If you’re sick, modesty is a luxury you cannot afford, writes ALEXANDRA SHULMAN

It’s hard to believe mammograms are currently undertaken only by female health workers, rather than simply by anyone – man or woman – with the right qualifications.

Thankfully, the Society of Radiographers is calling for a change in policy.

This shouldn’t be driven by the growing backlog of these vital checks, but by common sense.

Anyone who objects to a man giving them a mammogram clearly hasn’t had breast cancer. Or indeed any serious illness.

It’s not uncommon to feel squeamish about showing your body to medics. But that way of thinking is for amateurs.

When you are seriously ill, you simply don’t care.

As I lay in the hospital ward after my colon cancer diagnosis, my body was there for anybody who wished – male or female, young or old – to prod and peer at throughout the day.

Any trace of modesty or dignity, or the usual feelings about the appearance of my body, had become irrelevant. 

I consciously decided it didn’t matter who looked at me or how I looked.

The idea of being uncomfortable with having a male nurse squishing your breasts into an X-ray machine is frankly laughable when you consider what nurses, consultants and GPs are used to seeing when treating patients.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was examined and then operated on by a male surgeon. 

My colon cancer was also dealt with by a male surgeon, who has seen my entire body exposed on scans.

 It hardly made sense to be embarrassed when he and all the other doctors involved were staring at my naked abdomen while I was conscious.

Illness is a humbling experience, no respecter of social status (as clearly evidenced by the King’s cancer) or personal emotions. 

The best you can do is hope that anybody, of any gender, knows what they are doing – and just let them get on with handling whichever part of your body they need to.

Kicking up a storm over weather alerts

I’ve just returned from a trip to Louisiana. Along with alligators, gumbo and crayfish there was the unnerving experience of frequent dangerous weather warnings.

I’m a weather fanatic and enjoy nothing more than trawling through weather apps on my phone. 

As soon as I cross the Atlantic, I’m glued to the TV weather channel, hugely enjoying the dramatic tone of the announcers tracking some storm or other over the Great Plains.

But even so, the siren weather alerts that screeched through the mobile phone network every day in Louisiana were quite discombobulating.

Louisiana is essentially one big swamp, and flooding is rampant. Its climate means thunderstorms and hurricanes are fairly common, too.

So it’s perhaps unsurprising they err on the side of caution when it comes to warning locals of the perils coming their way. 

However, being woken at 3am with a terrifying alert announcing ‘This is a dangerous and life-threatening situation, do not attempt to travel’ did severely test my enjoyment of American weather news.

It’s also left me a little more tolerant of the hyped-up storm warnings we get over here when a relatively mild wind is blowing. 

At least they don’t scream at you in the middle of the night.

My Southern soul doesn’t travel well

Sadly, there are some words that don’t travel. 

I’ve come home from the Deep South in love with the term ‘y’all’, widely used to refer either to a single person or a group.

‘How y’all doing?’ has a much nicer ring than our ‘How are you?’

I long to adopt it, but I’ve tried it out in the privacy of the bedroom, and in a middle-class London accent it just sounds ridiculous. 

Like Hawaiian shirts, I’ve concluded it’s best left where it came from.

An AI supermodel is strutting this way

When is a fashion model not a person but an invention of AI? Any day now, it appears.

Although digital ‘avatars’ are already used in fashion imagery, it’s not yet the case that a real model’s image can be replicated artificially – at least, not legally.

But that day is coming. 

Although it’ll be a while before we see an artificial Gigi Hadid or Kendall Jenner, at the lower end of the food chain this is already happening, with model agencies selling image rights of their lesser-known clients for AI use.

Musicians and writers are already fighting back against their work being used by AI without payment or consent.

Ripping off a famous model’s image for free will never be acceptable, but fashion photography is expensive and it’s easy to see how tempting it would be for brands and magazines to use AI-generated advertising campaigns and shoots.

No flights, no studios, no hotel bills and quite possibly no photographer. Sad and terrifying. But not unimaginable.

When money talks – a tale of two mags

That old chestnut ‘If you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there’ came to mind during my visit to The Face magazine exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

I certainly was there in the Eighties and remember those years well. 

But my Eighties wasn’t the one portrayed in the pages of The Face, which was the new kid in town and a riot of street style and multiculturalism.

I was working on Tatler, a grande dame whose pages were filled with both the figures of a newly wealthy meritocracy and old-guard aristocracy.

The two titles reflected very different worlds, although both were terrific in their own ways.

It was also interesting to see what The Face achieved on little money compared with the extravagant budgets at big magazines.

In Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s memoir, When The Going Was Good, he recalls consulting proprietor Si Newhouse over a disputed $250,000 in a contract negotiation for photographer Annie Leibovitz. 

Newhouse concluded: ‘Oh, give it to her. We don’t want to nickel-and-dime-them.’

As they say – another time, another place.