RICHARD ORD: Hellraiser school of horror and beauty

Isaac (I knew I’d remember in the end) could probably do with a vision of the world beyond the hand held oblong hovering perpetually six inches from his face.

Geography is not his strongest suit. A fact borne out this week when he asked where in the world A La Carte was?

His grandmother was talking about the choices on the a la carte menu she had on holiday. Isaac, aged 13, liked the sound of that resort.

If it sounds foreign, he assumes it’s a place. Which throws up some interesting holiday options for the summer.

A trip to Deja Vu perhaps. “Haven’t we been there before?”

What about the lovely German city of Doppelganger? “Looks familiar.”

Or perhaps a camping trip to Schadenfreude? “My wife went there once and got food poisoning.”

The week of weirdness in the Ord household continued when my wife asked me to collect a package from the post office.

What is it? I asked.

“Oh, it’s probably the tattoo cream I ordered,” she said, matter of factly.

Tattoo cream!!?? The mind boggles. Do you just apply the cream to your skin and within a week a tattoo of a heart with an arrow through it appears?

“What,” I asked her, “Is tattoo cream and why do you want it? You hate tattoos.”

Turns out it’s a cream that you apply before you get a tattoo to numb the pain of getting pricked with a tattoo needle.

My wife wasn’t going to get a tattoo, it was part of her latest beauty regime.

Apparently, you can make yourself look younger by puncturing hundreds of holes in your skin with needles. She showed my the device she’d bought.

It’s a hand-held roller covering in hundreds of needles. It’s like a miniature garden aerator, but for the face!

Of course, it’s not called a face aerator, but something far more beautified: The Roll and Restore Dermaroller Skin Rejuvenating Kit.

You roll it over your face and it fills it full of holes. Or, as the blurb provided says, “creates thousands of tiny contact points that encourages the body to create a healing process for rejuvenated, smoother and younger looking skin.”

A roller with razor sharp spikes is less Laboratoire Garnier, more Hellraiser.

She topped that purchase up with a lip plumping gloss! “Within a week,” she said, “I should have bigger lips.”

Son number one, a keen boxer, said he could plump her lips up much quicker by putting his gloves and giving her a job or two in the kisser.

When I saw the cost of these cosmetic devices, there was only one response.

“Get to the back of the queue son.”