Nigella Lawson: Bunny lines? It's enough to drive any woman into a burkini

Nigella Lawson: Bunny lines? It's enough to drive any woman into a burkini

 

Really, what is to be done with Nigella Lawson? Is being hung, drawn and quartered a suitable punishment? She should certainly be put in a nunnery for wearing a dress that shows her ‘lumps and bumps’. As for the mad burkini thing: death by hanging?

It’s difficult to know what to do about these crimes against humanity: wearing what she wants and being bigger than size zero. (I don’t actually know what size zero is. Possibly the size my mother was when she died of cancer?)

But let’s not get heavy. At least the relevant authorities have been alerted that a woman larger than she should be is out in public. And the cellulite patrol and the feet police and the fashion pathologists have all been called in to analyse this deadly situation.

Actually, most men I know think Nigella is pretty gorgeous. They can’t all be weird fetishists, surely? They just see a beautiful face and a voluptuous body. Most women like the fact that she is a fifty-something sex symbol who stuffs her face in a sort of drugged semi-orgasmic haze of fairy lights. Well, I do.

I hadn't seen her in the flesh for years until a party a few months ago and she just glowed. If I had that skin I would certainly protect it. But it is my duty, as an investigative reporter, to tell you that she does not have a washboard stomach. She is not possibly as careful as Gwyneth Paltrow about what she shoves in her gob.

Nigella’s idea of a good time is lying in bed, watching telly and eating. Paltrow’s is to let herself go with a rice cake and some Coldplay. Oh dear. But apart from her low bone density problems, it is undeniable that Gywneth is thinner.

I was on a beach myself thinking about bodies, as you do, when I saw the burkini. It wasn’t a glamorous beach but one in Kent. And, as always, one sees the lovely bodies of young women who never feel good enough despite the enormous amount of work they have put in: waxing and depilating and fake tanning. Such bodies are described as ‘enviable’, which I think is just strange. Am I to envy my own daughters?

Generous serving: Most men actually think Nigella - with her deep cleavage and voluptuous curves - is gorgeous

Then there are the older women who start off coy. They cover their upper arms and thighs. The bellies that have produced children have never been quite the same since and a variety of sarongs can’t hide that. Then something wonderful happens: it gets too damn hot and, bit by bit, flesh that is neither tanned nor perfect is on show and people relax.

As though the slim young boys doing back flips are going to look at anything other than the teenage girls who this year, I note, are wearing false eyelashes to the beach.

In that part of Kent, shops are boarded up but every week a new salon opens. A friend and I puzzled over the treatments. All these new problem areas. Need help with your ‘bunny lines’? ‘Glabella’? (I had to Google that one – it’s the space between the eyebrows. Bunny lines are wrinkles beside the nose.) I still can’t get my head around the number of options for ‘the bikini area’.

In such a world, a burkini makes sense. My ten-year-old and her friends are smooth
and slim but already aware of all this. Some debate around the increased ‘sexualisation’ of children is muddled. In previous centuries children did dress as mini-adults. What is happening now is the huge emphasis on excessive and expensive grooming. To get a body ‘beach ready’ ought to be some sort of government training scheme it takes so long.

Meanwhile, back by the beach hut, actual bodies that have produced actual children and actual pleasure rarely resemble Victoria Beckham or Kim Kardashian. One of the happiest people I always see at the beach is a woman in her 80s in a strapless number who talks about the best days of her life.

And on a lovely day for those of us whose bodies are not perfect but just healthy enough, those days are now.

Our benign Royal boredom

Waiting for ‘the republican moment’ makes Waiting For Godot look as if it’s on fast forward.

For years I went to meetings about how to bring about a republic, attended strangely enough mostly by upper-class types who banged on about the constitution.

Whenever I pointed to the dysfunction of the Windsors and their treatment of women, they looked at me as though I had lowered the tone.

 

Treason: Saying anything other than doesn't Kate look nice (ie 45) in her Issa engagement dress is treacherous

And I had. And I will shut up soon, as saying anything other than doesn’t Kate look nice
(ie 45) in her Issa engagement dress is treacherous.

But I know, as do all politicians, that constitutional issues – the Monarchy, the Lords – float very few boats. And that flags will be waved but most of us are benignly bored rather than raving republicans.

Only Diana disrupted the narrative that Kate is being groomed to restore. Nothing will or can change until the Queen goes.

 

• The sight of Cameron and Lord Reid (the former communist John Reid) telling us that voting yes to AV will bring about the collapse of Western civilisation did for me. The squire and his hunting dog represent an establishment that will not contemplate change. They will probably secure the system that produced them. And I wish that the yes camp wasn’t so patronising in explaining that AV is not hard to understand. It’s preferences, love. Like counting 123 . . . Lawks, too complicated for the likes of us, guv’nor!