Make sure you have finished your cornflakes/porridge/ croissant/fry before reading on, and don't say you weren't warned. My good friend, I will call her Diana after the late princess, didn't have the decency to let me finish my bangers and mash before telling me about her recent experience with colonic irrigation writes Roisin Ingle.
The fork was halfway to my mouth as she began to wax lyrical about the benefits of a procedure where every undigested morsel is sucked out of you - look Nurse Reilly, a 10-year-old mushroom! - through a tube. I haven't been able to look at a sausage since.
I expected this to happen, but not for a while. I thought it would be at least 10 years before friends would start availing of plastic surgery or colonic irrigation, 10 years before these visits would be deemed about as shockworthy as a trip to the dentist. But that time is now, apparently, and in a development reminiscent of the days when everyone else in school had a pair of black pointy suede shoes with buckles on from Simon Hart except me, I am starting to feel left out.
My friend Diana is feeling much better since her colonic experience, which I was glad to hear when I rang her the other day. She said she felt cleaner and fresher but she couldn't talk for long. She had work to finish if she was going to make her next appointment, a date with a lady and a needle as it happened. She was having, she told me, her second Botox session.
When I calmed down, she explained that she'd had the first treatment just before being interviewed for her current job. She had started to notice these lines on her forehead, especially when she smiled, and she didn't want to look ancient when she was being given the once-over by the panel. It was quick and painless - the interview and the Botox - and none of her friends had noticed any difference. But she did. She felt much more confident and could now wear her hair back off her face in the style she is normally too self-conscious to attempt.
So what? That was the response of another friend when I called to tell her about Diana's colonic escapades and her €250-a-pop Botox habit. She said that she herself swore by this thing called micro dermabrasion, which costs €120 a session. Listen, she said, people are going into Brown Thomas and buying pots of face cream for €200 when they would be far better off getting more invasive treatment that actually works, for the same price. She used the word invasive as though it were a good thing, and then told me about a 26-year-old colleague who gets Botox injected under her arms to stop her chronic sweating.
Yet another friend thinks I am being hypercritical in my mild disapproval of this carry-on. She pointed out that everyone, including me, tries to enhance their natural assets, whether it's with a kohl stick or the latest laser treatment. Some people go further than I in their quest to look their best. What, she wanted to know, was my problem?
So I thought about it and I realised that my problem was that it made me sad. I looked into the future and saw a time when I will be meeting my friends and even though they know I'm coming, their latest procedures will mean they look unnaturally surprised to see me. If I don't succumb myself, people will say things behind my back like - and I am thinking of starting a campaign to ban this phrase - that one has "really let herself go". They will then discuss whether I was too far gone for the latest acid facial to make any real difference. Casual conversations will take place, in restaurants, in coffee shops, about the fabulous man who flies in twice a month from Harley Street. Casual conversations are already taking place.
I know a woman in her 60s who gets electrolysis because otherwise she would have a well developed beard at this stage, just like her late mother. Somehow that is acceptable to me. She dyes her hair from light grey to brown, which I also can understand. She has her eyebrows plucked, her nails trimmed and gets regular reflexology. All of these things make her feel better in herself. None of these things make me uneasy.
Bring a needle or a toxic chemical into the equation and I waver. Something in me says medical procedures should make an ill person feel better, not an ageing person look better. But then if having a medical procedure to make you look better actually makes you feel better in the process, where's the harm? I don't know. Where is the harm?
The day before Diana told me about her Botox sessions, I was walking down the road to work, and it struck me that she looks better now than at any stage in the 10 years since I have known her. She is beautiful. With or without Botox. I think I'll tell her that more often from now on.