Ian McMillan: My vain search for a face of reflected glory

I was staying in a hotel the other day and there was a mirror opposite the shower. As the water cascaded over me, I spent ages doing body-builder poses and pouting and looking at my reflection. My wife shouted from the bedroom: "Stop posing!" I shouted back: "How do you know I'm posing?" She replied, with ice-cold and unarguable logic: "Because there's a mirror in the bathroom".

In other words, if there's a mirror anywhere nearby, I'll be the one looking deeply into it, getting as close as I can.

Some people are the opposite; vampire-like, they scuttle away from mirrors and if it was up to them they wouldn't have them in the house.

Not me: if there isn't a mirror I'll gaze at the shiny kettle, if there isn't a shiny kettle I'll look at my own reflection in the TV set, and if there isn't a TV set or a shiny kettle, I'll get the silver paper from a Kit-Kat and flatten it until it gets reflective. The body-building poses aside, I like looking in mirrors because I like faces, and not just my own.

The face is the mirror of the soul, the thing we present to the world, the first thing we look at when we meet someone new. And I can genuinely say that I don't really understand the concept of ugliness; I guess some faces are smoother than others, whereas some faces are as full of character as a forest at midnight in winter.

Some are made up almost as much as a clown's; some are as bare as a

clean plate; some are conventionally beautiful, in ways that we can't quite define but which set our pulses racing, and some (like mine) are asymmetrical, lumpy, a bit floppy, a bit undercooked.

But they're all interesting, even the apparently bland ones that look like they've been drawn on a balloon by a bored art student who was thinking about something else.

Maybe that's why I'm vain and maybe that's why, even after I'd finished showering in the hotel, I gazed at my face in the mirror for so long

that we almost missed breakfast.

My forehead has got a few lines on it: not the ploughed furrows that

you associate with deep thought, but just a few hints of furrows to come.

Perhaps I don't think deeply enough. My eyebrows are approaching Denis Healey proportions: they look like a cross between a privet hedge and a porcupine. They join in the middle in a fierce and luxuriant monobrow that I quite like but which I know isn't very fashionable.

I know it's not fashionable because a couple of months ago I was having my picture taken ("doing a photoshoot" as they say in the media) for some publicity for my Radio 3 show. I was being looked after by a stylist, something that doesn't happen to me very often but which I quite enjoyed.

She gazed at my monobrow like an arachnophobe looking at a spider in the bath. "I guess you'll want to trim that," she said. I shook my head, causing my eyebrows to waft in the breeze like spiky seaweed. "I like it," I said. "I think it gives my face character." "It certainly gives your face something," she replied. "At least you'll let me comb it?"

Beneath the monobrow my eyes look out. They're an indeterminate colour, more brown than blue, more muddy than anything. I sometimes wish they could be described as "piercing", but maybe it's only tin openers that are piercing. My nose is a blob; it looks like it's been made from plasticine, with the aforementioned nostril-hair thicket. There are one or two bumps on it that suggest that, even though I'm not a boozer, I'm heading towards having a boozer's conk in old age, one of those noses redder than Rudolf's and pitted and scarred like the surface of one of the moons of Mars.

My mouth turns down at one side, at the same side as that ear that is further down my head than the other. Sometimes it feels like half of my face is sliding down my head as though the paint is still wet. I look a bit like I've been drawn by Picasso. There are tufts of bristle on my chin where I've missed shaving, like the dots in a dot-to-dot book.

We went down to breakfast and I looked at my wife's lovely face. And the faces of my fellow guests. And the waiter's face. And the face of a bloke walking by outside. All different, all amazing.

None of them with a monobrow like mine, though!