Sunday journalling prompt

Regrets, I’ve had a few…

On Friday, buoyed by some unfathomable urge for self-improvement, I reached for a packet that’s sat on my bathroom shelf for a long time. I’ve been regretting it ever since. 

The packet in question was a home kit for skin-tag removal. I’m plagued by these little glitches around my neck, which seem to increase their number every time I wear a woollen sweater. They are now so abundant that I’ve begun to obsess over them, not just because they’re itchy, but also because I think they make me look like a toad. I want them gone. 

I was a teenager the last time I had skin tags removed. I mentioned them to my friend’s father, who was a GP, and he offered to sort them out. When I arrived at his surgery, I was quite surprised to see that he’d improvised a device from a large battery pack, two tongue compressors and a length of wire. The wire was stretched between the tongue compressors and heated by the battery, and he effectively shaved my neck of all the dastardly tags. It was over in seconds, and completely painless. I was delighted. 

Because I couldn’t imagine that anyone else had improvised a device like this, I assumed I was stuck with my current crop, until I saw the bottle in my local pharmacy. It promised to cryogenically rid me of my tags, and so I bought it, and then couldn’t quite face using it for a further year. But last Friday, for whatever reason, I reached a tipping point. I got out the spray bottle, and worked methodically over my throat, holding the freezing liquid to each of my tags. 

It did not go particularly well. Soon, my skin was splotched red, and the tags were still very much there, except now they were black and far more visible. It was at that point that I remembered that I was shortly to head off on a small bookshop tour. I sent a photo to my friend, a nurse, who replied: ‘So wait, you’ve replaced your invisible skin tags with burns and frostbite?’