'Where would we be without eyelashes?'

This is a question I've been asking myself for quite a while now, after finding a few too many lashes resting as if very, very tired little thin old men on my cheek bones.

Would we walk around with bald little eyes, having regular and official breaks in we could poke around at our eyeballs in frantic attempts to get rid of the dust and debris which would surely settle?

(Excuse me, Mr Boss-man, I have not had an eyecare break in over 6 minutes, this is...disgraceful! How do you expect me to continue sitting here before this screen when from above and onto the delicate region of the eye rains a steady, almost percievable shower of dust? Government regulations and all...)

I have a memory of still being little and cute and be-ringletted, full of the wonders of new things, like those transparent plastic towers containing different coloured oils which would trickle from top to bottom colourfully when tipped from side to side... I remember sitting on my father's knee gazing up in amazement with an open mouth, before remarking slowly, "Daddy, you have no bottom eyelashes!"

Having no bottom eyelashes, is this yet another affliction the aging must suffer? Because if so, someone must find a magic cure! It wouldn't do for everyone to walk around top-heavy, with bountiful supplies of upper-lash, and then bald, watery rims underneath, pink like the facial features of a rodent with flu.

If I noticed my father's lack of bottom lashes all those years ago, surely it is a matter of time before a stranger approaches me and whispers with that same embarrassed tone used for pointing out spinach between the teeth, "excuse me, you seem to have lost your lashes."