WOULD you like to know what happened when I had The Snip? Thought not - and I wouldn't tell anyway because it is such a tale of woe, embarrassment and toe-curling humiliation it's probably best forgotten; except to let me pass on one snippet of advice.

Never, ever fall out with a surgeon mid-operation. The rest I will leave to your imagination.

Which is rather what I wish colleague Brian Beacom had done.

Brian, in case you happened to be living on another planet, had a hair transplant a little while back and has wasted the best part of a forest or two writing all about the experience.

I heard him on Woman's Hour and, damn me, he popped up on national TV last night talking about his new found love affair with a comb.

Well I'm sorry BB ... but I never noticed the difference - before or after.

Not that I am bald and proud of it ... I'm just a plain, old-fashioned bullet-headed bone-dome.

Last week Boots launched its latest anti-wrinkle cream, 100% scientifically proven to work.

Was I offended when a colleague suggested I join the head of the queue? Of course not.

My riposte of being more crinkled than a paper bag was as quick as a knee to his groin.

When others so fastidious of their fad diet routines and inability to lose a pound here or a half-stone there whinge, I just smile and remind them that once I was 15 stone . . . until I discovered willpower, the joy of sensible, well-balanced eating and a long daily walk round the park with the dog.

Vanity, as you might have guessed from the picture above, is not a problem I suffer from.

In his teens, a cousin suffered sticky-out ears which, his mother thought, exposed him to ridicule.

When he came out of hospital the bandages looked worse.

Cosmetic surgery as a solution to ageing is fool's gold: a waste of time, effort, money and surgical skill.

Years ago, we knew a family whose daughter, a pretty little thing with a lovely personality, was born with a cleft palate.

By the time she reached her teens, I defy anyone but those with a long memory to spot the joins, so skilled was the surgeon.

The other night I happened to catch the news and saw pictures of three-year-old Shams Kareem, the little Iraqi girl blinded in a bomb attack whose face was torn apart by shrapnel.

She appeared on camera laughing and chuckling and happily running about.

The damage was clear when she was captured in close-up and the surgeon described how he operated to re-open her fused eyelids before starting work on the scorched, patchwork quilt of her face.

More than anything, those images show the real value of cosmetic surgery.

Maybe, that's why I'm less bothered than I should be when a colleague pays for the privilege of being such a willing guinea pig ...