Why I'm finally ready to wear a bikini at 53: Inspired by 59-year-old Marie Helvin, LIZ JONES sheds her insecurities and her sarong - without the aid of an airbrush

Hand on heart (and it’s quite easy to find my heart as I have no bust at all), I have never paraded around in a bikini.
OK, I bought a pink Accessorize string bikini for a mini-break in Cap D’Antibes last month, but I wore a tracksuit until the moment I lay back on a sun-lounger and didn’t sit up in my two-piece, let alone walk around in it, to spare members of the public a view of my sagging, cellulite-riddled, 53-year-old rear.
So why do I, someone who has never been content with her body, now find myself posing in a bikini for a Daily Mail photographer?

Look, no airbrush! Liz Jones, left, in the Isme bikini modelled by Marie Helvin, right, last week - and neither women benefited from retouching or Photoshop of any sort

And not just any bikini, but the one worn for a modelling assignment last week by 1970s supermodel Marie Helvin who, despite being almost 60, is still a long-limbed, bronzed goddess. Worse, I have agreed for the photos to be published entirely unadulterated and unairbrushed.
But this experiment is not just about age and that old chestnut: can you wear a bikini if you’re over 50? (Actually, my buttocks do resemble an old, peeled chestnut — white, with rivulets.) It’s also about being happy in your own skin, which I have never been.
As a teenager I wore a thick towelling top and jeans on the beach. In my 20s and 30s I hid behind kaftans, wraps, windbreakers and trees.