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comment is free
 Melming Williams |
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I'm walking along the King's Road with a galpal of mine, who, like me, is a recent mother, but also a wildly successful Primrose Hill restaurateur and a barrister to boot. ‘Where does she find the time??’, thinks me, who got a migraine thinking about the mere logistics when one of the other mums at the Finchley Baby-Swim group asked me if I fancied joining her Yummy-Mummies Yoga Club.
My friend asks me if I’ve heard of Chelsea Charms. “Is that the new Conran shop?” I innocuously/innocently ask. My friend takes pity on poor, gloriously isolated from popular culture me (Me who enquired at a dinner party, just last week, “Does Amy Winehouse takes drugs, then?” Me who thinks that Tom Cruise is still a good Catholic boy.), and explains that Chelsea Charms is, in fact, not a new purveyor of exquisite talking pieces for the vibrant Chiswick household, but rather the owner of the world’s pair of largest (cosmetically-enhanced) breasts. “Gosh,” I squeak, when Calliope reveals that, at last measure, Charms vitals clocked in at a staggering 153XXX-23-34. Yes, that was 153XXX. These dimensions are completely alien to one such as myself, who kept waiting and waiting for puberty to really kick in in the chest section. I finally wearily admitted defeat when, at the High Michaelmas Ball in my second year at Oxford, my rather Pimms’d boyfriend of the time spent an hour telling me about the ‘wonderful’ advancements in breast augmentation procedures. ‘Not that you need it…’ Yeah right! Dumped! I’m not sure I’d even like big breasts. When I was pregnant with Malachy, and then breastfeeding (and, by-the-by, are any other new mums concerned about what fluoride in our tap-water could be doing to breast milk, and - in turn - to baby's health?? Email me), I reached the heady heights of a (leaky) D cup, but I felt like a grotesque. It turns out I was used to going unnoticed in crowds with my little crab-apples, and now I was schlepping round biffing people in the eye with a pair of granny smiths! On the other hand, I have a Ugandan friend whose beautiful ochre breasts billow and flow under unbelievably beautiful busuti and gomci dresses and, every time I see her, cause me to rue the day I was born a porcelain-white stick. But then, maybe Chelsea Charms’s breasts empower her. In a world STILL ultimately predicated on men’s tastes and desires, perhaps the only way for a woman to get power is to present a façade of complicity, but to really be manipulating those who seek to manipulate her, and all of us women. I really don’t know the answer. I do know I'm now the proud owner of a divine Conran end table, though. C'est la vie! |
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