I had my first contact lens “lesson” last week and to say it went badly would be a huge understatement. To be quite honest with you, I don’t know why any part of me thinks that I’ll ever be successful with a procedure that involves precision, dexterity and being OK with repeatedly touching your own eyeballs. I’ve never been successful with body-related things that don’t involve precision, dexterity and repeatedly touching your own eyeballs, come to think of it: all ear piercing episodes have all ended disappointingly when the holes have inexplicably decided to close themselves over; my flirtation with lash extensions was both painful and short-lived and don’t even get me started on the time I thought I’d use a diaphragm for contraception.

I’m fine about doing things to/with my body so long as I don’t have to interact with it in the same skilled way as you’d expect from, I don’t know, a medical professional. I like to be responsibility free. I can use a battery-operated foot file, for example, but if you ask me to inject myself with a life-saving anti-coagulant twice a day for a week I will look at you with a faraway expression that means that I have definitely not processed the instructions. I can Veet my bikini line, but do not ask me to check my own c-section wound for infection. Go ahead and pierce my ears, but I can guarantee you that I will not turn the studs to release the stinking gunk.

Things I have vetoed due to my post-babies aversion to having my body meddled with in any shape or form: getting a contraceptive coil fitted, starting my very necessary Invisalign programme (I have a bite problem that needs correcting) and having any form of face alteration, injection or tweakment. Unless a procedure is potentially going to stop me from getting ill or dying then I’m not interested, ta ever so. Back the f*ck away with your needles and rollers and things that freeze your fat off.

So why, then, have I made the decision to have a crack at wearing contact lenses? Surely this decision is – at best – unwise. At worst it is completely and utterly insane. I had a complete breakdown at my first cystoscopy (Google it if you dare) and was so traumatised that I sat in the bath for five hours, silently rocking back and forth with my knees pulled up to my chest. What makes me think having things inserted into my eyes is going to go any better? Having to touch the wobbly eyeballs, those jelly balls, the things that Lady Caroline from Succession (may one of the best dramas ever made rest in peace) called “face eggs” with such a tone of disgust?

Having things inserted into my eyes was better, obviously. I’m being obtuse. I mean if you had a choice between having your eyelids clamped open and your eyeball firmly stroked, over and over again or having a camera inserted up your pee-hole then I can imagine you’d fall into the same camp as me. I’d opt for the eyeball every time. Still, it’s not what I’d classify as an enjoyable pursuit. Apparently I have flickery eyelids, which hinders things when it comes to contact lens application, but tell me this: what sociopath doesn’t flinch when something approaches their naked, vulnerable eyeball?

Anyway, it took ages to get the blasted things in and it wasn’t even my go to do it myself yet. And I have astigmatism and so some parts of the lens are thicker and I had to blink lots to get them to turn into position, which felt like blinking with an eyelash stuck in my eye and all felt very counterintuitive. If I’m being truthful, the lenses still felt like eyelashes, or debris, even when they were in position.

But barely had I recovered from one torture when another one started: a lesson in how to take the blasted things out. There I was positioned, in front of a pedestal mirror that had apparently been briefed to show me in my very worst light, and all I could see was a version of myself who was at least fifteen years older than the one I’m used to (potentially because I’m so blind) pulling faces that wouldn’t be out of place in an aquarium and poking herself again and again in the eyeball whilst exclaiming “ugh” and “ow” and “argggh”!

Had someone happened upon me who had been unaware of my predicament, ie that I had to sit there until I had learned how to remove these little eye-discs of doom, they would have thought I needed immediate help. Because who willingly sits there fingering their eyeballs until they are dry (I needed emergency drops) and sore (of course they were sore) when there are racks and racks of perfectly comfortable glasses to try on just around the corner?

It must get better. That’s what everyone keeps telling me and that is why I am taking another stab at the whole thing. For want of a better phrase. I have another appointment – Eye Death Episode II – at the end of the week and it’ll either be disastrous, ending in another mild panic with me flailing about saying “just get them out, for the love of God – GET THEM OUT OF ME!”, or I shall emerge victorious with a trial pack of my special daily lenses and a spring in my step. I cannot see there being any middle ground. If, once again, my eyes feel as though they are being massaged with sandpaper then I shall have to politely decline a trial and draw a line beneath my contact lens escapades.

Many thanks to all those so far who have sent tried-and-tested contact lens methods, they are all very much appreciated. Can I have a show of hands for those who thought they would never conquer it after their first go but then emerged, to use my own description, victorious?

Image credit Unsplash

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I fully realise this isn’t the sort of debate that will change the world but it’s a question I’ve been pondering for the last week or so, since the weather has been sub-zero again, and it is this: which is better, frost or snow?

People go crazy for snow, don’t they? At least they do in the UK. I don’t know the specifics for your particular geographic location; I imagine if you’re in Norway or, I don’t know, Alaska, then snow isn’t any great shakes. More a fact of life – something you tolerate because it is there for so much of the year.

But here in the UK, a forecast of snow is met with an almost unanimous sense of unbridled joy and excitement. (Apart from those working in the emergency services or those who have to travel to work, no excuses.) Snow turns nearly every adult into a child again and I will admit that there is something magical about waking up to a world that has been completely transformed, overnight, into a pure white canvas.

It is mandatory to take photos of this new pure white canvas – and don’t kid yourself that this is a new, social-media-fuelled phenomenon either: sifting through some old pictures at my Mum’s, there were dozens of yellowed photographs of “snow in the eighties”. Not even picturesque landscapes, either, just “the back wall in the snow”, “car on bricks, in the snow” and my favourite, “small children very far away with their backs turned to camera, in the snow”.

Snow has National Treasure status in the UK. It’s like Dame Judi Dench, or Sir Trevor McDonald: snow can do no wrong. Almost any full appearance by snow is celebrated and newsworthy and even if it is massively inconvenient it is still considered a thing of wonder.

The smooth, undulating curves of deep snow sitting atop thatched rooftops, like fondant icing. Flawless fields stretching featureless into the distance. Narrow streets in the City of London suddenly picture postcard perfect; the roads around Spitalfields turned instantly into the setting for a Dicken’s novel.

Bloody brilliant.

But I’m going to throw something out there: frost is better. Both visually and practically. Bear with me before you blow a gasket with fury; I know how revered Snow is and that I’m walking on thin ice, but I’m going to take you through an analogy that will explain my slightly outré assertion. It’s not a perfect analogy so you’ll have to be tolerant.

Imagine you have a beautiful face. (That’s the landscape. I realise not all landscapes are beautiful but just use your imagination. I told you to be tolerant of my analogy.) Wouldn’t it be a shame to completely obliterate that face beneath an entire, thick layer of completely opaque foundation? Yes it would.

(I can see this analogy collapsing in precisely twenty seconds yet I can’t seem to stop writing.)

Imagine you now have a makeup artist of supreme ability. They take out their brushes and they do a little gilding of the eyelids here, a dusting of some sort of light-blurring powder there. They lightly conceal and they daintily add the faintest hint of shimmer and when they are finished, the face is a masterpiece. Different, changed, but still – essentially – the face.

(Someone stop me, for the love of God!)

I think you’ve probably guessed what I’m at, here: snow is heavy foundation, frost is the magic touch of a makeup artist. I told you it was tenuous.

Look: snow is great. But it’s a big old clumsy blanket of whiteness dropped from above. There’s no nuance. It’s an absolute obliteration of the picture. Look at someone’s photograph of “the park in the snow”: it’s a plain white rectangle. Maybe with a tree trunk striking a knobbly scar through the middle. Frost, on the other hand, is nature’s artist. Glittering the tops of fence posts, gilding every tiny leaf and stone. Not only does it put a sort of filter over the world, desaturating it and adding a hint of very pretty ice-blue, it blurs and prettifies every single feature. Cars become sugar-coated churros, rooftops sparkle, the green is taken out of gardens and the grey is taken from the roads so that everything is a uniform silvery version of its former self. You can see what’s underneath, but it’s like seeing it all through a dream…

vs snow, which has just one dimension. Which is to throw a sheet over it all and be done. It’s lazy and it has no skill. If Frost is the meticulous magician then Snow is a caveman, just trundling along shouting “white! White! White!”

Ug.

On a practical level, snow is an absolute bastard. Especially if you live out in the sticks, but it also seems to stiff the city-dwellers too. If Snow visits for longer than day, you really know about it. You want him out by day two, once you’ve had the sledging fun and had a snowball in the face. He’s like the “crazy friend” who comes to visit, the one you met in Magaluf in the late nineties who drank pint glasses of tequila and had “knob” tattooed on his head. Fun for a few hours and then it’s just one almighty pain. Takes ages to get rid of, too. Melt….melt….melt….for f*ck’s sake just get on with it! Go home!

Frost is welcome almost any time. Frost arrives quietly, brings cake, has a cup of tea with you and then leaves by lunchtime. And even if she doesn’t (ha! Note that Frost seems to be female here), even if Frost has come for a little mini-break, then when you need to get on with something important she sits in another room and reads a book and you barely even know she is there. She doesn’t stop you driving, like Snow. Snow turns your car into a Death Mobile. He might feel solid and crunchy underfoot when you’re trampling up the sledging hill but don’t be fooled: he’s three pints of tequila followed by a twenty minute ride on a banana boat.

So, “Frost is better than Snow: Discuss”. I know that this will flare some tempers so let’s try and keep it sweet.

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My Mum was horrified when I showed her my newly acquired Finishing Touch Facial Hair Remover.

“You can’t shave your face!” she cried. “Why can’t you just use nail scissors like everyone else?”

Pause for effect.

Can we please get a show of hands from anyone – anyone at all – who uses a pair of nail scissors to stay on top of their facial hair? I thought not. She couldn’t have picked a more impractical tool. It’s like going to battle brandishing a chainsaw – there’s more chance of maiming yourself than winning the fight.

“I just hold the scissors like this,” she said, her head back and her chin thrown high, “and snip as close to the root of the hair as I can.”

“You can’t even see where you’re snipping,” I said, ‘you’ll end up cutting off something important!”

“Well I use a mirror, obviously.”

Mum’s snipping method is flawed in many ways: firstly the risk of injury is high, even with the use of a mirror. Perhaps especially with the use of a mirror, because we all know how even the simplest of tasks becomes impossible once you’re relying on your reflection to guide you.

Then there’s the fact that you’re not even getting to the root of the problem, just cutting off the visible part. It’s a bit like weeding by pulling off the top bits. Does my Mum go around the garden strimming over the dandelions? No she does not. She goes about on her knees, pulling the whole thing out.

And finally (though I can probably think of many more problems with the scissor method), how bloody long must it take to de-hair an average chin and moustache area? Days! I’d be tempted to open out the scissor blades and slide them along my skin for speed’s sake, old-fashioned cut-throat razor style.

“God I don’t do my entire face!” said my Mum. “You just do the longest hairs, you daft thing. The ones that are a few centimetres or very dark.”

This is why we have different removal methods, then: attitude towards facial hair. Mum: happy with the usual facial fuzz. The stuff that we’ve all had, probably from a young age, but that 4K HD TV and hi-res phone cameras have gradually made me hyper-aware of. She only irks at the longest, blackest of hairs – the rest is just considered normal, like having eyes, or legs.

“You wouldn’t shave those off.”

My problem is that I look at my face in detail nearly every single day. It’s part of my job. I should disclose here that I’m not a particularly hairy person and my colouring is quite fair, but because I test makeup and skincare I do spend a lot of time staring at zoomed-in photos and videos of myself. And when it’s not photos and videos it’s the bloody magnifying mirror, aka The Portal of Doom, checking whether or not a new foundation that I’m testing has crept into fine lines or migrated into the oilier patches. And so not only do I see the longest and blackest of hairs (though mine tend to be white, like Father Christmas) I also see the plush thackets of peach fuzz, so dense they’re like velvet.

I left the peach fuzz for a while because it did seem like overkill to start taking that off; I plucked at the longer hairs with my tweezers (definitely my recommendation over nail scissors) and I ignored the fuzz. But then I started plucking the slightly longer bits of fuzz as well as the hairs, especially in the side tache area, and before I knew it I was plucking all of the peach fuzz out with my tweezers. It was taking ages and was actually quite painful after a while….

…hence the new Finishing Touch shaver. I haven’t actually charged it up to try yet, such was the ferocity of my mother’s reaction to it. I think she has visions of me doing a full shave routine, using one of those badger brushes to lather my face up, leaning in towards the mirror like Desperate Dan. White vest, gun belt slung over the towel rail, ten gallon hat resting on the shelf above the sink.

But I’ve started with the mass-tweezing and so now there is no retreat. The moustache hairs come back slightly sharper, so that when you’re watching TV you can find yourself stroking your stubble – for that is what it is – wisely, like an old sage about to make a pertinent statement.

The only way forward is to continue with the total eradication technique – but with my new shaver it will be like (hopefully) using a lawnmower rather than a pair of long-handled secateurs. Speedy. Efficient. Painless.

I’ll keep you all updated, if only to horrify my Mum.

The Flawless Touch gadget is online here (ad-affiliate link) and costs £29.99. I have to say, it feels very light and cheaply-made, for the price, but since writing the above I have tested it properly and it works well. If you have other suggestions then let me know!

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Did you know that bees in a hive have this thing called swarm mentality, or hive mind, which is this amazing sort of collective thought that happens when you get lots of social insects (ants, bees) together in a colony? I’m no Attenborough, but I’ve been Googling this for all of about, ooh, four minutes, and it’s so interesting; the behaviour of the insects in the colony is so coordinated and the mental activity is so collective that it’s comparable to a single mind controlling their behaviour.

It’s kind of creepy when you think about it for too long, especially if you’re apiphobic. I don’t have a problem with bees, thanks to having been mentally conditioned from a young age to see wasps as the enemy and bees as the insect equivalent of Dumbledore from Harry Potter. (Necessary for survival, essentially good and kind, very unlikely to sting you without extreme provocation. Wasps would be Voldemort.) It was perfectly acceptable to swipe at a wasp with a rolled-up newspaper; a fallen bee presented something of a small national emergency. The invalid bee had to be scooped up with an empty yoghurt carton and placed on a silken pillow and provided with a tiny pool of sugar water to sup from.

Still, many bees together: creepy. (If you want to read an excellent and highly imaginative novel that’s quirkily written from a bee’s-eye-view then I highly recommend The Bees by Laline Paull*.) And the idea that their common need and purpose creates a sort of mega-mind gives me the tingles. But I suppose it would all completely fall apart, wouldn’t it, if they didn’t have the single goal or intention? Imagine if bees were just up to their own bits and pieces all day, like we humans are. Pottering. Living in millions of tiny mini-hives rather than one big one – spending Sundays fixing a leak in the roof of their condo-hive or painstakingly harvesting the honey from their comb and pouring it into tiny little glass jars ready to send to the local hipster market. It would be chaos! The world would come to an end!

‘Where have you been, Brian?’

Brian comes sauntering in from a day out in the rose bush, his face covered in pollen.

‘Here and there, Geoff. Here and there.’

‘Well we’ve all been toiling in the hive, Brian, whilst you’ve been faceplanting the good stuff all day. Look at the state of you! It’s on your back, your thighs, you’ve even got pollen on your eyelids.’

Brian isn’t remotely regretful because he has no swarm mentality. What Geoff doesn’t know is that he also banged the Queen Bee three times that morning and he’s not even the correct ranking of bee to approach her, let alone climb into her bed! That’s just the way he rolls; he’s a renegade bee with his own way of thinking, his own unique –

‘Go and get cleaned up Brian, for God’s sake. You’re an absolute disgrace.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

And ants! Imagine if ants didn’t have swarm mentality. It’d be a total shit show. There they go, carrying their brown leaf in a perfectly straight line, three of them on each side like little fast-legged pallbearers. There’s no “to me, to you – to me, to you!” in the ant world. They know exactly what they’re about – perfectly attuned to one another. But if you had even just the one ant anomaly; blimey. Carnage.

‘Erm, guys?’ says the free-thinking ant wearing the orange trousers and a snazzy cravat. ‘Which floor are we taking this crumb of bagel to? Do you want to go the short way through the slurry pile or circumnavigate the mess and head on through the air brick?’

The others in the ant removals crew wouldn’t even answer him, because they all communicate telepathically, probably; I imagine they’d just put down the bagel crumb, advance menacingly towards him and then trample him to death. Before stopping for a cup of tea.

Seriously, though; what would all of these insects do if they had total free will and didn’t have to work for the good of the swarm and for the purpose of survival? Would insects get any enjoyment from just meandering about? Would a bee see a pollen-filled flower in the same way we see a hotel suite? Comfy bed, room service, bit of a change of scene? If bees were just working for themselves – freelance bees – would they work as consistently or as hard as the ones enslaved by the hive mind? Or would they, like me, spend a morning polishing all the cutlery from the cutlery drawer with an old t-shirt and then cram all of the actual work into the afternoon?

If I was a freelance bee, an escapee from the swarm brain, then my day would look like this (remember this is only in the summer months, because in the winter I’m dead):

5am: sun comes up. Poke head out of detached mini-hive (didn’t want neighbours) and decide it’s too early to go out. The air is a bit fresh and the dew still sits on the grass and the petals. If there’s one thing I hate then it’s getting damp. My fur takes an age to dry out and if I leave it damp for longer than a few hours, I smell like wet dog.

6.30am: do another dew check. Still dew present. Other bees are beginning to take off on their commute to the hive-rise office: I am still grooming my leg hairs.

8am: dew point acceptable. But wait! What is this floating through my doorway? White and powdery…pollen. In the air. What an unexpected bonus. This is what happens when you cannily set up house next to a protected wildflower meadow. The plot was pricey but I am reaping the benefits now, let me tell you.

8.03am: Nose-dive into the pollen pile.

9am: hive-rise secretary rings to see when, or if, I might actually turn up for work. I do not like his tone. Mainly because am high as a kite and struggling to make out all of the words. Call in sick for the morning and roll about in the remaining pollen for a few minutes to take the sting out of the experience.

10am: bored. Can’t go outside in case another worker sees me and reports back to the collective hive mind. Disguises don’t tend to work well for bees so is a last resort option. Peer jealously at my colleagues who are working the lavender, bobbing up and down and having a right old time of it. They are getting heavier and heavier with the pollen – one of them is so loaded he keeps flying into the wall.

10.10am: regretful.

10.30am: attempt to tune into the hive mind. Can still pick up signals now and then if I sit really still and concentrate on my antenna but today is mostly static. Omega Patrol have been called to the rose garden and there’s a wasp incident in sector nine (fig tree, always an absolute battlefield) but apart from that, nothing via the airwaves. Nap.

11am: do some crunches to try and tone up ever-expanding gut pouch then some lunges to strengthen legs. Clean out my pollen-collecting baskets with a damp cloth, even though they are really hard to reach because they’re on the backs of my legs. What idiot decided that was a good idea?

11.05am: sit holding the damp cloth, staring at wall.

11.45am: don disguise (large furry coat that takes me from worker bee to bumblebee in a matter of seconds!) and clumsily fall out of own doorway. Fly as quietly as possible down to the foxgloves and insert myself into  best-looking flower. I say insert, it’s like trying to stuff a cat into the end of a trumpet; the bumblebee disguise is both heavy and cumbersome. FML.

11.47am: regretful.

11.49am: am heating up unbearably in bumble disguise. Sweat everywhere, including top lip. Can smell the nectar, feel the nectar, but can’t move to lick the nectar as am restricted by aforementioned coat.

11.53am: fear for own life. I have heard of honeybees doing a mass pile-up on wasps and then their generated heat kills the wasp: now I see how this is possible. Cannot sustain this level of discomfort. Must. Leave. Flower.

11.56am: have been spotted by Pieter in management. Am red-faced. Not least because my core temperature is equal to the sun. ‘Why are you wearing a fur coat in summer?’ Pieter said as I fell out of the flower and I wanted to punch him in the honey gut. Told him I had a summer cold and had called in sick. ‘But you’re feeling better now, aren’t you?’ said Pieter. Rhetorical question.

Noon: went to work.

Next week: the life of ants.

(Photo by Delia Giandeini on Unsplash)

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