We are all barely coping, just hanging on by the skin of our teeth

If you tell me that you’re comfortable in your own skin, I will make affirmative noises. But, secretly, I will be looking at you sideways. 

I mean, come on, it’s a weird claim to make. Popular, though. You only have to look at the RTÉ Guide. It buys into “skin ownership”. At least twice in the last couple of months, they’ve put captions on their front cover, announcing that some star or other is now happy in their own skin. Every time it happens, I look at the pictures of the star so described, wondering whose skin they occupied up to now. And how did the owner of the other skin manage without the human saran wrap that keeps their innards from falling all over the floor? Did they, in turn, borrow a third person’s skin? Is a kind of skin relay race going on, where if you’re touched by a baton, you have to hand over your epidermis and go rent one, until you get the original, returned by its borrower?

Getting in and out of skin, your own or somebody else’s, worries me, too, because this is not like struggling into a wet suit. This is a tight, form-fitting yoke, with annoying details like fingers, which have to be covered fairly precisely. So it’s great to have the singer, Cheryl, to explain how it’s done. She seems to have done a skin swap at the onset of motherhood, perhaps because she didn’t like much about pregnancy.