Will I ever look as elegant as Audrey Hepburn? Ask me once I’ve finished licking my nostrils and pinching my jowls

A brilliant author and artist recently opened my eyes to the wonderland of jaw exercise videos. Smiling women in pastel-coloured vest tops chew the air, stretch their lips and tilt their tongues towards their perfectly formed noses. Angry men in blue polo shirts push tennis balls into their chests. People in medical scrubs try to lick their nostrils. Women with perms pinch at their jowls as if they are trying to crimp a pasty. It’s wild out there.

Now, I worked in consumer media and advertising long enough (for more than 30 seconds) to know that pretty much anything that says it can change your face, or life, or relationship, will do nothing of the sort. In my heart, I recognise that my face is my face, a slowly collapsing combination of genetics and expressions that has changed very little since I was about three. Look at my first nursery portrait – in which I am sitting in a pink nylon jumper in front of a marble-effect backdrop – and you can see 39-year-old Nell smiling back at you. Yet the promise of a new, sharp, Hepburn-esque jawline, created from nothing more than a five-minute routine at my desk, is so tantalising – so deeply penetrates a lifelong desire to look like someone else – that I am struggling to resist.

I’m furious that women still do more than their fair share of domestic chores. At least this might take my mind off it

The other night, I spent half an hour cleaning the mud kitchen of a city farm, surrounded by sand, goat hair and mulch. I have never cleaned the inside of my own oven. Yesterday, I lost a happy hour dusting all the shelves of my friend’s bookshop with a fluffy grey duster so extendable that at one point I started cleaning the rafters just because I could. I have never, to my knowledge, dusted any of my shelves. Last week, I happily washed about 40 wine glasses after a book event, noting the different shades of lipstick as I went. Washing up in my kitchen makes me want to punch a hole through the sink.

Cleaning anything that isn’t my own home feels less boring, less pointless, less like my soul is being leached into an abyss of dirty hobs and splattered toothpaste. Perhaps it’s because this kind of cleaning less pointedly marks out the continued gender inequality that lurks at the heart of most British households and was exacerbated by the pandemic. A report called How Are Mothers and Fathers Balancing Work and Family under Lockdown?, published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London in May 2020, found that, in the first months of the first UK lockdown, mothers were still doing disproportionately more housework and childcare than fathers. Even when both were in the house. Even if both were paid employees. Even if the mother was the primary earner.

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