Double Take: When you're dealing with weighty issues, a little Botox, liposuction and plastic surgery helps, writes Ann Marie Hourihane.
Jesus, the menopause hit Cherie Blair like a freight train. Is that all we have to say after a 10-year sojourn in Downing Street, a regime that brought peace to Northern Ireland (touch wood) and plunged the United Kingdom into an unwinnable war? No. We also have this to say: Look at bloody Tony, with a heart problem and Iraq on his conscience, he looks absolutely fantastic. He hasn't put on a pound.
We also have a few things to say about God, or Mother Nature, or whoever you want to blame, but there has been enough bad language in this column already. It used to be sin, and then it was poverty and then it was sex, but now ageing is the new taboo - an international obsession. We find nothing so interesting, or so frightening.
Now you may believe that we should be out hugging trees, or delivering Meals On Wheels, or - my personal favourite - at home praying for a happy death, but the truth is that we're not, we're bent over the newspaper photographs and bitching to our friends. Time was never an equal opportunity kind of a guy, and, in a culture ruled by the camera, ageing is no joke.
So we have the constant inspection of celebrities for signs that, well, time has mugged them. Madonna is now held up as a victim of over-exercising - thank God, eh? Madonna will be 49 in August - the newspapers have been saying that she looks great for her age for the past 10 years. And that ain't all down to yoga.
Plastic surgery can no longer be dismissed as the preoccupation of singers and footballers' wives. Amanda Holden (who can hardly be 40) is on Britain's Got Talent, looking Botoxed to oblivion, but she is no isolated incident. The most serious and admirable women are going under the knife, and at a wholesale rate. Dublin's department stores and restaurants are now sited firmly in Stepford, full of female customers with strangely immobile foreheads and preternaturally big mouths. And they're just the ones who went to the wrong clinic.
The truth is that the plastic surgery train has left the station. Everybody's doing it and you are only peculiar if you haven't tried it. Plastic surgery holds particular appeal for the Irish. It's radical and effortless - if you don't count the pain, the danger or the expense, which we don't - and it is the Big Fix, exactly the type of solution of which we as a nation are so very fond.
In France, you know, being overweight is the taboo. Cherie would not have put on weight if she'd been married to Jacques Chirac - Jacques would have had her sent to the Bastille. Because in France being fat is like being caught drunk in the street - a sign that you are slovenly, totally out of control and probably on your way to make your home in a bin. Staying slim requires iron discipline, constant vigilance and careful planning, attributes in which the Irish are not rich, to put it mildly.
As I munched my way through the television news the other night, I could not help noticing that Cherie Blair was not the only one who looked on the large side. It must be the Irish in Cherie's Liverpool veins, because the same night that she left Downing Street the male accused in two Irish court cases were several stone overweight and the female witnesses were hefty. Personally, I blame the smoking ban for our fatness. No wonder liposuction is so popular here.
Nevertheless, Ségolène Royal had her jaw threaded before the French election. (Jaw threading: a band of tiny fish hooks which is tightened to take up the slack flesh under the chin. Yes, it does sound fantastic.) Plastic surgery has gone global. Debbie Harry has had everything done: "I did it for business reasons," she says. "You photograph better, and looks are a key part of being an entertainer. All sorts of horrific things happen in life - why make it worse by worrying about getting older?"
Debbie Harry joins a long line of alternative goddesses who were once thought of as being too well-adjusted to
go under the knife - a line headed by that beautiful old leftie, Julie Christie. Of course, this is hardly a surprise. You don't get to be an alternative goddess by sitting about letting modern technology pass you by. Strangely, though, I do blame Faye Dunaway, not for having plastic surgery - disapproving of plastic surgery is soooo over - but for having it done so badly.
On the one hand, I do not want to know about plastic surgery. Like the late Eric Morecambe, I can't bear to see the join. On the other hand, I want to know everything. For example, I know I have a First Lady problem, but the person I really, really want to know about is Laura Bush. What work has she had done, exactly? It can't be all those early nights and no booze.