I just don’t like paleness (my own paleness) unless it’s perfect English rose maid marrian cream. I don’t think it’s an English thing though, it’s a paleness thing. Pale fat hairy European men are in a league of their own in terms of the eugh! factor. I think you’re tanned enough Dodman: Liv and I are the ones who have to be careful not to get too fat, hairy and pale. Tan and Jul have foreign type skin anyway. Grrr…

I don’t think he was being gender specific.

While I would like to say that this is purest compost I must confess that I have barely considered a English woman desireable in years…
and so, Dodman, in our wisdom, we (that is you and I) have rather more pleasing to the eye foreign types filling up the gap on the other side of the bed. Three cheers for us and backslaps all round.

A choice piece of wordage from AA Gill today:

“What is it that makes English bodies so spectacularly repellent in the daylight? It isn’t simply the clammy, adipose, maggoty-white flesh, with its zits and lesions and dry, scrofulous craters. It’s the distribution that so noisomely offends. The softly curdled lumps that hang like fungus on beech trees, the swaying underarms, the double nuggets of cheesy flob behind the knees, the exhausted, stretched, who-cares haggis of gut, the shuddering, horrified backsides, with their wrinkled, slippery clefts and creases, the thighs pitted like rain on cold sand — all of it shaped and moulded and bulged by waistbands and straps that were hopeful three years and 4in past.”

Aha.

well there are about a million police around london today, all because it’s a thursday. Bevies of suspicious coppers most probably ready to ‘shoot to protect’ and packs of hounds sniffing for semtex or suchlike.

Also i have a rather stiff neck from trying to sleep on the train.

Bring on Brighton!