Tuesday, January 30, 2007, 12:30 AM
It will have surprised no one that the newly-crowned Big Brother winner Shilpa is now being represented by 'PR Guru Max Clifford'.But has anyone stopped to question something - if Max Clifford is such a PR genius, how come everyone I've ever spoken to thinks he's a pecker?
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Monday, January 29, 2007, 12:13 AM
It's only fitting that I should follow up an article about someone leaving these shores with a tale of the experience of trying to get into the UK.
Normally, when you see a large queue outside somewhere, like a club or a restaurant, it's a good sign, indicating that it's really worth the wait to get in. Anyone arriving in the UK for the first time at Stansted Airport last night will have been sorely deceived. As soon as you have walked across the tarmac into the corridors leading to the terminal, you hit a mass of people, standing awkwardly on the travellators, moving at one metre an hour. When it takes one hour twenty minutes to get from your plane to the luggage hall, you know that something is seriously not right with the airport. And if you were naive enough to check your bag in, it will already be in a pub car park in Chelmsford by the time you reach the carousel.
With monumentally British understatement, this sign advises of 'possible delays', much like you might experience 'possible discomfort' by chasing a pride of irritable lionesses. And what was even more British was the spectacle that we experienced towards the end of our ordeal - a lone man had lost his composure, perhaps with a dose of slight claustrophobia. He edged his way to the front of the queue, but his progress was halted by two law enforcement officers. He was marched to a spot where, in full view of an enormous crowd of half-asleep travellers, he was 'nicked' for queue-jumping by armed police.
I suddenly realise where Veronica Beckham is coming from.
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Saturday, January 27, 2007, 11:45 PM
HELLO! magazine missed out on an unforgettable special edition here. To mark the occasion of Global Style Icon Victoria Beckham's departure from these shores, they should have created a limitied edition entitled: GOODBYE!
What with glamour model Jordan fully signed up with rival OK! Magazine!, Hello's editors must be pacing the boards trying to figure out what will fill the rather odd buxom-waif shaped void left by Global Style Icon Mrs Beckham (rather touchingly referred-to as Virginia Beckham by one LA broadcaster). Anyway, I'm writing this because I have to salute the news-making ability of the woman. She jiggled her way to stardom with the Spice Girls with 'Wannabe' in 1996, and then proceeded to dominate the news agenda of the ensuing decade with nothing more than babies, pouting, fiddling with her hair and sunglasses so large, they had to be checked in on flights. I think 1997-2007 must have been a slow news decade.
I only have one memory of seeing her in the flesh - it was at England vs Paraguay in the World Cup 2006, and as the game ended, a buzz broke out on our side of the stadium as, several rows below us, people started to gather around a rather peculiarly-proportioned woman with sunglasses the size of shirehorse blinkers. As security men shepherded her towards the exit tunnel, something odd happened - it dawned on the crowd around her that they had nothing to ask or say to her. I mean, no one has ever actually seen Victoria Beckham open her mouth, let alone say something. And when every detail of your life is there to read in the celebrity press, it sort of kills the conversation. When you know so much about someone, you're resticted to calling out rather awkward ice-breakers like "who does your grouting, Victoria?"
And now she's off to LA, that will have to remain a tantalising enigma about the woman.
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Friday, January 26, 2007, 11:53 PM
Do not go near one of these things. If you have even a remotely addictive personality, you will find yourself drawn to it like a bad itch. I am unfortunate enough to work in an office where there is one of these a few metres away.
Every evening, when I should really be thinking of going home, the tell-tale rattle of the table begins, and you know that play is underway. Whilst normal families are sitting down to dinner, I am co-ordinating the movements of three plastic blokes who have very little in the way of trickery or finesse, but have a good work ethic, excellent positional sense and none of them are ever likely to waste perfectly good paper with their 'autobiography'.
I am a defensive player, which means that I am useless in attack, but there is a perverse satisfaction in thwarting the attempts of the opposition. I have been told I play negatively, a bit like Blackburn - looking at the fact that they are currently tenth in the Premiership, I can't really consider that an insult.
If anyone fancies a game, let me know.
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Thursday, January 25, 2007, 11:30 PM
What you see here is not from some healthy eating catalogue. This lot turned up on my doorstep this morning in an anonymous brown box. A box pretty much filled with organic fruit and veg straight from some farm somewhere in the country.
If you want to put one in the eye of packaging, supermarkets, plastic bags, food miles, pesticides, cashiers, fricking Nectar cards and bland-tasting veggies from God-knows-where, then you may be interested in trying the same service as I did. I took this photo after eating a load of carrots and was shocked at how used I had become to supermarket tastes. Or should I say, the lack of them. This was a proper bugs bunny carrot - it had bits of earth on it, it tasted rich. almost sweet, and I will probably be able to see in the dark when I go to bed tonight.
The company is online greengrocers Abel & Cole, and they are just the sort of business that represent the flipside to multi-aisle Tescos and Sainsburys that proliferate virtually everywhere. Sure, it's probably not as cheap, and I guess that you don't have the satisfaction of dealing with a human being, but I'm too busy to shop at a grocer's anyway.
Achieving my five-a-day won't be tricky now; the supermarket will still come up with the same depressing regularity on my bank statement as it did before, but I will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that I have begun to slip free of my dependency on Mr Sainsbury.
So, if you want to begin to free yourself in the same way , all you have to do is click here...
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