Today I bedazzled my bowl of porridge with a few sprinkles of coconut and a drizzle of honey. My morning bowl of gruel may as well be tasty.

 I made my way to a seat. I sat opposite a colleague who had just returned from a several week holiday, back to her home country.

 I asked ‘How was your trip?’

 ‘It was lovely – I went to the seaside for a while.’

 ‘Nice, and did you go visit your family?’

 ‘No they came to visit me.’

 I glanced at her for the first time that day – I’d been fussing with putting butter on my toast and brewing my bucket of tea, so I had been distracted while making this small talk up until this point. If the truth be told I didn’t genuinely care how the holiday was, or what she’d been up to, aside from a vague hope that she’d enjoyed herself. I wasn’t looking for details though.

 I looked again. Her face looked …  different. Her upper lip looked – shall we say – plumper. This was not some new lipstick though – the contour of that part of her face had been altered.

I didn’t want to stare. Perhaps she thought that this facial refinement was subtle looking. Discreet. That no-one would notice.

 Well I didn’t want to disavow her of that notion.

I started babbling inane chitchat, to keep the conversation flowing while pondering some theories.

Maybe it was some dental work? But no – her teeth looked the exact same. In any case braces don’t cause a swelling of the upper lip.

Nor do they erase the philtrum from a face. (For those who are curious, the philtrum is the groove that runs from your nose to your top lip – I did not know the name for this until five minutes go, when I googled it. As you do, when you notice that someone has had it erased from their face). The new skin surface looked waxy, shiny and plastic

I wanted to ask ‘Did you have some work done on your face while you were on holiday?’ But I don’t know the social etiquette when it comes to plastic surgery. Is it OK to ask bluntly about surgical cosmetic procedures when you notice them? Or is it more a case that you wait until they acknowledge it themselves? And if they don’t acknowledge it do you just pretend they look the same as they always did, and tell everyone how they must be on some new diet and exercise regime that causes major weight loss – specifically in the nasal area?

 I erred on the side of caution and said nothing. If it was a close friend I’d certainly ask. But a colleague? May her new trout pout is a secret? Maybe it’s not ?  It’s entirely her own business what she does with her face though. If she wants to revitalise her appearance with some elective surgery, then that’s nobody’s business but her own.

 And if I want to speculate about the surgical procedures she’s undergone, and what she said to her family when they visited her, as she recuperated in a hotel close to the clinic, then that’s nobody’s business but mine.

 I finished my breakfast. I returned to my desk to google ‘space between nose and lip.’