Angelina to the rescue

You know sometimes when you look in the mirror in the morning and you get such a fright that all you want to do is cry "oh, noooo", and run back to the bedroom and hide under the covers for the rest of the day?

When I have one of those days and if I must face the outside world in order to get to work or something, I find it can be really helpful to have access to pictures of the beautiful people looking rough, because somehow it manages to take the edge of my own misery.

This is one of my favourite first-aiders. Sure, when she makes even the slightest bit of effort Ange morphs into a knock-out, but I can live with that, because if I concentrate I usually succeed in focussing only on our shared moments of looking rough. And that makes me feel a little bit better.

Nina pretty ballerina

In a parallel universe I’m a ballerina. I imagine myself flying effortlessly through the air, my every move graceful and light. That I didn’t realise I wanted to be a dancer until I was about 28 is one of life’s great disappointments, with another major one being that hardly anyone bothers to teach inflexible, rhythmically challenged “old” people like me dance. One expection is Lynda Raino, a dancer and choreographer who has a dance centre for adults in Victoria, Canada. She also started Big Dance, a company for large women and famously said “You don’t have to have a dancer’s body to dance, just a body that dances”.

When I lived in Victoria I took classes with Lynda and did everything from modern technique to floor barre and even tried ballet for absolute beginners (which was actually rather boring once I realised it just wouldn’t happen, I would never be a Darcey Bussell). Lynda helped me create a bridge between my mind and my body and this played a huge role in making me aware of myself in space.

But although my “career” came to an end in '98 when I moved to the UK, in a parallel universe I am a ballerina and so I go to pilates, because that’s what all dancers do. I’m comically inflexible and considering I am approaching 40 I’m starting to wonder whether my pig-headed stubbornness will ever pay off and I will one day be able to do something resembling the splits. But I adore my teacher Ruth, who incidentally was a ballet dancer with the Scottish Ballet, and so I go every week and dream of at least one day retraining and becoming a pilates instructor.