Last week I made a decision that, for the modern woman (and let's face it, we are all modern women. Even the men. And the old guys) is as pivotal as working out whether you vote Labour or Tory, and who is your favourite, and therefore the best, Beatle (Paul).

Yes, I finally decided where I stand on the issue of cosmetic surgery. For a while I'd been working on a pro-feminist assumption that a woman's body is her own business, it's a hard world out there, and if you feel you need to buff your face into an intractable, ageless carapace to get on and kick corporate ass, then you go, girlfriend.

However, I had a flashbulb moment a few weeks ago that suddenly made me decide against all radical cosmetic intervention. It came at a memorial service for a friend's father, and the largest concentration of eminent, 40-plus women I had ever mingled with. Actually, to be accurate, I stood on the edges of, thinking: “I have absolutely no idea what you say to people at memorial services. I'll just do a sad face, and look thoughtful.” I expected such a gathering of top ladies to exude an aspirational air: a blend of self-confidence, luxury face creams and having paid the mortgage off five years ago. But as I scanned the room, I realised that they had, to a woman, had facelifts, filler and Botox - all extreme enough to be noticeable from the other side of the room. And do you know how they looked? Aside from pretty much immobile from their hairlines to their collarbones? Scared. Women who have had cosmetic surgery/injections don't look fearless, or kick-ass, or confident in their new-found “freshness”. They look scared.

They look scared of death - and that does not become a fully grown woman. Really, in many ways, womankind would benefit from pretending that they are lady highwaymen. A lady highwayman does not show fear in the face of ageing. A lady highwayman has an air of dashing insouciance towards death, and runs towards the grave, gin in one hand, gun in the other, shouting: “Come on then, Death! You can hardly be worse than childbirth; or that time I did a sick in my perm on the 512 into town, and had to wash it out with lemonade! I eschew you, right in your face, you ARSE.”

You shouldn't be ashamed of your ageing. It is worth pointing out, every day, that EVERYONE IS AGEING, THEY JUST ARE, IT IS A FACT - and that ageing is not, as many women's magazines seem to imply, the result of an individual's personal inadequacies and/or lack of Boswellox. No, rather than being ashamed of ageing, you should be amusedly intolerant of it, instead. If you've had a wrinkle's worth of vexation in your life, you must go around, pointing at the wrinkle, and saying, “Look at my bloody wrinkle! This world! Tcoh! Cuh! Prft! HELL.” People can relate to that. If you start cutting your wrinkles off, willy-nilly, everyone will presume that you've had the life of a pampered dandy-boy, and will be unwilling to let you have the last coconut Quality Street because you deserve it, etc.

Anyway, so many of the presumptions around ageing are untrue. The main, risible, postulation is that it is always bad: we are all born full of gorgeousness, peak at 18, then slalom - sadly, floppily and puckered with remorse - to the grave. The life cycle of women - poor, pitiful, disgusting wretches - is “Baby, cheerleader (until 34), hag (34 to the grave)”. Personally, I have not found my life to be like this. I will be honest with you: at the age of 18 I looked like a Goth Womble, garnished with a single, gigantic eyebrow. I wore black lipstick, was indolent to the point of morbid obesity and, because of inappropriate boil-washing, the Lycra in my tights was shot, giving me permanently wrinkled ankles. Given this ruinous adolescence, every subsequent year has been, yes, one step closer to the grave, but also one step farther away from the bad days when small children used to follow me down the street, throwing stones and shouting: “Grotbags!”

I scarcely think I am alone in this. A quick, ROFL-ing dash through my peers' Facebook photo albums suggests that, by and large, people look awful until the age of about 27. Their features are blurry, their hair lacks any manner of suitability or sanity and they never, ever have a jacket that fits properly across the shoulders. They all (except Leslie Ash) look better now than they did in 1992. That's just a fact.

Perhaps if you were a pole-dancer, ageing would be a bigger problem. There's no doubt, despite all my positivity, that skin, past the age of 25, does start to resemble less a bale of satin, and more a paper bag containing a Greggs sausage roll. But it does bear pointing out that 99.9 per cent of women are not pole-dancers. Women really do need to be reminded of this fact every day, I think. A great deal of female anxiety and sorrow seem to be predicated on the subconscious assumption that, at any moment, government officials might burst into the room, shouting “Strip! It's a bum inspection!”, then shoot anyone with cellulite. Ladies, you might have an arse like a bag of mashed potato, but it doesn't matter! No one's ever going to see it! Just keep it safely in your pants! A bottom can be a permanently hidden item. Really, you might just as well worry about having an unsightly intestine.

And as for the undeniably visible places (ie, your face), Botox and fillers are scarcely a secure solution to the “problem” of ageing. For with the credit crunch, I suspect that a lot of women's chemical maintenance routines are going to fall by the wayside. Over the next year, whole swaths of women are suddenly going to be going cold turkey on their injections, and putting on ten years overnight. They'll be carrying their faces around in buckets. They won't even know how to activate their eyebrow muscles, and will have to move them around with sticks. No, there is no solution to ageing. And that's because it's not a problem.

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