I'm genuinely shocked to realise that what I see reflected in my mirror – my surroundings and me – is actually a moment in time that I have frozen. Does this mean that my glory days are encapsulated in an out-of-date catalogue and I have acquired and placed mirrors that merely support this strange collision of styles through filtered lenses; blonde hair, cream trouser suit, pared-back Scandinavian furniture and a skylight? I have been locked into one vision, one look, my whole life? Mirrors and SLEs have aided and abetted; my waning eyesight has only increased the distance from the truth. My nostalgic view of a certain point in my history has enabled me to live life looking through, at best, a rosy lens. When I carried out the recent, vastly deep and meaningful investigation into my collection of mirrored surfaces (let's be honest: the cooker, when clean, serves), I left out one set that has always occupied an entirely different space and has never been placed in an SLE – the complete opposite, in fact; these mirrors need glaring, torturous light. They are the mirrors of truth. The hair mirrors. Not hair-on-your-head mirrors but hair-on-your-chin mirrors. Mirrors that show your skin in depressingly magnified detail. A few years back, x5 magnification, then x10 and now an absolutely vital x20 plus reading glasses. I view my errant hairs through lenses so powerful and thick that they could, with some adaptation, view the surface of the moon. These mirrors are so far removed from me and my experience of my body and face that when I pluck and scan and search for stubbly hairs, I genuinely feel like I'm trekking across a different land; a delta, a savannah, a wasteland, flatlands. These mirrors and their reflections are not now and never have been me. Does that make sense, in a nonsensical kind of way? I don't see me; I just see hairs. Put simply, without telescopic vision, I can barely see my face, let alone single or clumps of hairs. My fringe covers my eyebrows so from a distance they are 'Cara bushes' and close up, without help, 'caterpillar blurs'. Magnifiers don't count as true mirrors – they are merely used in the process of finding and eliminating, across vast, minute landscapes. But the enemy deep within the wing mirror has now become my fully paid-up, overpriced therapist, the one I have been avoiding all these years. The therapist that slams 'STOP' down on the table; 'LET GO' of all the impossible goals you have spent years creating for yourself. You will never look like Bianca Jagger in YSL 'cream and narrow'; you have reached an age where you might want to consider a nip or tuck, or a few shots of Botox; you may want to start shopping for tunics in stores that sound like Cornish villages; and you may want to forget that bed-hair product as it makes you look unhinged, not recently ruffled. That wing mirror, that journey became a turning point in my rather lightweight life. I realised then and there that looking back at me was the lived-in face of a woman who has hit her 50s, sat atop a neck which is starting to concertina, like a salmon-pink Austrian blind. As the youth would say: I need to fix up, lose the Habitat interior and get some much better lighting for all of my mirrors, big and small. I need a non-reflective makeover, don't I? @justjuno1