It began when I noticed that all my husband’s rapidly departing hairs seemed to be coming up on my face. Suddenly every facial feature, apparently sick of the way my eyebrows had monopolised the hair supply over the past decades, started sprouting its own set, determined to achieve parity in quality and abundance. Even a favourite mole, jawline friend of my youth, started to produce its own miniature forest.

Before long, I was having to go to work on my face like a keen amateur gardener. I contemplated installing an industrial power supply in the bathroom to cope with the overnight growth. It required not so much a gentle prune as a hack-and-slash approach to secure the area first thing in the morning so that the children could kiss me goodbye before school without wondering which way I was facing. After several months in denial, I had to face up to the truth. At 47, I was on the cusp of the menopause.

From talking vaginas — thanks to those monologues — to PMT as a fantastic raison d’être for pretty much every spontaneous mood swing, few areas of womanhood appear to have been left uncelebrated. Take a closer look, however, and the truth leaps out at you. Like a sundial, all are linked to the fertile years when we are strong and, above all, youthful; in other words, in our prime. But when it comes to the menopause, you can forget house prices, politics or religion as the top conversational killers. Of all the elephants in the room, the menopause is the mother of them all, and a hormonal one, to boot. It’s perhaps not surprising that the menopause is conspicuous by its absence as a suitable dinner-party topic. However much we kid ourselves that 40, 50, 60, 70 or 80 are the new 20, 15 or 10, its onset closes the door on a significant chunk of our lives.

Though in these days of miracle treatments this isn’t necessarily irreversible, of course. Thanks to advanced fertility techniques we can bring our childbearing years back on the public stage like a fading opera singer whose farewell performances just go on and on.

Let’s face it, though, it just won’t be the same second time round. Many religions celebrate the rite of passage from childhood to maturity with a moving ceremony. But how many 55-year olds do you know who’d want a repeat party to celebrate the return of their periods, complete with presents and delighted friends and relatives? As things stand, it’s only doctors who are keen to push the menopause. Presumably to ensure that, what the advertising community terms the “early adopters” don’t miss out on an exciting new opportunity, doctors have recently launched the peri-menopause as a kind of taster version, so that those slightly too young for the full thing can experience a few, specially selected symptoms while waiting.

The secrecy surrounding menopause symptoms means that conversations have a distinctly hole-and-corner feel to them. “Wear clothes with buttons. Then you can take them off quickly,” was one muttered tip. The desperate undertone gave the impression that if hot-flush disaster strikes, my overwhelming compulsion to lower my body temperature would result in finding myself bright red, semi-naked and surrounded by discarded clothes and strangers.

Even worse, there’s no quick-fix solution. You can ameliorate the symptoms with herbal remedies, such as black cohosh, or conventional HRT, which trails a certain Russian roulette connotation thanks to assorted health scares that have caused its popularity to rise and fall. But you can’t amputate the menopause, inject it or massage it away with aromatherapy oils. And it lasts for years.

With this in mind, there’s only one way to go. It’s time for women of a certain age to rise up and bring the menopause out of the closet, to dust it down and make it fashionable. We must remove the moan from hormonal and put the “aah” in HRT. For a start, we need to bring the language up to date. If terms such as hot flush (which sounds like a state-of-the-art bidet) and “change of life” (a phrase destined to be spoken only in a stage whisper) are the best we can do, it’s not surprising that many women avoid them.

Then there’s the problem with role models. There aren’t any, unless you count Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, whose description of her post-menopausal self, “shrivelled, aged, breastless”, isn’t exactly life-enhancing.

We also need to listen to our ageing bodies. Mine may no longer be the temple it once was, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend the remainder of my years having it constantly gutted and modernised. Mind you, that shouldn’t preclude a spot of avant-garde experimentation. If my face wants extra sets of eyebrows, who am I to deny it? With a small goatee to match, I could set a new trend at the next PTA meeting, possibly with a bearded version of the diamanté decorations that are becoming part of bikini-waxing couture.

And the day I rush home to catch Hormone Rush rather than Sugar Rush on TV, or watch Madonna discarding that clingy, heat-generating rubber stuff in favour of clothing with quick-release buttons, I’ll know that we’re winning.

Meanwhile, I think I’ve worked out a way of easing the menopause into mainstream conversation. I’m harvesting my surplus facial hair and using it to knit my husband a wig. It may not look great, but I think I can guarantee that the first time he wears it at a dinner party, it’ll prove the most fantastic talking point.