My friend's advice proved highly impractical - one year on I have two dogs and at the rate I'm going I'll be bigger than the SPCA within a couple of years.

I'd become famous on my street as the mad English woman with hoards of dribbling dogs all licking her calves lasciviously and constantly tripping her up as she walks them. While this does actually have some appeal (I like my toes being sucked), something tells me it may give my future husband second thoughts about not only taking on a crackers woman as his wife but also the local dogs home as his substitute children.

That said they are the love of my life. My adorable pet pooches are spoilt rotten - they deserve it for putting up with me and my permanent state of PMT (Pre-Madness Tension). Once a month they spend the day at the pet spa where they have a shampoo, cut and blow-dry as well as manicure and pedicure. They're more pampered than I am.

When the pet groomer's van comes and collects them I'm tempted to join them and hurl myself in the back, pleading with them to give me a mani-pedi too. Their day out costs the same as my having a hair-cut by a top stylist at Toni & Guy! Off they go to the high-end pooch parlour while I make do with the dodgy 10 minute S$10 hair do. They look like the prize winners of a dog show, I look like Miss Mullet.

Talking of hair, as I've experienced a dating famine since I arrived in Singapore a few years ago, arrggghhh!!! I've questioned the need for keeping a well groomed beaver. No-one gets to see it, so why waste time ensuring the landing strip isn't wonky - they've gone and landed somewhere else afterall (most likely Orchard Towers). I digress.

A dating famine combined with being broke, spotting wrinkles for the first time and starting to loose tufts of hair on my head through stress meant I was feeling a tad low. What started out as being 'What's the point? No-one wants it' and then 'I can't be arsed to de-fluff' turned into rather a fascinating exercise. I hadn't seen the old snatch in its natural state for nearly two decades.

I didn't realise it came down to my knees and long enough to plait. The Discovery Channel should have filmed the whole thing really, it would have made for a bizarrely rivetting reality TV show. I suddenly realised I had a choice - officially being classed a weirdo in the Guinness Book of Records and guaranteeing my place at the nunnery, or forgoing plaits for a Brazilian wax to attract my future husband.

If anyone heard screams coming out of Wheelock Place last week that was me. Why they don't give you wood to bite down on I don't know. I have found the perfect solution for getting Saddam Hussein to speak in court - give him a Brazilian wax.

He'd admit to anything - being Father Christmas's love child, wearing lacy ladies lingerie and dancing to the Cheeky Girls, hiding weapons of mass destruction under his bed, being Iraq's national hoola-hoop champion, you name it. Believe me, torture has reached new heights. I'm sticking to my plaits...