Dr Chez Vous makes urgent house calls on a Yamaha FJR 1300. He arrives dressed in black leather, brandishing a smoking metal briefcase full of Botox^® fresh from the freezer. He’s the 24/7 emergency muscle-freezer and wrinkle-filler doctor. Within moments of arriving, he’s got you lying on the sofa, pumped full of poison. From the initial phone call to the final au revoir, the whole process can take less than two hours. He’s like the Milk Tray man, but with expensive neurotoxic proteins instead of cheap chocolate.

People think Dr Chez Vous is an urban myth, but he’s real — I should know, I have him on speed-dial. He sorted me out when I was quaking at the thought of being the oldest, tallest, most unmarried bridesmaid in all Englandshire last autumn. I envisaged me, Lurch-like, standing at the back of the bridal cluster, looking haggard and sad, and wanted something to jack up my confidence and make me feel beautiful. I wanted Botox^® — and fast, if it was going to kick in by the time the organist wheezed out the Mendelssohn.

When I made a TV show last year about the growing phenomenon of women who make themselves look pretty (and not so pretty) with the literally bloody, cutting-edge treatments found in beauty salons, I was amazed by how addictive, on many levels, the process of being jabbed into a more youthful shape was. Determined not to get any once I’d finished filming, it was only four months before I wanted more. Mentioning Dr Chez Vous to my mum, she protested: “No! You’re like a junkie.”

The word junkie describes the behaviour of the average Botox^®-loving female pretty well. Like a junkie, I got panicky when the drugs ran out. Consultations with cosmetic doctors in nice practices full of glossy mags are all well and good, but I always want Botox^® now. I tend to want it in the same way I might really want shoes or a new dress. I really want it then and there — if I wait, the urge or insecurity passes. This is why Dr Chez Vous makes a killing. He comes on demand. And he delivers. Dr CV is a highly reputable cosmetic doctor known as Dr No in Paris, because he is très conservatif et sophistiqué with his needlework.

Botox^® is expensive, especially if you’re going to have someone artistic do a nice “has she or hasn’t she” job and not just freeze your face so you look like a startled blow-up doll. A bit of Botox^® by Dr CV starts at £180, plus £10 for petrol and parking. Like a junkie, there is a bit of a scrabble getting the money together to pay. I saw a woman wearing a T-shirt the other day that read “Will f*** for coke”. I gave her a pitying look; my T-shirt would declare “Will f*** for 100 units of botulinum toxin”.

The economic downturn hasn’t given the pharmaceutical companies that make rejuvenating injectibles the willies: American advertising expenditure on injectible favourites such as Botox^®, Restylane and Juvéderm is up nearly 20%, and on both sides of the Atlantic usage is increasing. It costs a doctor about £2.50 to buy one unit of Botox^®, and if you are a deserving case — someone with cerebral palsy or an excessive sweating problem — you can get it on the NHS. However, if your only symptom is wrinkles, he will charge you £10 or more per unit. And a unit doesn’t go terribly far.

“So, Dr Chez Vous,” I say, as he zips himself back into his leathers and prepares to dash to another urgent house call, “when I get to know you better, will you become Dr Chez Toi?” Despite my red, sore face and fresh puncture marks, I was flirting — warming him up for a discount.

A friend, who looks 34 but is in fact a 44-year-old single mother of two thumping teenagers, says she gets her sugar daddy to pay for her Botox^®. I was shocked — not by the sugar daddy, I just never knew she was so old. The young and vulnerable frequently get into drugs and booze by copying an older, influential figure. It’s not much different with Botox^®. We look to our big sisters, be they red-carpet icons or fresh-faced older friends, and often, sad but true, they are users of injectible treatments.

Most of my good friends can and do frown on Botox^®, so I’ve made a few new ones who do not — indeed, cannot — frown at all. These are my drug buddies, and we swap doctors’ numbers and discuss the various tricks that get the price of a fix down. Among these girls, using syringes in a beauty regime has been normalised.

It’s like giving cocaine to your vanity — one expensive hit of Botox^® will make you feel king of the world, then it will furiously feed your insecurities as it wears off, waiting for that moment, four or so months later, when your body has metabolised the paralytic agent and your face, literally, drops back to normal — midnight hour for the Botox Cinderella.

When, several times a day, I peer in the mirror, watching my face slowly dropping back to its usual Deputy Dawg expression, I think: “I should give up this stuff, it isn’t making me happy.” But then there are these jabs in the chin muscles that you can have to turn up the corners of a miserable mouth.

I can look happy again — for a few months. Then the whole process starts once more.

Dr Chez Vous; 020 7221 2248