Garth George: Eternally grateful for being so wonderfully formed

The face you see above my name in this column is mine and I guess I am fortunate that I live behind it and only have to look at it for a few minutes each morning in the mirror when I shave.

Nevertheless, I own it and while I agree that it could probably be improved aesthetically by an injection or two of Botox, if I did that the resulting wrinkle-free physiognomy wouldn't be me.

I am not, incidentally, as grizzled or as fierce as the picture would have you believe. Our faces are continually mobile and mine happened to be caught with that expression in the split second it took the camera to capture that image.

It doesn't help, of course, that I was born without a photo gene and can count the number of flattering pictures of myself taken in my lifetime on the fingers of one hand.

One of them adorned this column for its first five years or so until it was suggested that I was cheating and should have another one taken.

I have what I would call a lived-in face and I'm aware that it shows the depredations of 20 years of hard drinking, a lifetime of cigarette smoking and nearly 50 years of working under pressure in the daily newspaper trade.

But I'm happy with it because it's mine and there isn't another one exactly the same in the whole wide world.

The hair that sits atop it is uniformly silver, a process that started in my early 30s and which I've never done anything to prevent on the basis that I should be immensely grateful that I didn't lose it.

It is, I admit, getting a bit thin on top and I have been tempted to explore some remedy to thicken it up a bit.

But in the meantime I just make sure I wear a hat when out in the sun, for a sunburned scalp is not only painful but messy when the flakes fall all over the black shirts and jackets it is my habit to wear.

The rest of the body is showing (and sometimes protesting) its age, but that's okay, too; it's not (yet) so bad that it might frighten little children on a beach.

By now some of you will be asking what on earth I'm on about here, so I'll tell you: the absolutely wonderful thing about this body of mine is that I'm at home and perfectly comfortable in it.

And when I note the screeds of ads for and articles about healthy this and healthy that, exercises and meditations, diets and anorexia and bulimia, pills and potions to prevent ageing and/or improve potency and plastic surgery to modify just about any part of the anatomy, I have to conclude that I must be a bit of a rarity.

So it was with great pleasure that I read an article buried on an inside page of the Herald on Sunday last weekend in which actress Robyn Malcolm revealed her pragmatic and uncomplicated view of ageing.

"As you get older," she is quoted as saying, "there is a trade-off. Skin starts to sag but you also start to sit in it a lot better."

Older people are often so much more attractive because they just got used to themselves. They're in their own skin and they have lived some life.

Malcolm, who is 40, says she is happy with the way she looks and sees no need to have Botox injections, silicon implants, collagen lips or to develop an eating disorder in a vain attempt to stay youthful.

Nor does she. The onetime Shortland Street character is a fine-looking woman and Outrageous Fortune is worth watching just to see her in action.

I, too, have never seen the need to do anything to try to stay young - short-term gain with the probability of long-term pain has never appealed. What little exercise I do, and the few potions I use, are for my comfort right now and not because I don't want to look my age, or live forever.

When I drag myself out of bed of a morning to go for a brisk walk, I do so because I have learned that my day will go better; I will be more alert and am less likely to get tired or out of sorts.

And my daily use of aftershave, underarm deodorant and cologne is a habit born in the days of my youth when body odour, both male and female, wasn't all that uncommon and turned my stomach.

I am what I am and what I am is what God made me. In the 139th Psalm, King David wrote:

"For you [God] formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made ... my frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the Earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them."

How on earth could I possibly improve on that?