Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy

www.paulcoia.com


You can tell Christmas is on the way, can’t you? Go to the shops just now and it’s all cut price Terry’s Chocolate Orange and Michael Jackson’s mummy kissing Santa Claus. But the real giveaway that Santa’s getting the soup stains out of his beard and gearing up to whip the elves in to shape is that every shopping mall walkway is overrun by adults with their barrows, trying desperately to shift crystals and hair ties that even eBay wouldn’t touch.

I went to our local mall this week and had to run an assault course of guys wishing to rub sea salt on my elbows, women who wanted me to buy hair straighteners, odd looking hippies selling perspex cubes with holograms of Jesus, barrows buzzing with vibrating cushions and then the sad sight of three adults sitting on trikes and going round in circles while imploring us to stop and buy. The embarrassed looks on their faces were replaced by tsunamis of sweat and a look of job hunting gone very wrong two hours later when I passed again to see their wacky races still in progress and, judging by the stock on view, not one single sale made.

What bothered me more than any sympathy I felt was the builder’s bum showing on each one of them as they cycled by, bums topped, of course, by the usual tattoo. Now regular readers know I would rather drink maggots melted in goat’s sick than get a tramp stamp tattooed on my posterior, but these were different. One had a bar code, as if she was scared of losing her bum and might get it handed in to a check out later, and another had an arrow marked “this way down”. I almost wanted to buy a trike just to get a closer look.

A church of England vicar, Jim Mullen, says he wants gays to be compulsorily tattooed on their bums with the message “sex can seriously damage your health” which is a great idea for all of us but, for those whose romances are conducted with lights out, perhaps they could use luminous ink. Maybe also do it in Braille just to be helpful to all minorities. Married men who stray could get one on their appendage saying “Property of…” to avoid any infidelities and if there’s not enough room then perhaps just the wife’s name. Or, in my case, initials.

Carrying on through the shopping centre I went past someone selling orthopaedic sandals, another with pillows that massage your head, a crazed looking woman selling calendars and then I bumped in to a woman who really had it sussed. She was selling pots of honey and jam and had a queue of men buying furiously. The reason is that she had her blouse unbuttoned and her ample chest pushed up with some sort of industrial hoist till her cleavage could be mistaken for a cleft chin.

Looking at these guys who had suddenly discovered the joys of jam I was reminded of that line from Notting Hill where Hugh Grant confesses that he can’t see what all the fuss is about regarding women’s breasts. “After all, half the population have them. Slightly more if you count Meatloaf”.

Having just come back from a week in Portugal, I was exposed to these celebrity magazines you only buy on holiday because they usually have a free Cadbury’s Flake stuck on the front. Magazines like Ok and Hello don’t normally fill my reading hours although I did like the cheek of a now defunct Scottish version called Hiya. Of course it had to be short lived as, once you’ve interviewed David Tennant and The Proclaimers, there are no Scottish celebs left. Anyway, this week there were photos of Kerry Katona who was pictured topless with her hands cupped around her bare breasts, looking like she was trying to gather in pounds of bread dough before they slid to the floor. Liz Hurley appeared in a red dress with her cleavage hoisted up and squashed like two big stress balls and the irony that she was appearing at a Breast Cancer fund raiser, where many in her audience may have had surgery, seemed to have escaped her.

Then, in the same magazine, yet another page had Gok Wan and loads of women taking part in some nude contest with him grabbing someone’s décolletage. And today I see Georgina Bailey, the girl at the centre of the BBC’s problem ‘phone calls, has starred in a sleazy video where she gets another girl to wash her bare chest. The world has gone boob crazy!

We know that if Kerry Katona had a sensible mum she’d wear her squishy assets as a nice scarf wrapped around her brass neck for the cold nights and we’re smart enough to realise Liz Hurley’s boobs don’t really look like that. So what’s the point of it all when we suspect that she goes home, undoes the steel harness, and watches as her chest hits her kneecaps before sweeping the floor.

The police say it seems that a Friday night isn’t complete without some girl having a few drinks and thinking it’s wild and wacky to bare her chest in public. “Wouldn’t it be absolutely hilarious”, she thinks, “if I pulled my top up and showed my bazoombas. My how everyone will think that’s original and will laugh.” Well, go on You Tube and watch thousands doing exactly the same and you’ll get an inkling of why, at the risk of sounding like an American TV evangelist, I’m going to say “enough is enough”.

Please girls just stop. We guys have something unique too, you know. How would you feel if we went around showing what we’ve got all the time? Would you fancy opening up Hello and seeing Liz Hurley’s husband showing his... er... beer belly? We blokes know that you’ve all got these treasure chests, but Hugh Grant was right. It may sell honey and jam but it’s not big and it’s not funny.

Well unless you’re Kerry Katona of course. Now hers really are big and funny.