The three people featured are all entering the twilight of their years.  One of them even makes several references to "being in God's waiting room."  On the surface, she's joking.  On the surface, all her friends are laughing at that joke, but there's a tangible sadness behind that laughter.

The three have more in common though than age, and the fact that their long lives have left them each with a heap of regrets: they all think that having their bodies chopped about a bit can solve their problems.  Are they right?

Of course not.  Sylvia, 64 (and pictured here), is followed through the process of having a boob job to return her sagging chest to its former glory and remove five litres of fat from her belly with liposuction.  Because of her age and the danger that general anaesthetic poses for her, it will take several months for her to recover, but she's not done yet.  She wants liposuction on her thighs and a bum lift.  Presumably she wants a face lift as well, although this wasn't explicitly mentioned.  She holds up a photo of herself at 30.  "This is the target I'm aiming for," she says without a hint of irony or embarrassment.  Hang on love - you're more than TWICE as old now as when that photo was taken.

Once the swelling dies down, Sylvia undoubtedly looks better, but she looks a better sixty-four year old.  Will she really be able to kid herself, when all the pain is over and all the thousands of pounds spent, that she can recapture the lost days when she was thirty?  When she didn't have two failed marriages behind her?  Anyone who has lived has regrets.  Not everyone chooses to try to wind their body back to a time when they hadn't done the stuff that caused those regrets.

Brenda (67, I think, and pictured right) doesn't want enhanced boobs, she wants them smaller.  When she was younger and happy, her tits were 34A but they've expanded with age (that happens to some women, apparently.  Who knew?) so of course to be happy again, if not younger...you get the idea.  Her husband left her in 1993 for a younger woman, obviously because her tits were too big.  Stands to reason.  Luckily Brenda comes up against a doctor who, while treating her with the utmost kindness and respect, essentially tells her to go away and lose some weight and think about the real reason she's not happy.

While she's thinking about whether to go ahead or not, you kind of get the idea that she knows deep down that having a breast reduction will not bring her errant husband back, or make her the woman in her photo again, or actually make her any happier.

Tony is 70 and pictured at the top of this post.  He used to be in a boy band (did they have boy bands back then?  Apparently so) and cannot get used to seeing an old man staring back at him from the shaving mirror.  He wants a face lift, and goes to Prague to get one, but his surgical odyssey is dogged by problems.  The first attempt at operating has to be abandoned owing to his low potassium levels - this increases the danger of general anaesthetic especially in the elderly.  He spends two days on a potassium drip and they try again, only to be thwarted because his heart rate is too low.  This time though, the doctors agree to go ahead with an "eye lift" under local anaesthetic.  Ewwww!  Sooner him than me.  When he's almost recovered from that he discovers the clinic offer "face lift without knives" so he has a go at the Botox and the fat injections to fill out his deep lines.  After twenty minutes of these fat injections he comes over all unnecessary and they abandon the procedure, but it's enough to make Tony realise that he would never be able to cope with the full face lift under just a local.

For some reason (desperation?) he then has his eyebrows tinted, but not his hair, ending up looking like some mad Groucho Marx impersonator.  I don't know how much he paid for all this but I have to say none of it made that much difference and once again the real problem wasn't his face but what's behind it.  Tony bitterly regrets the failure of his marriage, which he admitted was his fault.  He longed to be part of a 40- or 50-year marriage and bounce grandkids on his knee, but it wasn't to be.  Mate!  You won't get there by squirting blubber into your cheeks!

Three cases, three slightly different results, but really the same poignant story.  Life is lived in one direction and you can't rewrite your personal story with a knife and some Botox.