Last week, I had a little chat with a cosmetic surgeon. Yes, me - Mr. 'No-Meat, No-Coffee, No-Car' Chinn - is actually pondering the scalpel. Maybe not right now (the crow's feet are fleeting, the creeping love-handles of doom not too entrenched), but it's always good to be realistic about one's future, right?

For a full body overhaul (eyes, nose, face, butt, gut, and I'm factoring a few veins and a hip replacement into the estimate for good measure), the charming Doctor Cutter (no, seriously) reckons I need to save about £26k to cover it. Not cheap. But then, that's but fraction of what the new Whitechapel, which relaunches on Sunday, has spent on its facelift.

Two years after the century-old East London gallery's refurb began, and it's almost doubled in size, grown a smattering of slick studios and reading rooms, a vast and stunning new interior, and in a stroke of artistic justice gained a rare tapestry of Picasso's infamous Guernica - which it once showed the original of back in 1939.

Beside that £13.5 million pricetag (that's 500 full Addie overhauls, for the record), the cost for maintaining my own aesthetic quality for all eternity seems pretty reasonable, actually.