Bibsey

I won’t lie to you. Life has been less than glamorous of late.

On my recent visit to the UK I found myself alone and in the Tesco coffee shop actually undoing my top button and zip before embarking on an enormous scone with clotted cream and jam. The scone wasn’t even that great, but I ploughed on. As I did, I had a little laugh to myself as it had only been minutes before that I had been trying on jeans in three different (ever-increasing) sizes in the changing rooms and making vows of moderation to the mirror.

Resolutions and moderation have never been my friends. Hence, my inexorable slide into lumpy bumpiness.

I could almost hear the empty Cava bottles of Christmas past (and every other day of the year for that matter) clinking in my ears. A boyfriend once tried to persuade me that Champagne was not fattening. Ha! This is a gloriously inactual little factoid that he based on the much-more-likely-to-be-actual fact that supermodels apparently live on the stuff. I thought then, as I do now, that it was far more likely to be the reported mountains of cocaine, that well known appetite suppressor and personality enhancer (yup, uh-ha), that enabled them to consume so many calorific bubbles and remain skinny and supermodely.

Anyway, that digression into racier and more glamorous lifestyles aside, the whole Tesco-scone-Cava-jeans-shopping episode took me back to my first ever moment of shock horror in a changing room. This was sometime in my mid-twenties in Sydney circa 1994. I was jeans shopping again, oh vile occupation, when I had my first sighting of cellulite on my arse. Damn their truthful mirrors and honest lighting. And so began my steady descent into the realms of anti-glamour. Oh course I am quite nostalgic about my 1994 arse now.

Another, equally salubrious, experience awaited me at Stanstead airport last week, as I queued with Bibsey to board Ryanair flight FR-WHATEVS to Malaga. I arrived at the gate sweaty, disheveled and weighed down with toddler and exploding hand luggage for two. In my wisdom I had decided to do the England trip without a buggy. Nuts of course, but there you go.

The gate was the usual scene of chaos and carnage with Priority Boarders, determined to get value, riding rough shod over the old and infirm. The [cow]girl on the gate shrieking (with accompanying I’m watching you hand gestures) at passengers, with perfectly legal-looking carry-on luggage, that she needed to “SEE’” their bags go into the cabin baggage ‘fit’ cage, or whatever they call it. Even the most glamorous of my fellow travelers were stripped of all dignity at the gate as they struggled to stuff their bags into the measuring device.

As my time approached I actually found myself nervously whistling Perry Como’s Magic Moments. Oh how I wish that I could report that the group joined in. They didn’t. And, after a rather desperate reshuffle of our hand luggage, I was rather disappointed that I wasn’t called on to ‘perform’ for the assembly. Clearly I was just too much of a shambles…

Here is some pretty funny YouTube footage, that I originally found here, of some girls falling foul of the Ryanair baggage restrictions, followed by Perry Como and friends.