My forehead appears freakishly oversized when I check my reflection on the back of spoons.
Rather than vain, I am just making sure that something else hasn't slipped off.
Maintenance is a killer.
The sheer amount of time and money that goes into ridding oneself of hair, while simultaneously styling the hair left on is not vanity but the triumph of hope over experience.
Add to this agonies about weight, not to mention parts that are beginning to resemble fruit (or its peel) and the fairer sex have it pretty unfair.
Men, simple creatures that they are, reproductive organs dangling perilously on the outside of their bodies, aren't vain at all.
Or are they? When I was at high school, anorexia was in fashion (so was smoking) but back then we just called it being skinny.
You'll have to forgive us, it was the '80s, largely a very confusing time and many a smoking non-eater has since not lived to regret it.
Nowadays, anorexia is thought a little bit sad and hip bones and rib bones are more likely to be cloaked in a blanket of booty.
Starvation so unfashionable and my booty too bootyful, to keep my weight down I have psychotic episodes of running.
It is much harder than it looks on the adidas ads but people are very encouraging: at least I think words of encouragement are what white van drivers are yelling at me - I can't hear with my iPod on.
Hibernating all winter, my first attempt last week pulled every muscle in my body and had me lurching about at work like a peg-legged pirate.
Sensible shoes? You'd have to break my legs before I'd get that desperate.
Wheeling around the television station, (the last bastion of un-PC behaviour) parrotless and sulking, I griped, "men never worry about their bloody weight".
I was fairly shouted down.
"Surely just those with saggy man-breasts," I countered.
"Leave it out," came a defensive voice over the newsroom partition.
I conducted a spot poll.
How many of my testicularly-enabled colleagues practised male grooming?"Grooming?" mulled the camera man, rolling the foreign word around on his tongue.
"Isn't that what monkeys do?"Results suggested that behind the camera, over-enthusiastic personal care was disdained as unmanly, even effete, while those in front practised a great deal of it.
"See this?" said one dapper reporter-about-town, pulling a tub of styling product from his anorak.
"I'm never without it."
I felt comforted.
"I'm not vain," said the economist, "but I do have a lovely personality."
(I have no idea why he keeps saying this).
"You must be vain about that incredible head of hair of yours," I said to Michael Andrewes of the Really Authentic Gilbert and Sullivan Performance Trust.
"You can talk," he said, looking askance at my expensively topiaried locks.
"At least mine is its natural colour."
Ha! Quite frankly, if God had thought up the colour my hair is he would have retired happy and not bothered with some of his more boring hues, like mousy brown.
Over family G&Ts I broached the subject again.
It was proposed that male vanity extended to accoutrements such as cars, younger totty or a great job (Silvio Berlusconi is vain).
"Some men are vain about their trouser equipment," the economist said in a quiet voice.
"It's not the size of the sword, its the skill of the swordsman," my mother-in-law said.
"Nobody believes that old chestnut," my mother said huffily.
"Never take a knife to a gun fight," my stepfather said.
At this point the conversation became too obtuse for me.
At its best, vanity means enhancing your natural assets and at its worst, resorting to artificial embellishment (sporting fire-engine-red hair being an excellent example).
The diary
Oct 6 Heather Straka & Hannah Riley - Blue Oyster.
Oct 8: Jason Grieg "Sleep Depraved" Brett McDowell Gallery, kooky.
Oct 9: Fur Patrol NZ tour, Chicks Hotel, get your rock chick out.
Oct any time is a good time to buy a painting at the Temple Gallery. Make mine a Diana Smillie.
Oct 17: An afternoon with a Good Keen Man, NZ Book Month event, Dunedin City Library. Crumping.
Oct 18: Rhododendron Festival, goes beautifully with a new spring frock.
