Reasons why Fran gets through a lot of toothpaste

I wasn't a spotty teenager. Phew, I thought. I've got away with that. And, until I was 49, I did.

Then, the day after my 50th birthday. BOOM! Mahoosive spots, all over my chin, cheeks and forehead. On a bad day, I look like the Lake District.

But it's not just me. 

Next time you go to see Shakespeare's Macbeth, watch Lady Macbeth carefully. When she does her 'Out, damned spot!' speech, I swear this isn't bloodguilt at all, but a rant about late-onset acne. Granted, last time I saw the play, I couldn't see the spots on her face, but I was in a £7.50 seat in the upper circle and so far from the action that when Macbeth said, 'Is this a dagger I see before me?' I couldn't have helped him out if I'd tried.  

Furthermore, my theory about Lady-Macbeth-the-Menopausal is supported by the fact that she has ripped off her nightie in the small hours and is wandering about naked, spouting nonsense. Any woman over 45 knows what that's all about.

She's a formidable woman, though, Lady Macbeth. If I'd been her acne, I'd have gone 'out' as fast as I could.

I tried her technique in front of the mirror. 'Out, damned spot!' I said to my reflection. Then corrected it to 'spots'. I had to get to work, after all.

Nothing happened.

This might be because telling spots 'Out! Out!' when they are already 3 or 4 centimetres 'out' and yelling to the world 'Look at me, I'm an uber-spot!' is futile. Maybe I should be shouting 'In! In! Get Back In, damned spot!'

This way, I may end up with craters rather than spots, but at least I could fill those in with some tile grouting or peanut butter or left-over hummus, and then slap on some foundation.

Just part of the morning routine

There's no point trying spot concealer. Has any product ever been so mis-named? Spot concealer is only suitable for teeny-weeny-meeny little baby spots, otherwise all it does is REveal. If all I had were teeny-weeny-meeny little baby spots, I'd be spending my money in Costa instead, sipping a latte and feeling smug about people in the queue who had real acne. But I don't. I have proper grown-up spots and all spot concealer does, once I've applied it in careful layers, like Pompeii, is announce them to the public. 'Don't bother with nature programmes to see a furious, pulsating volcano! Just look over here at this old bird trying to pretend she has smooth skin!'

So what am I, and Lady Macbeth, supposed to do? Join a model agency that supplies women to medical journals?

I saw in a magazine that if you put toothpaste on a raging spot, it calms it. Sometimes I do that overnight. Sometimes it works.

You're welcome to the tip. But remember. It's only an indoor solution. Don't do what I did, which was to blob toothpaste on my chin and forehead one Saturday morning, knowing we were going out with friends that evening, and then ...

You know what I'm going to say ....

I realised my mistake just before we went into an Italian restaurant to meet our friends, and my husband had to help me scrub off the toothpaste under a street lamp in Leamington's high street. It wasn't easy. I was using a face wipe from my handbag which had been there for a year and was as dry as stage fright.

And, of course, all I did was reveal the spots, which were still there, throbbing away like a 70s disco, ready to party, and shouting, 'We're out! We're out! You said 'out' and we're out!'