Class Holes

As Labour apparently gears up to fight the most hypocritical and ridiculous class war in the history of humankind versus Cameron's Tory Toffs - a quick question to the audience en masse.

Is there really such a thing as 'class' these days - and if so, does anyone really give a flying fairy about it?

Yes, I know damn well there's massive inequality between rich and poor - but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the subtle intricacies of the fabled English class system, as constantly attacked by the great John Prescott - a man who had not so much a chip on his shoulder as a fair-sized branch of Harry Ramsden's.

I'm talking class as opposed to money. The sort of 'class' where the largest lottery win of all time will not move you one single fraction of an inch any further up the scale. The sort of 'class' whereby Francis Fulford would be considered infinitely and uncategorically the superior of Katie Price - irrespective of the fact that their bank balances tell a very different story.

To me, the whole concept of non-money-related 'class' looks rather quaint, wistful and pathetic - a frail, lacy remnant of a bygone age that now seems to come from a totally different planet. Gentler. Slower. More trusting. More polite.

It has the infinitely fragile gentility of a carefully-pressed flower in a Victorian book - wildly, insanely, outrageously out of place in a brutal world of tattoos and road rage and Heat magazine.

Class is Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire.

It's Tara in Gone With The Wind.

It's a concept which inhaled its last rattling, wheezing gasp at some point in the early 1960s. Then lurched on, rotting, undead yet possessed of a certain macabre vitality, before finally being smashed through by the silver bullet of Thatcher's Britain - and collapsing to the ground a la Night Of The Living Dead.

Buried with a stake through its heart under a Porsche garage in London Docklands.

Referring to class today is like referring to the video recorder or the discotheque.

There's no surer way of proving yourself to be a sort of human Betamax.

My own mother (whose circumstances were less upper crust, more the crust on its uppers) retained, even in the depths of penury, jumble-sale-bought clothes and bed-and-breakfast accommodation, a morbid awareness of all this stuff. It seemed to have been hard-wired into her by a solidly upper-middle-class elocution-classes-and-pony-clubs Fifties childhood. Consequently, I grew up being taught that Barbie was common (Sindy was OK). ITV was common (BBC was OK). 'Toilet' was common ('loo' was okay). Hell, even 'lounge' was common (apparently the mot juste was 'sitting room'.)

Oh, and word to the wise, From this early indoctrination, I can tell you uncategorically that the second syllable in 'garage' ought to rhyme with 'British Raj'. Rhyme it with 'ridge', and it's common.

But even at the tender age of six or seven, I could see that all of this was a 24-carat crock of shite.

Already, even then - and we're talking mid-80s - all this malarkey was about as culturally relevant as the Mitford girls.

Nobody I'd ever met gave a rat's fanny how you pronounced the word 'garage' - so long as you had a brand new BMW sitting inside the bugger.

Since then, society has carried on in the same direction - only more aggressively, more charmlessly and more quickly. Flicking peremptory one-fingered salutes and honking its deafening horn at anything slow or foolish enough to get in its way .

Take the controversially-debated Eton. The self-styled class warriors of New Ideas Urgently Needed Or We're Going To Lose The Next Election By A Landslide Labour may claim that its noble playing fields are the exclusive preserve of hated 'toffs.' The entitled descendants of old English aristocracy, pink and smug with centuries of inherited privilege and power and knowing how to pronounce the word 'Belvoir.'

However, in today's brave new world, the vast majority of its inmates are actually descended from dodgy self-made Russian billionaires, topless models and premiership footballers - none of whom would know a fish knife from a Stanley knife, or a correctly-written thank-you letter from a box of frogs.

The Francis Fulfords of this world can't afford the fucking fees.

I think it's a shame in a way. Hindsight and heritage nostalgia notwithstanding, there was something rather sweet and archaic about the old class system, as there always is about Things That Money Genuinely And Truly Can't Buy (an increasingly short list that currently contains two items - 'health' and 'fashion sense.' 'Peerages', 'bigger tits', 'respect' and 'peace of mind' all got crossed off the list yonks ago.)

Anyway, to any random Labour politicians who happen to be reading - please, please stop attacking the Tories on this archaic stuff.

It's like you're turning up to the OK Corral with a fifteenth century musket on loan from the Smithsonian Museum.

It's fucking embarrassing.

Show some class.

J x

Children Of The Damned

It just cracks me up when you get the earnest hand-wringing free-range Guardianista parents
coming out with this sort of thing.

As if, left to their own devices, children are sweet, open-minded, nonjudgemental little critters, only too keen to embrace nontraditional gender roles and learn more about alternative lifestyles.

And it's only society and bad parenting that instills such nasty adult things as prejudice and gender stereotypes into their innocent little minds.

The hilarious thing is that they couldn't be more wrong if they were a toy mouse that sounds like it's singing 'paedophile.'

Left to their own devices, kids are instinctively more reactionary than old Colonel Fubster and his pals in the Wankington-on-Sea Neighbourhood Watch.

And they come ready-equipped with every sexual, social and racial prejudice in the book -apparently installed as their default factory settings.

Assuming that human nature hasn't changed completely in the last twenty years - and I'm damn sure it hasn't - any primary school playground in the world will show you that children automatically perpetrate a sort of cast-iron, no-exceptions gender-based apartheid system.

The girls play in one area (daisy chain manufacture, skipping games, elaborately Machiavellian
character assassinations and psychological germ warfare) - while the boys' football and general-rough-play games take place in another.

And you could organise a major national music festival in the vast, yawning space in between the two groups.

It's more rigidly segregated than Johannesburg in the Forties - and nobody sets up and mans the barriers but the kids themselves.

Any girl attempting to join the boys on the football field will be treated like an orthodox rabbi applying to join the Gestapo.

As for any boy who attempts to express his feminine side by joining in with the girls' skipping games - well, on the positive side, he can rest assured that he'll be a schoolyard legend for the rest of his days.

Right up to the point where he hangs himself in his bedroom aged nine and a half.

However earnestly their well-meaning, politically-correct, Amnesty-subscribing parents try and change this, kids are - by very nature - more conventional and more passionately in love with the accepted middle-England status quo than Enid Blyton. In Kidworld and playground games, the mummy does the hoovering and makes the dinner, the daddy goes off to work in the morning and fixes the car, and ne'er the twain shall meet.

In fact, children's untaught, instinctive mummy-and-daddy games reflect a society that the average Fifties housewife in Tunbridge Wells would have considered to be a little cliched and sexist.

Among primary-school-aged children's other charming qualities, there's also alarming racism and xenophobia, and a vehement - nay obsessive - dislike for anything remotely unusual, exotic or simply 'weird. Eeeeew.'

Anyone introducing children to world cuisine or unfamiliar forms of music will quickly realise what they're up against.

All small children are, to a greater or lesser extent, Jim Davidson with a Transformers lunchbox.

Of course, luckily, children's viciously Darwinistic right-wing tendencies don't carry over into the field of socio-economic diversity. Because if there's a child in their class who comes from a more deprived background than the majority - whether they're on free dinners, or are living with their family in a B and B - you can rest assured that the other kids will go out of their way to minimise any perceived stigma or humiliation, instinctively embracing the less fortunate child as an equal.

*Snork*

Kidding.

Oh, and I haven't even started on prepubescent homophobia yet. It doesn't matter if little Zachary comes from the most achingly right-on home this side of the Modern Parents. The second he sets foot in that playground, he'll turn into a four foot tall Richard Littlejohn.

Like it says in Hairspray, 'you can't stop the river as it rushes to the sea.'

Well, with today's scientific advances, you may in fact be able to.

But you sure as hell can't stop an eight-year-old boy perceiving 'gay' as an unforgivable term of abuse - whether applied to a classmate, a bike or his own unsatisfactory packed lunch.

Far from being naturally sweet open-minded friendly little hippies, which only the gradual pressure of society prevents from creating a future Utopia, kids are naturally spiteful, bigoted, convention-obsessed, horrible little fascists - and it's only the gradual pressure of society that prevents them from creating a future Nazi Germany.

'I believe the children are our future.'

What a terrifying thought.

Thank God they have to grow up a bit before they can go into politics...

J x

Look Who's Squawking

Just to clarify, I'm still very happy with my other half. And he's officially exempt from everything I'm about to say here.

But it occurs to me that, via some sort of weird psychological transferancey projectiony thingy, men always seem to accuse women of the very failings, ridiculous behaviour patterns and character flaws that they're most spectacularly guilty of themselves.

And I thought I'd make a quick list of the most obvious...


Juliette's Guide To The Critical Things That Men Say About Women (Which Men Are Actually Far More Guilty Of Themselves)


1 - Women Are Obsessed With Social One-Upmanship And What Other People Think

Men say bitterly that women are all about jockeying for social status, peer envy and impressing their friends. That they'll only be attracted to men if they know that other women
want them - because their likes and dislikes are totally dependent on the social approval of their peer group.

The irony of men saying this about women is nothing short of staggering.

It's like Dawn French accusing Nigella Lawson of having a fat arse.

Well known fact - porn is what men actually want sexually in private, alone with themselves, and with all the friend-impressing social-status stuff stripped away. And amateur porn is hugely, hugely popular. BBWs, horny grannies, stretchmarked housewives and all. So if men's hard-ons were in any way dependent on devastating female beauty, a good 80% of modern porn wouldn't exist. There'd be no reason for it to exist. If it don't sell, they don't make it.

Another well known fact - the vast majority of super hot people of both sexes notoriously suck in bed. Turning up there like Paris Hilton at a newly opened provincial nightclub - sure that their very silent, passive, unmoving presence should be greeted by rapturous disbelieving fall-down-on-one's-knees-and-offer-thanks-to-God tearful gratitude.

Consequently, the one and only reason why men want a woman who's physically above a 6 or a 7 is to impress their equally dickish friends. And since 'scoring' an 8, 9 or 10 is the life mission of a lot of guys, one can only infer that impressing said dickish friends ranks somewhere between breathing and eating on their list of priorities.

Men may say this isn't so, and may even manage to fool themselves on the subject - but this is self-evidently complete and utter bollocks. They can insist that they want their 9.5 purely for personal and private sexual gratification, and that they wouldn't care less if their friends didn't know they were sleeping with her, But this is one of those statements which can only be taken with a fair-sized Siberian salt mine and a planet-sized cry of 'yeah, right.'

I have a personal theory that a lot of men's fantasy woman would be a Barbie doll that turned into a Playstation whenever their mates weren't looking.


2 - Women Are Irrational And Illogical And Half Of Their Desires Directly Contradict The Other Half.

Unlike men, who want a woman who won't play manipulative games and is frank about her sexual desires and will do everything they want in bed on the very first date. Except, obviously, this makes her a worthless fuck-and-chuck whore who they'll never want to see again - and if she's got a sexual history of more than two or three guys, she's a slut. But at the same time, she has to be drop-dead stunning, in the ultra-high-impact way of a high-class lap dancer or Victoria's Secret model - and she has to love sex when it's with them, as a low libido is also a deal breaker.

So in fact, they're looking for a sexually ignorant virgin who despite her uber-high-visibility hottest-woman-in-the-room beauty and ragingly high sex drive has never before been propositioned by anyone remotely attractive - and ideally has never seen another man's penis. But still gives great blow jobs. And does anal. Except this makes her a slut, too. Oh dear.


3 - Women Have No Loyalty And Are Always Looking For The Bigger Better Deal

Ooh, aren't women horrible. Bitchy and fickle and untrustworthy, with shallow emotions and selfish motivations, and the ability to lose interest in their other half in the blink of an eye when a better alternative comes along. Whereas men, with their superior moral character, are defined by deep and constant emotional connections - their loyalty and love is given for life, faithful as that of a devoted St Bernard.

'Don't go changing to try to please me. I love you just the way you are.'

As sang Billy Joel to his beloved wife.

Right before he, um, dumped the beloved wife in question for a blonde supermodel half his age.

Loyal as the day is long, that's men for you.


4 - Women are Gullible and Dumb

Okay, a quick question.

Why aren't there any strip clubs aimed at straight women?

Yes, I know about the Chippendales and the Dreamboys and all that jazz. But that's a big girls-night-out thing. An all-dressed-up, night-on-the-town, let's-get-pissed-together-and-pinch-the-male-stripper's-bum-and-laugh-about-it-in-the-taxi-home female-bonding experience.

You will never, ever get a female-aimed version of Spearmint Rhino or Secrets.

A club where women arrive alone and sit alone in an increasing puddle of drool, getting one single guy to do dance after dance after dance for them - then paying him to sit down with an insanely overpriced bottle of champagne and pestering him to meet them outside work.

Because women would know damn well that the dancers think they're beyond pathetic - and regard them much as bartenders regard the sad old lush who mumbles to himself in the corner of the pub and is always waiting outside the locked doors when they open up in the afternoon.

This is in direct contrast to men, who will believe they've made a genuine emotional and romantic hit with seventeen-year-old Tawnee in the Pink Pussy Club. Hey, she really liked me. She asked me to come back tomorrow night, and said she really wants to see me again. And she's not like the others. She's only doing it to put herself through college, and I know that for a fact because she told me.

Equally, you will never get women looking for serious life partners in third world countries where the average annual income is about twenty-five quid, life is cheaper than a pair of socks and people do whatever the hell they have to in order to survive.

Then getting all shocked and devastated and vengeful when it turns out that, shock horror, the Thai bar girl young enough to be their great-granddaughter has - drum roll - just been using them for money all along, and extraordinarily enough never genuinely loved them. And her granny didn't actually need that life-saving £20,000 operation after all.

Who'd a thunk it?

Well, that's all the things I can think of off the top of my head.

Hmmm, wonder if I've missed any out...

J x

Haters of Roissy 5 : Guilty Pleasures

Oh, man.

I shouldn't like this sort of behaviour.

It's indefensible. It's sick. It's cruel. It's wrong.

It's probably illegal.

So why has it enhanced my morning in the same small-but-undeniable way as finding an unaccompanied five pound note fluttering along the pavement?

J x

Festive Spirits

'Merry Christmas, Bob Cratchit! Here's five guineas for your Christmas dinner - and don't worry about coming in to work till the twenty-eighth!'

'Oh thank you, Mr Scrooge! Merry Christmas to you too, sir!'

Ebenezer Scrooge left his office and started walking down the picturesque snowbound streets, whistling Jingle Bells.

God, he loved Christmas.

Pausing only to stop off at Asda for some emergency supplies of sugared almonds and chocolate liquers - and throw coins into the hat of some rosy-cheeked carol singers - he walked back home.
Then he froze in his tracks. For, as he unlocked his front door, the knocker suddenly turned into a ghastly and horrible face. The terrifying likeness of Bruce Forsyth, presenting a Christmas Come Dancing Festive Special.

But when Scrooge looked again, it was an ordinary knocker once more.

He went in, got himself a mince pie and a glass of Bailey's, and sat down in front of the fire. Then a terrible moaning noise filled the room, and a ghostly spectral figure floated into the room, rattling the chains that it was wrapped up in.

'Who are you?' Scrooge cried in terror.

'It is I, your old partner, Jacob Marley. Don't you remember? We did karaoke together at the Christmas party every year, before I was killed by a malfunctioning Christmas cracker.'

'But what are those chains you wear?'

'I wear the chains I forged in life. Behold, Ebenezer Scrooge, these storecards from Toys R Us - puchased in order to acquire toys that the ungrateful little bastards had either broken or forgotten about by New Year's Day. Behold these boxes of sugared almonds, which absolutely everyone hates, and are destined to moulder away at the back of a cupboard until somebody notices them and chucks them out. Beware, Scrooge, lest my fate become yours.'

Looking out of the window with terrified eyes, Scrooge beheld a host of translucent, tormented spirits floating about in the night air. One was attempting to jam a large, lopsided and moulting pine tree into a pot. Another was wailing forlornly over a blackened turkey, which it held before it in skeletal hands. One was insanely running round with a jampacked supermarket trolley, shrieking that there were only three shopping days left and they still didn't have any brandy butter.

It was a sight of unearthly horror, and Scrooge shivered.

'Tonight,' Marley's ghost told him, 'you will be visited by three ghosts who will show you the error of your ways. Farewell, Scrooge.'

The spirit vanished.

Scrooge took a few deep breaths and calmed down a bit. He decided it was probably some sort of hallucination caused by digestive problems, as he'd managed to eat three times his own bodyweight in mince pies that day at work. He didn't even like mince pies. Deciding it would be a good time to go to bed, he put on his novelty Christmas pyjamas, went into his tinsel-bedecked bedroom and fell asleep.

He was woken by a spectral figure standing over his bed, which resembled a small sleepless child bothering its parents at half past midnight on Christmas Eve.

'We are going back to the Christmasses of your past,' the small figure told him.

The spirit guided him out of his bedroom window into the frozen night, and Scrooge became weightless as he touched the spirit's hand. Together they flew through the dark night air, before landing in front of a house that glittered and sparkled with Christmas lights and decorations.

'Spirit - this is the house I grew up in!' Scrooge exclaimed delightedly.

'Behold your past Christmasses,' the sprit replied.

They both stood at the window and looked in. Scrooge saw his ten year old self and his sister glumly sitting in front of the telly, where the Queen's speech was droning on interminably. Across the room, an old lady sat snoring like a log cutter, with an empty bottle of Irish Mist beside her hand.

'I'd forgotten about that,' Scrooge said, frowning. 'Nan always made us watch that crap whenever she came round for Christmas Day.'

He surveyed the familiar scene for long seconds. He and his sister hissing to their parents that they were missing the Indiana Jones movie on ITV. Their parents hissing back at them to stop being a nuisance, Nan might wake up and hear.

'Senile ratbag,' Scrooge said quietly. 'And she smelt of piss.'

The childlike spirit took his hand, and they flew off again. Suddenly, they were looking through another frosty window, at a large and crowded office party. A fat red-faced man was dancing a jig on a table top, waving a large jug of mead in one hand. At the sight, Scrooge was unable to stop himself from crying aloud, in sudden recognition of his former employer.

'Old Fezziwig, bless my soul! As I live and breathe, it's old Fezziwig!'

He paused, surveying the scene for long seconds before speaking again.

'Christ. he was an embarrassing old wanker.'

His frown deepened.

'Died of liver disease two years later, if memory serves.'

The pallid spirit took him back to bed, where he slept. Then he was woken up by a noise outside his bedroom door. Scrooge stepped out to find the room beyond was transformed. The floor was covered in torn wrapping paper and discarded bits of satsuma peel and the packaging from various plastic toys, along with treacherous roller skates and spiky little action figures. Scrooge felt a sharp stabbing pain in his foot and cried out.

'Sorry about that,' a loud booming voice told him. 'It's those bloody pine needles. Get stuck in the carpet, you know. Hoovered up only this morning.'

Scrooge looked up at a huge figure dressed as Santa, with a wonky cotton wool beard, bleary eyes and a nose as red as a strawberry. The pissed-looking giant swayed on his feet, waving a huge bottle of Warninks advocaat.

'I am the ghost of Christmas Present,' the spirit announced, and then was sick on the floor.

The spirit transported him to a small, crowded house he recognised as belonging to Bob Cratchit. Mrs Cratchit was in the kitchen, staring at a giant turkey and wondering how the hell she was supposed to fit the damn thing in the oven. Bob and the children were staring blankly at Strictly The Celebrity X Factor's Got Talent On Ice, Get Me Out Of Here - Christmas Special. All apart from Tiny Tim, who was tugging ferociously at his father's sleeve, saying he wanted the Megatron and Optimus Prime and the Transformers mothership, and if he didn't get them tomorrow morning he was going to scream and scream until he was sick.

The sight struck sudden terror into Scrooge's heart. Unable to prevent himself from speaking, he cried aloud.

'Spirit, tell me - I implore thee! Will Tiny Tim get his arse smacked for being such a spoilt, annoying little twat?'

The spirit shook its head slowly.

'I see an obnoxious little brat running about at half past four on a Christmas morning. I see Optimus Prime and the Megatron under the tree, unwrapped greedily and with no thanks whatsoever. I see a huge tantrum because Mrs Cratchit didn't get the right batteries for the Transformers mothership, so the lights won't light up. I see his parents running up to his bedroom to placate him, and promise him they'll get him the right batteries as soon as the shops are open on Boxing Day - instead of giving Tiny Tim the sore arse he so richly deserves.'

'No!' Scrooge howled. ' Spirit, tell me it is not so!'

But the spirit stared at him sadly and led him back to his room, where he fell back into tormented dreams.

When Scrooge awoke, there was a dark figure standing beside his bed, skeletal, menacing and enigmatic in a black-cowled robe.

'Are you the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come?' Scrooge asked it breathlessly.

The shape said nothing. He had no choice but to follow the cowled and spectral being down the stairs and into the kitchen. Its bony, skeletal hand beckoned towards the open larder door.

Within, Scrooge beheld an extraordinary and terrifying sight. The shelves were packed solid - yet there was nothing that any normal person would even think about eating. There was a half eaten cold turkey, and some flat, pallid and depressed-looking mince pies. There was a big thick wodge of smoked salmon that had been half-price in Marks, and suddenly looked completely uninviting as nobody had bought any lemons to go with it. The spirit's bony finger drew Scrooge closer, and beckoned to words on the smoked salmon's packaging.

USE BY - DEC 26TH

A shiver ran down Scrooge's spine. There was some really weird shit like duck liver pate and champagne flavoured marmalade, cold stuffing and cold roast potatoes, and a big fuck-off lump of half-eaten Stilton. There was a giant mountain of nuts that made you lose the will to live just to look at them, sugared almonds and candied fruits, and indescribably sickly chocolate liqueurs. Most terrible of all, a full bottle of Warninks Advocaat, the lumpy yellow fat looking like it had been sucked out of somebody's arse during routine liposuction.

A terrible sickness sank into Scrooge's heart.

The spirit led him out of the house and into the dark night. They proceeded into a desolate winter graveyard, the scene icy cold and forbidding. As if hypnotised, Scrooge walked to the gravestone that the figure pointed to. And the words stared back at him, cold and uncompromising.


EBENEZER SCROOGE

DIED OF INDIGESTION ON BOXING DAY


'Spirit - please tell me,' Scrooge cried aloud. 'Are these things that will be, or things that could be? I must know, I implore thee -'

Then suddenly, Scrooge woke up. In his own bed.

He sat up and looked out of the window. As he saw the gentle morning light, he realised it was Christmas Day!

Thank the heavens, it was not too late after all!

Scrooge jumped out of bed, and began to dance a mad frenzied jig round the room.

He rushed down to the kitchen and took the huge turkey from his larder. Then he carried it over to the window, throwing it open wide. He leaned out and hailed a small boy passing by.

'Ho, my fine young fellow! Do you know the butcher on Old Miggins Lane?'

The loveable urchin stared back at him, wide-eyed.

'The one that had a turkey as big as me in the window, till some muppet with more money than sense went and bought the ruddy great thing yesterday morning?'

'That's right - well here it is, with the receipt!' Scrooge threw the turkey down to him. 'Tell the butcher I want my fucking money back, and bring it right to me. And don't delay, or I'll kick your arse square!'

Scrooge turned away from the window.

'Bah, humbug,' he said contentedly.

Then Ebenezer Scrooge went to take his decorations down.

THE END.

Cutting Remarks 2 : Dial M For Empathy

Following on from my last post, I was musing on one of its comments referring to the late Solange Magnano still being an exceptionally attractive woman at 38 - more so, in fact, than most women at 25. Ergo, in her case, the fatal butt-lift wasn't about her wanting to just be accepted or acceptable - it was about wanting to be queen bee. The hottest of the hot.

And I can see this is true. Quite clearly.

What I can't see is why this makes her story any less tragic.

Upon reflection, I'm struck by an elusive, haunting parallell with Christopher Foster - the ruined multi-millionaire businessman who killed his family and himself when he knew their five-star lifestyle was living on borrowed time.

Both tragedies, different as they are, seem to grow from the same twisted roots. Christopher Foster was used to being the richest man at the country club. Solange Magnano was used to being the most beautiful woman at the party. They could both, in their different ways, see the brutal end of this state of affairs approaching with inexorable and terrifying speed. They both took highly different measures to prevent this from happening - which, again in different ways, ended in tragedy.

And admittedly, most people, me included, won't ever have their experiences. We won't ever know what it's like to be the guy with a multi-million-pound mansion, a stable of thoroughbred horses and seven high-performance sports cars with personalised number plates gleaming on the drive. Or the woman in the room that every single straight man is staring at - overtly or otherwise - from the second she walks in to the second she walks out.

And a lot of people are unable - or unwilling - to bridge the vast yawning canyon dug by jealousy, resentment and simple alienation.

'Entitled, spoilt, pampered motherfuckers. Welcome to the real world, bitches. It wouldn't have killed Solange Magnano to acknowledge she wasn't the hottest woman in the room any more, never would be again - and begin the steady fade into total invisibility, watching other, younger women blithely taking all the attention and admiration that used to be hers. Any more than it would have killed Christopher Foster to shrug his shoulders as the bailiffs repossessed his Ferrari, take his daughter out of her exclusive private school and send her to the local sink estate comp, watch his wife take a cleaning job, and sign on down the local Job Centre with the rest of the penniless losers. I've got no sympathy.'

However.

There's a little thing called empathy here.

Which, judging by some of the (particularly male) comments to my last post, is rarer than rocking horse shit with a four-leaf clover stuck in it.

If you've grown accustomed to being the richest man or the most beautiful woman, it's who you are. It's your whole self-image and self-esteem, and everything you've ever had to be proud of or secure in. And facing its loss must be like facing the amputation, not of an arm or a leg, but of your entire self.

Still can't empathise?

Well, try this. Think of some of the things that you're used to having in your life, which millions of other people in this world would wildly envy you. Good health. A roof over your head. The freedom to come and go as you please. Enough to eat.

Do you take it for granted? Hell, yes.

Does it make you happy per se? Hell, no.

Would it totally devastate you if you thought you were going to lose it, or you could see it slipping away - to a point where you'd contemplate literally any course of action to stop it happening?

Answers on a postcard, please.

I still feel sad for that woman Solange Magnano. A dark sympathy which I can also bring myself to feel for the late Christopher Foster - even though, admittedly, he lost a fair few Brownie points by taking his wife and daughter with him. As one of his friends said, 'to come second place wasn't Christopher's style' - and, rightly or wrongly, I can't help thinking this was also true of Solange.

And I can't help but be reminded of a couple of lines from that haunting, savage poem by the great Dylan Thomas.

'Do not go gently into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light...'

Hey, I told you I felt uncharacteristically serious about this story.

More funny shit soon. Promise.

J x

Cutting Remarks

Okay. On a serious note.

I'm truly and genuinely appalled by how judgemental the good people of Middle England are when it comes to stuff like this.

I mean, I know that expecting sensible reactions from people reading this stupid bloody paper is a bit like expecting your cat to rescue you from a house fire. It'd be nice if it happened, but, you know, probably best not to hold your breath.

Even so, the overwhelmingly condemnatory tone of these comments goes beyond even their usual level of small-minded gittery.

A large majority seem to be implying that, at some level, women who have non-essential cosmetic surgery genuinely deserve to die - because it's their own stupid fault for dicing with death in the name of a better bum.

Well, cosmetic surgery goes wrong sometimes. A lot of things do. Parachute jumps go wrong sometimes. And mountain-climbing expeditions go wrong sometimes. Hell, getting on a damn fairground ride goes wrong sometimes.

But none of the people doing these activities, all of which are far more pointless and purposeless than cosmetic surgery, get anywhere near as much shit from the public en masse when it does go wrong.

'Well, what a pathetic idiot that mother of two small children who just got tragically killed is. I've got no sympathy for her. She should have thought of the 1 in 100,000,000 risk before she got on that apparently ultra-safe roller coaster in the first place.'

Personally, I've got nothing against cosmetic surgery. I dipped my toe in the waters of Harley Street a few years back - and finances permitting, I'd be only too happy to do so again. The only case in which I'd condemn it and consider it reckless is when people's financial desperation
hammers their common sense 20-nil, and they jet off to sunny Kazakhstan - where some self-taught surgeon with shifty eyes, no English and three fingers on one hand is offering to give them a boob job for three hundred and fifty quid.

And if you buy today, he'll chuck in a tummy tuck on the house.

Hell, he's seen it done on telly. How hard can it be?

I'd like to be a little more sympathetic, but these women really are fucking idiots.

And they have nobody to blame but their ridiculous selves if they find themselves flying back with a couple less (or indeed, a couple more) nipples than they originally flew out with.

But assuming you go somewhere reputable and follow the surgeon's instructions - so you're not actually hanging out the welcome mats for trouble, putting trouble's favourite foods in the fridge, and calling all trouble's old school mates to organise a surprise party - I can't see for the life of me why the very minimal risk is seen as deserved punishment when something goes wrong.

And why, if I'd died during my own op (assuming my nearest and dearest had released some bloody good and preferably scantily-clad photos to the press - which makes all the difference between the front page of the Daily Mail and page thirty-five of the Wilmington-on-Sea Evening Spaz) I'd also have had these self-same judgemental, ignorant and self-righteous tosstards going all Old Testament on my dead ass.

Thundering down from the heavens about vanity and shallowness and just deserts.

But while I hate to break it to these people, there's another little factor at work here. And it goes far beyond individual vanity and shallowness.

A funny little thing called 'society.'

I can't speak for all women who opt for surgery, and I don't claim to. But personally, if I was given the opportunity to emigrate to a nice non-vain non-shallow world where women were judged, not on the youthfulness of their skin, but on the content of their character, you could bet your brand new half-built Dubai hotel that I'd be filling in the ex-pat papers before the day was out.

Unfortunately, moving worlds is not an option.

In common with the rest of us Earthling women, I'm stuck in this shitty one, which is full of shallow people, physical judgement and a rampaging cult of youth-worship that's scarier than anything the Nazis ever invented.

And while I'm aware that slagging off the Daily Mail is like shooting very large slow right-wing fish in a very small transparent right-wing barrel, the unconscious irony of their comments is nothing short of breathtaking.

Because you just know that, five minutes later, these unsuperficial, Beauty Comes From Within, What A Tragedy That These Vain Silly Women Can't Be Happy With Themselves As They Are devotees will be uncritically devouring the article about the impossibly beautiful 35 year old Kate Moss being snapped coming out of a nightclub at 3 am. Taken at a bad angle and in a horribly unflattering light. And - quel horreur - with something resembling a faint expression line on her forehead.

And then they'll start exclaiming Oh My God She's Letting Herself Go.

Infuriatingly, this shit doesn't apply to men at all. A man who lets himself go and ages naturally is the accepted social norm, unjudged and unjudgeable. Think of the seventy-something Jack Nicholson, waddling round on yachts and beaches with the biggest tits seen near the sea since Pamela Anderson's heyday. And still being portrayed as a credible Jack the Lad - despite the fact that, these days, he looks more like Jabba the Hutt in a residential care home.

It's an escape clause from the world's judgement that women simply don't get. Even old Jack's feminine equals in fame and fortune are held up as objects of disgust and ridicule past a certain age, if they attempt to portray themselves as anything other than dignified, well-coiffed, sexless matriarchs. Think Jane Fonda in the ads. Think Lauren Bacall in anything.

Unless they opt for radical, Thirty Years Younger full body surgery a la Demi Moore - which can see them playing sexy women up to, ooh, at least forty-two.

Of course, then they're vain and stupid.

And deserve to die.

Yes, I know we're talking Hollywood movies here. But they serve as a profoundly disturbing Rorschact test of how society en masse thinks - thanks to relentless focus grouping and target audiencing and generally producing the damn things by numbers. If people don't like it, it don't get made.

And with the exception of bittersweet late-life rom-coms like this ghastly-looking thing - a mercifully limited sub-genre of movies, as toe-curling as the old git sections of Blind Date* - you will never, ever, ever see a female romantic lead who looks a day over thirty-five.

And even that's seriously pushing it.

So who's to be surprised when we start having surgery to look younger?

I really think some people will only be happy if society becomes a gender-divided Logan's Run, whereby all women are forced to take a lethal injection at the ripe old age of twenty nine.

On the positive side, at least we'll save money on Botox, so it's not all bad news...

J x

You know, the ones where sprightly old tap-dancing Alf had to choose between Mabel who liked ballroom dancing, Ethel who was ninety-three last year (oooh!) and Dolly, who made buttock-clenchingly embarassing jokes about willies. TV gold, I tell you.