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Getting personal

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Sorry to get all “Just Seventeen” on your arses, but what is your least favourite bit of your own body? [Or maybe you consider yourself to be a perfect specimen.]

Me, I really don’t like my arms. They’re pale and not very manly. I longed for brown, muscular arms when I was a teenager, but I could never seem to beef them up and every time I tried to get a tan they just went red and peeled. So I covered them up and they’ve been covered up ever since.

I have very good legs, though.

How about you?

2

Comments

  1. Upper body of a distance runner, lower body of a pre-1989 Eastern European shot-putter on steroids. So legs least favourite.

    I do have nice shoulders though. 🙂

  2. My hamstrings. Years of football mean that they’re always tight, and one is fractionally shorter than the other, with the consequence that they require constant stretching, foam rolling and ice-ing, and that my lower back tightens up if I don’t take proper care of them.

    They also prohibit me from deadlifting properly in the gym, and I love me some deadlifting.

  9. My feet are pretty disgusting. Too much football I suspect. And never going near a chiropodist. My midriff has got a little too settled as well.

    Full head of hair though so not complaining.

  10. I suppose about 7or 8 kilos of it around the gut. I have lost 10 kilos since finding out at a health check that I had tipped into the obese category (only just, BMI about 30.25) but losing more would mean eating less of the stuff I like. Swings and roundabouts.

    The one I can’t do anything about is my hands. There’s nothing wrong with them, but I’ve always wished I had long artistic hands, rather than the broad-backed artisans’ mitts I do have. I fully realise that this is nuts. No-one is whispering behind my back saying, ‘There he is! The guy with perfectly ordinary, functional, but unartistic broad-backed hands!’ But if I could choose myself from a kit, that would be the first thing I went for.

  13. I am beginning to think that from these body parts we can build both the ultimate Frankenstein’s monster and the perfect human being.

    My pale arms, Ruby’s Commy Bloc legs with Bingo’s painfully stretched hamstrings, Rob C’s 5’7″ cock, Jack’s titties – we’re halfway to a truly awesome specimen.

  15. The excess carry-on between my nips and my gentleman’s area. I need to get back into cycling.

    None of the rest of me looks like Brad Pitt but I’m at peace with that. Could just do with a bit less of me.

  17. A couple of years ago, walking on ice on the cobbles outside my house laden with a heavy rucksack, I slipped and went down like a sack of spuds. Ever since, my left hip has a pronounced lump on it, which certainly only I have ever noticed, but about which I am self-conscious.

    In truth, I should be grateful that I didn’t break my hip as that could easily have happened.

  22. Always had gappy teeth, never worried about them but just carried a stick to beat all them ladies off …
    Nowadays every young person in The Universe has perfect white gleaming gnashers and I’m constantly looking at myself thinking “who’s this old geezer with the yellow, stained and gappy teeth”? Don’t seem to need that stick anymore.

    • Yes, me too.

      Plus everything else. I can look at myself in the bathroom mirror once all the ablutions are complete and can issue a certificate allowing me to leave the premises without scaring any horses.

      If I catch my reflection in a shop window at any unexpected moment later I look like a sack of shit tied up in the middle. Scruffy, bellied, stupid thinning hair, wonky legs and generally horrifying.

      I’ve got nice ears, mind.

      • That ablutions thing can be a horror, can’t it? It’s amazing the transformation a bathroom can make. Stagger in looking like one of Lando Cakes’ genetic experiments, maybe a cross between a radioactive pig and a giant sea-slug, and a mere forty minutes later spring back into the world reborn. Unfortunately, as you say, as a human being somewhat past his prime.

        Thank god for bathrooms. And clothes.

  24. Bottom left molar, as of this afternoon. The bastard has been giving me grief so the dentist decided after two lots of antibiotics, that it needs root canal treatment, started about 6 weeks ago and completed on tuesday. Now my jaw and cheek are swollen up like an egg and they think it might be an extraction if another (third) course of antibiotics doesn’t sort it. I pointed out this bastard has now cost me the equivalent of a decent Fender Stratocaster and i have no intention of losing the fucker. Grrrr.

    Calling @lenny law

    • Coo, I had the final part of my own root canal treatment done on Tuesday too.

      My dentist is really good; I was so relaxed that I dozed off while he was doing it. True!

      As for the cost, he didn’t ask me to pony up any iconic amplified instruments whatsoever, as it was all covered by my £30/mth Denplan payment. It’s worth enquiring whether your dentist offers that.

  25. At 50+, it’s got to be the hair. So many colleagues, some half my age, are thinning/receding/bald, but I still have a luxurious thatch, which I cherish. I do bugger all to look after it, and couldn’t care less about the ever-increasing grey flecks, but it never seems to suffer. The rest of me looks shite, but the follicles rock.

  27. Wings……(or, as Alan Partridge puts it, I have a fat back) Male muffin top. Not a gut as such, it all squeezes round to the sides and haunches.
    But it doesn’t befit an older man to be too thin.

  29. I’m yer proper big unit: not skyscrapingly tall at 6′, but BIG: a yard of shoulders, lots of muscle, big hands and feet. I’m just a very strongly built bloke. That’s the bit I like fine.

    The muscle is a bit submerged, unfortunately. I don’t have a belly, thank god, but me love handles round back are the part of me I’d love to get rid of.

    Still. I’m working on it: I’m a stone lighter than I was 3 years ago, 2 stone lighter than 6 years ago, and although I’ve been a bit lighter than I am now at times, I’ve never got close to putting that long-term weight back on. I had nearly 4 years of my late 20s / early 30s at that heaviest weight and when I look at pictures I’m amazed. I was never someone whose defining feature was “cor, look at fatty!”, but I was way too heavy. Still am, but much less so.

  31. All the usual – big nose, long-distance luggage under my eyes, the place where my waist used to be, thin hairless arms. Probably most disappointed in my prostate though.

  32. There’s no one part I’d like to single out. The general process of ageing is a dispiriting thing. There comes a day – I think you could calendar it – when you stop fooling yourself you’re either pretty good for your age or could easily become so, if you felt like it. That day could also include the shocking sight of your bald patch in the angled barber’s mirror, which explains why you were getting such a short time in the chair. It could be the day when you realise cutting your toenails requires some kind of yogic position that gives you stitch. It’s the day we all have to live through, and for the rest of our lives. The upside of this, if there is an upside, is to appreciate what a fantastic thing the human body is in its prime, to get pleasure from seeing kids spring about, totally unselfconsciously, just for the fun of it, and the beauty of athletic achievement. I may have lost that quality (springs replaced by creaks, laughter by groans) but that doesn’t mean the quality itself is diminished in any way. I’ve had my share, and I’m grateful for it. My physical pleasures are mainly simple comforts now, and that’s something to celebrate, too, in a quietly resilient way.

    • to get pleasure from seeing kids spring about, totally unselfconsciously, just for the fun of it,

      Yes; and how easily they move- bend, jump, flex, squat (squat! Right down to their haunches!) and how spontaneous it is.

      Whereas these days, picking something up, or sprinting for a bus, or bending down, requires that extra split-second of thought- can I do this? Knees bent, brace, pause, take a breath.

      But there is some pleasure to be had from how ageing is marked on the body: the wrinkles, frown lines, laughter lines, scars, even old injuries- all memories.

    • I find haircuts a harrowing experience these days. It’s not just the shocking contrast of the grey chaff as it falls around my ears onto the black tabard, or the trick with the truthful mirror that shows you a spot of flesh you hoped you’d never see. Those aren’t really the problem.

      It’s the thirty minutes of staring at your own reflection, four feet away, looking back at you in silent contempt for the way you’ve treated it. You might, in the course of a day, pull your James Bond face as you wash your hands in the Gents, or instinctively step aside to let a portly old duffer through a glass door before realising it’s you, reflected and reversed, but this is the only time you’re forced to face up to the damage you’ve done. Harshly lit, able to turn your head away only at the risk of losing an ear, and with the tight collar of the clipper’s cape pushing your fleshy neck up around where your chin used to be, it’s a terrible ordeal of forced reflection.

      This wretch you’re stuck opposite is talking distractedly about his holidays but his eyes never leave yours, and they are saying: What the fuck have you done to me? Where’s my jawline gone? Where did all this forehead come from? And how come my ears keep getting bigger? He’s got creases on his eyes, his cheeks, even his earlobes. Tributaries lead to deltas and into canyons. There are craters and occasional patches of dark vegetation in the drying, dying moonscape. You’ve got a face like Arizona from space.

      Although for you the devastation has been gradual, the effect ameliorated by familiarity, wishful thinking and wilful avoidance of the evidence before you each morning, the man in the mirror only sees it every six weeks, and he fucking hates what you’ve done to him. Next time I’ll take a blindfold.

      • it’s you, reflected and reversed, but this is the only time you’re forced to face up to the damage you’ve done.

        Oh yes, that’s so true. Hairdressers, with the unforgiving lighting, are the worst. And for me it’s about an hour; an hour of looking at the lack of sun protection, frown lines from not wearing specs enough and general irritability, the sleep deprivation, the new sags around the mouth that weren’t there last year, the increasing asymmetry of my wonky face.

        I re-frame it as ‘evidence of experience’, a delusion which works for a little while.

        • Ah hah though but! I have to remove my specs for a haircut, so the face in the mirror remains an inchoate (good word Saucy, keep it up) blur onto which I can project a fond image of myself as a young man. The moment of truth – the reveal – is when I have to hook my specs back on and confront the thumb-faced, amorphous blob-creature with its little piggy eyes and red nose.

  33. My expanding midriff, hair loss and shattered veins are a consequence of age. From day 1, I had wished for a lovely set of gnashers. On my mother’s side, lovely gnashers, dad’s side, all horrible small things. When I laugh, I look bloody toothless and gormless. I tend not to laugh, just a crooked smile now and again, which means that I tend to come across as miserable or supercilious.

  34. My hair. I can cope with it thinning out (in fact that’s a blessing cos I might shave it off in a few years time). What annoys me is how it sticks out at the sides (bit like Alan Partridge’s) and will not lie flat. It means it only looks good just after a haircut. After a few weeks’ growth I look like a washing up brush.

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