Back when I was 20, my hair cascading down to my shoulders, jeans shredded at the knee, I thought it wise to complete the look with a lip ring. Two years later, there I was, supine at Birmingham A&E, surrounded by doctors craning their necks to look and laugh, while I desperately rued my life choices.

As the local anaesthetic took hold, my mind returned to the night before: four pints deep and finding the ring broken at the join, I had squeezed the two ends together, clamping it tighter than my lip could ever accommodate. By morning, it had turned blue. With a mouth swollen like I’d kissed a wasp nest, I went for a post-op pint, only for it to dribble out of the existing hole. No more piercings ever again, I swore.

For as long as I can remember, ageing has terrified me

For as long as I can remember, ageing has terrified me

Bad as that was, it was hardly the beginning. At 18, determined to arrive at university as an edgier proposition than the boy who had left school, I had my eyebrow pierced, aiming for Incubus and landing somewhere nearer Duncan from Blue. My body, unimpressed by the reinvention, spent the following weeks expelling the bar as it would a splinter. Within months, it had literally grown out, and that was that: no more eyebrow bar to complement the spiky blond highlights I’d also acquired.

Few men have ever had better grounds for renouncing piercings permanently. Yet three months ago, at 41, I found myself in a parlour........

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