Bare Flesh

I love going to lunch on my own with a book, a magazine or a newspaper; today was the only day this week that I have been able to do so. One of the things I read this lunchtime was AA Gill’s column from The Sunday Times Style magazine, which had me quietly chuckling to myself over a grilled vegetable salad. Gill was lamenting global warming because the English do not know how to dress for it.

Frankly, I don’t give a toss if half a dozen Pacific islands become an underwater adventure destination for sharks (serves the islanders right for eating strangers), and I don’t much care if Greece becomes part of a new, improved Aegean. But I do mind having to look at the English attempting the sweaty equation of heat, going out, Sunday and “my wardrobe”.

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 by waistbands and straps that were hopeful three years and 4in past.

My friends have heard me on the subject many times - dress for your body. It is one of Max’s pet peeves that so many people walk around in public, or even serve me drinks, showing bits of their bodies that would best be left covered forever. It is not at all that I have a perfect body; in fact I am quite secure in saying that I do not. The thing is that I also do not insist on showing bits of flesh that absolutely no one wants to see. I am tired of bare midriffs and thongs crawling out of trousers that are cut too low. I am sick of seeing waists bulging out over belts that are too low and too tight. Show a bit of cleavage, sure, and perhaps fleeting glimpses of skin elsewhere, but please leave the rest up to the imagination.