IT'S always National Something-or-Other Week. Public relations companies pull out all the stops on behalf of their clients, who either want to sell us something or tell us something.

National Smile Week (toothpaste manufacturers?), National Tie Week (who wears a tie these days unless they have to at work?), National Elf Week (promoting the sales of garden gnomes? No, I made that one up).

My favourite, though, was National Spot Week, the organisers of which a few years ago, if I remember their mission statement correctly, said their aim was to make life a little easier for the estimated two or three million victims of acne who are reckoned to be "suffering in silence" with their affliction.

I am far from convinced that anyone with spots suffers in silence.

The most common method of suffering is the teenage one - loudly and angrily, while facing a mirror - and it goes along the lines of: "OH NO!! Look at the state of that! And I'm supposed to be going to a party tonight! It's just not fair!"

When I was at this vulnerable age, the sudden appearance of a really nasty spot, shortly before any important event, led me to the conclusion that the outbreak was closely linked to stress.

This is a fair enough piece of clinical deduction, but it doesn't actually solve the problem which - when Life felt like playing a particularly savage trick on me - came down to the fact that an unpleasant and painful red volcano had erupted right on the end of my nose.

The doctor was no help at all. In his best patronising voice he would inform me that this sort of thing happened to teenagers (it certainly didn't because lots of my friends, usually the good looking, talented ones, went all through puberty without so much as a blemish appearing on their face).

He would send me away with a prescription for a tube of cream, stuff that had the consistency of sand mixed with Brylcreem. It closely resembled the grinding paste I used to buy to bed down the valves in my car.

Putting this stuff on the face was extremely painful and was certainly not an example of suffering in silence. It also had absolutely no beneficial effect, as far as the spots were concerned, and merely left my face with a most unnatural red glow, rather as if I'd been done over with coarse sandpaper.

When things got really bad, I even tried a smear of brown make-up nicked from my mother's dressing table. Better a brown splodge on your face than an angry red one, but I gave up this poor method of disguise one day when my girlfriend's little niece of about eight or nine looked at me closely and ran back to her mum, yelling excitedly: "That man's wearing make-up!"

Because I ate far too much fried bread, chips and chocolate as a teenager, it was pointless moaning to my mum about how unfair I thought it was to be plagued like this. "It's your own fault... just look at what you eat," she'd say.

Which is roughly what would pass through my mind when I saw one of our sons, in their teenage years, spreading salad cream on bread and putting it in the microwave.

It would not only smell vile but it would look to me like the perfect raw material for spot production.

In fact, the idea that spots are caused by diet is now thought to be a myth. It's a myth that eight-out-of-10 people believe but it's still a myth.

Acne is caused by oils that the body can over-produce when the hormone balance is disturbed and the solution, as it is with most disorders these days, is a course of antibiotics.

It's a lot easier than all those horrid hours spent in front of the bathroom mirror, prodding and squeezing and wiping and cursing, and cursing...