The cosmetics hall here has a very different vibe to that wood-panelled department store where I was fussed over by pansticked ladies on my sixteenth birthday. Here, the atmosphere is more ‘skincare lab’ than ‘we cake stuff onto your face’. While I’m not expecting to shop my way out of my current malaise, everything is so shiny and beautiful and heavenly-scented that my spirits begin to lift immediately.

At an upmarket skincare counter I give the sales adviser – thankfully a properly grown woman, and not a mere child – carte blanche to start dabbing her wares onto me. She has one of those cheery faces you warm to immediately, and her rosy complexion is certainly a good advert for a decent moisturiser.

‘You have lovely skin,’ she assures me. I wait for her to add, ‘For your age’, or even, ‘For someone whose appearance is clearly not a priority’, but nothing else comes. Instead she sets to work, demonstrating the youth-giving properties of serums, eye creams, moisturisers, masques and something called a highlighter which, apparently, is making me glow like a halogen bulb.

‘What d’you think?’ she asks, smiling brightly as she hands me a mirror. I blink at my reflection, taking in my revitalised skin before noticing – Christ! – a ruddy black whisker sticking out of my left cheek. Instinctively, I go to yank it out.

‘Ooh, hang on a sec.’ The woman produces a tiny pair of scissors and hands them to me.

‘Thank you.’ I snip it off. ‘How embarrassing,’ I add.

‘Not at all,’ she says with a dismissive wave of her hand.

‘Honestly, I didn’t know it was there.’

‘It’s these lights in here,’ she says, as if they are to blame for accelerating its growth, like the Glo-faster lamp my dad bought, in the hope that it would boost his tomatoes in our greenhouse.

‘I think it’s more my time of life,’ I say with a smile.

‘God, tell me about it,’ she says.

I turn and study her seemingly flawless face. ‘Do you get them?’

‘All the time,’ she says with a chuckle. ‘Have to give myself a good going-over with the tweezers every time I leave the house.’ She pauses. ‘But it’s not all bad, is it, this mid-life business? I love it that I can blame any bonkers behaviour on my hormones being out of whack.’

So cheered am I by this woman’s positivity, I find myself slipping into dream customer mode as she recommends the products I might like to buy. ‘The super-charged Vitamin C capsules make a visible difference …’

‘Hmm, yes, I’ll take those …’

‘And the hyaluronic microspheres help with plumping …’

Plumping: not so great arse-wise but facially, yes.

‘Maybe a gentle exfoliant to refine the surface texture? I call it a holiday in a pot.’

Well, I haven’t had a holiday this year, have I? Sold!

‘Have you thought about hands?’ she asks now.