I discovered an interesting new facial care routine. Well, I say discovered. What I mean is "A thing in a box arrived on my doorstep and I feel compelled to now pretend it is brilliant because otherwise I will have to answer all manner of complicated questions."

It's always nice to receive surprises, and even more so when they appear to be quite expensive pieces of facial-buffing technology. The kind of thing that you might, say, stick a battery in, hold to your face and wait, patiently, while it foams up, rubs, buffs, polishes and makes you more beautiful than the face of god itself. And that's incredible. I mean, all that technology, all that innovation, all that power and research and time spent in development, just to reproduce a high-tech version of the flannel.  It's remarkable, the power of human ingenuity.

Still, it's great to receive something you haven't been expecting, even if it is something of questionable point. But surprises are always nice.

Which makes it sound as if I have been taking kickbacks, bribes. Accepting free samples from manufacturers in return for positive reviews or mentions in one of the blogs I write for.  Sadly, that is not the case.

No. It means I've been internet shopping while drunk again.

There's always  - no, not always, that would be too predictable - there's reasonably often this point, a few days after a really good night out, when a small brown box will arrive from Amazon. I will stare at it, frowning, slightly, wondering if there is any faint possibility that it is something sensible, like a potato peeler, or a pencil, or that copy of  'Managing Your Minuscule Budget For Dummies' that I really should be picking up sometime around now.

But no. It will be one of those things for which companies inevitably book adverts late at night, when people will be weak, or tired, or in some other way incapacitated and more likely to buy something they really, really don't need.

"Buy this" they say "in a matter of only a couple of days, every single problem you've ever had with your skin, your weight, your hair or any other part of your appearance will disappear. And it's only 19.95! AND you get a free gift!" Which is very nice of them, and very generous, but the only really fair free gift would be a badge saying 'MORON', which would, at least, help deter me from the last time.

And so I end up with revolutionary scrubs, ground-breaking pluckers, vibrating flannels and the occasional ineffectual diet pill. All plopping through my letterbox and sitting, smugly on the doormat. All, a month later, sitting on my shelf, collecting dust, mocking me and my continually hopeful - yet lazy - attitude to self improvement.

So here's the plan: someone needs to lock the internet. Not every night, just on nights when I've been out and/or had more than three glasses of wine with dinner. Or just lock that really specific programme where you can look up things that you've just seen on the television and then spooge money up the wall on them. You know the one. Google.

If someone would arrange that, that would be great.

... Although if it looks like someone's attempted to draw a thin moustache on her upper lip with a biro, there's a fair chance she probably hasn't.

Tattooed lip liner is just wrong. When you wear it with lipstick it might be absolutely perfect and the timesaving step forward that women have waited untold centuries to attain - but on days when you don't wear mouthpaint, or as you get older and stop wearing make up most of the time, you will look, from a distance (and, to be fair, from close up too) quite a lot like Errol Flynn. That's not a general point, of course. But it is the thing I've been meaning to say to the lady who works in my local deli for a while.

But then, what do I know? I'm not a make-up expert. I'm barely a registered female at all, in terms of make-up. While all the other lucky female children were taken off to their secret "How to be a girl"  classes, I was out in the garden, poking at an earthworm, and did not hear the bell.

I cannot apply eyeliner, any experiment with blusher or eyeshadow leaves me looking like a clown has been rubbing himself all over my face as I slept.

I can just about manage a thin covering of that skin coloured liquid, and some mascara. The other week I bought my first lipstick in about ten years. I wore it twice, couldn't really see the difference.Certainly no one approached me to compliment my ethereal beauty on the street, no one offered to offer me a better life, a happier future and a stable career in something incredibly easy and ridiculously well-paid. My lips were slightly darker than they had been the day before, but I couldn't *quite* work out what the benefit was beyond that, and it tumbled its way down to the bottom of my bag where it fell open and has found a new job as a fluffer (the kind who work on underground railways, not the kind who work on porn sets).

So I have a very basic knowledge of the things that I am *meant* to be able to do in order to be properly and proudly "a lady", I just have no idea how to achieve some of them. Or why. Which is why I will be writing about health and beauty type things. Because things are so much more fun that way.