A wrinkle in time

Whatever the purveyors of Botox and suchlike tell you, wrinkles are not the root of all evil. A few lines on the face and a few creases around the eyes are just signs that you have lived.

The lines tell of laughing until you are sore, of loving until you are spent and of crying until you've no tears left to spill. The best wrinkles hint at all-night parties and bottomless two-litre bottles of Linden Village. If you are anything like me, they also speak rather eloquently of the time you slept standing up in a hotel wardrobe because the only bed in the room was being occupied by your female friend and a male member of a popular rock'n'roll band. Well, you didn't like to disturb.

Much as it pains me to quote Hull's finest if oft-vilified band, The Beautiful South, I must do so here, if only to illustrate my pro-wrinkle argument. "Let's take a look at these crow's feet/Just look/Sitting on the prettiest eyes/60 25th of Decembers/59 Fourth of Julys/You can't have too many good times, children/You can't have too many lines/Take a good look at these crow's feet/Sitting on the prettiest eyes."

Wrinkles are grand. Wrinkles are fine. But all in their own good time, you understand. The other morning I woke up and got a fright as I glanced in the mirror at the tragic stranger who stared back. Like me, the stranger also happened to be brushing her teeth. She was even using my toothbrush. Hang on a second . . . Aargh!

I hadn't expected to get a fright like that for a good few years. But there I was. My eyes puffy and red raw, two deep crevices the size and shape of the Grand Canyon decorating the space beneath my lower lashes. Wrinkles hewn gradually over time - totally natural. Wrinkles carved out overnight while you sleep - totally unfair.

I examined the evidence. One: The staff Christmas party had taken place the night before. Two: I had, during the course of this event, drunk lots of lovely white wine. Three: And maybe a Baileys. Four: I had been one of the last to leave, because my colleague Kevin Courtney got the guitar out for a sing-song, and you haven't lived until you've heard his version of Space Oddity. Five: At one point I myself attempted to sing the excellent song I co-wrote about my brother's ex-girlfriend, who left him for another woman. Six: Someone gently wrested the guitar from me. Result: two wrinkles the size and shape of earthquake fissures taking root under my eyes.

I've had hangovers in my time, but this was ridiculous. That morning, on the (oh sweet, divine baby infant son of Mary and Joseph) three-and-a-half-hour bus journey to Enniskillen for an assignment, I pondered my predicament. Surely hangover-related wrinkles couldn't last longer than a couple of hours. Surely by the time I got to Enniskillen they'd be gone. No such luck. I blame my early-onset wrinkles for scaring away most of the good people of the Carran Crescent housing estate whom I'd been sent up to interview. Me: "Hello. I wonder could I talk to you for a minute about how things are in the first mixed Protestant-Catholic Housing Executive estate in Northern Ireland?"

Most of them (except for a sweet woman called Deirdre, who took pity on me, and a Latvian family who, endearingly, weren't aware until I arrived on their doorstep that they were living on a mixed estate): "No."

The next morning what I had assumed were hangover-related wrinkles were still there, even though the hangover was gone. They were still there when I went into work the day after that, except now I also had an itchy rash on my neck. At work I discovered that my friend was also suffering from the crevice eye and itchy skin combo. An allergy, we wondered? Something we ate?

Later that day, in another office across town, I met yet another sufferer from the complaint. This one had already been to a GP. "Go to the doctor," she urged. I told her I couldn't see the point of going to the GP when she had already been there asking about crevice eye and itchy skin. "Why should I pay €60 when you can just tell me what the doctor said?" I asked. "Let's cut out the middleman." So we did. "It's stress," she said. "Stress, my eye," I said. But after her second-hand medical advice, and a quick visit to the chemist, I could finally look in the mirror without flinching.

I'm glad they've gone, but I still have no problem with your common-or-garden wrinkles, the kind that whisper of the night you sat holding hands with a stranger in a car until 4am. It's like Paul Heaton sings: "Not through the age or the failure, children/Not through the hate or despise/Take a good look at these crow's feet/Sitting on the prettiest eyes."

So whether you're a wrinkly or a wrinkly-in-waiting, hope 2007's a good one.