Spot the pimple
I’ve had a hard time the last few weeks, what with one thing and another.
At my age you’d think pimples were a dim adolescent memory or at least something that I couldn’t care less about. But the wisdom that comes with wrinkles is shot down by the volcano on my chin. And I’m young enough to see it in the rear view mirror! So with wrinkles, fatigue and everything else mapping my path through life on my face, I took this solitary, defiant blemish as a grievous insult, added to already extensive injury.
I have done my best to keep to the office, the car and home, avoiding as much contact with strangers as possible. As fate would have it, many of our computers had to go in for cleaning, thrusting me unwittingly and repeatedly into an almost exclusively male environment. It was a conspiracy I tell you! I found everyone talking to my chin, never mind the boobs. I swear I could’ve been stark naked and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference! Not that the boobs are anything to write home about – but I think we’ve discussed my surgical, or financial, limitations already.
Self-conscious disguise was inevitable really.
The disguises over the last few days have included an impossibly raised collar (John Travolta style – with my fleece jacket, sexy!). A finger raised to my chin (in contemplative manner albeit sometimes in the most unlikely circumstances – who walks through a shopping mall with their finger on their chin and their elbow hovering in mid-air? Once a till slip clenched between my teeth (as if my hands were full) and sometimes walking as though I had developed a serious neck injury – with my chin stubbornly stuck to my shoulder. My children had to fend for themselves crossing the street. What with me glaring at the ground, finger affixed to my chin, gagging on till slips, it was each man for himself!
Before they come to take the kids away, let me just point out the slight exaggeration; I left them in the car, they were embarrassed to be seen with me!
I am pleased to report that The Pimple has since died of natural causes (murder having been narrowly averted by Rescue Remedy) and subsided to more humble proportions, hence the courage to write this. As soon as my colleagues and friends read this I imagine them streaming into the corridors to see my chin for themselves, and I will mumble something about stones and glasshouses and a hex on you all, as I push my way through the crowd ….