Don’t worry: I haven’t been taken seriously ill; I’ve just updated my profile photo.
It turns out the old one was taken twelve years ago, when I was 20% younger and still retained my late-40s boyish good looks. My beard was more pepper than salt back then, as was my hair, which was considerably thicker than now.
I kept putting off updating my photo, worrying people might think I’d aged twelve years overnight. Actually, no, I was more worried they’d think I’d aged twenty-five years overnight.
I’m by no means a vain person, having little to be vain about, but I’ve tweaked the new photo to make it slightly less hideous. Nothing too drastic or misleading, you understand. My general rule with removing blemishes from photos is, if the aberration is something temporary that would no longer be there in a week or two, feel free to get rid of it. So I had no hesitation in removing an unsightly red spot near the tip of my nose. I also zapped a whole pile of dust from my spectacles and removed a stray beard hair that seemed to be emanating from my left nostril. And I trimmed a peripheral cluster of uncharacteristically dark moustache hairs that made it look as if a bluebottle was about to take up residence in my other nostril.
You’ll notice I’m not smiling in the photo. I wasn’t in the previous one either. I’m generally a very happy person with what I like to think of as an engaging sense of humour, so I smile a lot. But it’s a very unflattering smile. I put this down to my upper incisor teeth, the outer ones of which are smaller the most people’s. When I grin, these small incisors are dwarfed by the adjacent canines, which lend me a decidedly vampiric look. When I give a toothy grin, it looks for all the world as if I’m about to sink my teeth into your jugular. I’ve experimented with a tight-lipped smile, but, if anything, that’s worse: the resultant smirk makes me look like some sort of pervert. Not the sort of image I’m looking to promote. So straight-faced gaze it is.
But believe me, inside I’m smiling.
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