My nose is the first bit of me to get cold. It’s like a personal thermometer.

(Before you ask, it doesn’t look like one. It’s not long, thin and with a curious red bulb on the end. Well, except when I drink excessively, but then whose isn’t?)

Even when the rest of me is toasty warm, the tip of my nose is sensitive enough to detect a tiny drop in temperature, and I know that if my nose is cold, the rest of me will soon follow.

Noses. Curious things, really. I used to obsess over mine - not because it was especially big or small or lumpen or anything, but because everyone else could do something with theirs, which I couldn’t. Wiggle it. Flare their nostrils. Hang things off it. My nose just kind of sat there, kind of blobby, unmistakably hereditary, a little bit wonky and sort of round.

Anna Dibley, in my class at primary school, had a retrusé little nose which turned up slightly at the end, allowing her to hang a teaspoon off it for, oooh, ages. I was insanely jealous of this physical talent, and spent many long hours at home pushing it upwards with my index finger in the vain hope that I could train it into turning up at the end - until I realised one day that:

a) it made me look like a strange variety of human pig and
b) it left a red crease across my proboscus that made me look like Adam Ant in a bad mood. Strangely fitting for the early eighties, but not that becoming.

Oh, and how I wanted to wiggle. How I yearned to be able to let my nose twitch of its own accord. Doing party tricks with my tongue? No problem. Raising one eyebrow independently? Peasy. Going cross-eyed? Pah. Wrote the book. But twitching? No can do.

I’ve tried and tried, until it hurts, and yet still all I can manage is a cross between the curved lip of an Elvis sneer and the fierce concentration of an especially demented rabbit - neither becoming nor successful, I’m afraid.

Do you know how I can train my nose to twitch? Can you do it?

Also, have you ever wondered what we’d look like if our noses went into our facial cavities instead of protruding out of them? Pretty odd, I’d imagine - difficult to keep specs on and a bugger to deal with in wet weather - you’d keep filling up, wouldn’t you? But somewhere very handy in the middle of your face to keep loose change. Maybe.