The phrase, “No, I don’t want a colonic irrigation”, may be the most important line you must memorise before you enter a spa. Spas and I don’t get along. They don’t take to my barefoot-around-the-house, no-makeup rules and I don’t take to their yen for terrible rituals involving nozzles and inner cleansing.

But then an old friend called, asking whether I’d provide moral support for her “makeover”. She’s thirty-something and thinks she’d better do this before she starts “letting herself go”. The makeover involved sessions with hair stylists, skin specialists, a former supermodel who would offer her makeup tips and a consultation with a clothing adviser who would “do her colours”. Would I come along?

The hair stylist briskly explained that my friend needed complete hair therapy, colourising, rinses, packs, cuts and oh yes, maintenance. He advocated a half-hour scalp massage followed by gentle brushing every night, plus innumerable applications of various kinds of gook on what seemed to be every second day of the week. “It’s the sun,” he said severely, “it’s soooo bad for you. And you mustn’t, mustn’t go swimsies. Naughty girl.” My friend, an avid swimmer, gulped but promised to avoid the pool.

The skin specialist scared me, but perhaps I only say this because she lovingly pinched my cheeks in a case of mistaken identity and said, “Ooh, good texture but no, no, you must use makeup, bring out those cheekbones and, tut tut, the Neck is always the First To Go.” “Do her,” I said firmly, thrusting my friend forward.

By the time we left she was five thousand bucks poorer and laden with skinfood, skin cream, anti-ageing treatments, age-defying gels and cellulite busters. Skin care would take half an hour in the morning, half an hour at night ? not counting makeup donning and removal time, and adding an extra 40 minutes for hand-and-foot care.

The rest was an increasingly terrifying blur: all I can remember is that my friend emerged after her colonic waddling like a constipated duck and that her colours were Autumn.

In the end, I did the math. Two hours of exercise (plus a carefully regulated diet), one hour of skin care (plus 40 minutes for the extremities), about an hour more if you club clothes buying and bra-matching (there’s the T-shirt bra, the salwar-kameez bra, the tubetop bra, the no-bra bra, the Wonderbra? it made me almost nostalgic for those Liberty bodice horrors) together with hair care. That’s four hours a day for basic, routine maintenance, never mind the special massages and the waxing and the Ayurvedic treatments and the “personal time”, which seems to involve a lot of Positive Chanting, rose petals, tubs and scented candles.

Now I regard beauty queens with fascinated horror. The road to the catwalk leads past the treadmill and the salon and other places that belong in a Horror Museum’s torture chamber. Those girls, I reflect, as I spend the extra hour I have to myself on account of not following a beauty regime padding barefoot and with defiantly unplucked eyebrows around my garden, deserve our pity.