Lest I Forget
If this photo were Scratch and Sniff,it would smell of Patchouli
This piece of evidence got hurled out of some vortex in the Universe into my living room floor this week. No-one knows how it got here. It is a photo of me in the ladies loo of some establishment aged eighteen, looking like I was getting ready for a Dexy’s Midnight Runners tribute band audition. Every time I look at myself it makes me laugh. It makes me chuckle almost as much as this photo of an advert for fizzy juice on the Paris Metro. I say, almost as much, because nothing is funnier than this photo of an iron pumping, presumably steroid popping grizzly bear. Nothing.
The need for that fig leaf disturbs me
Anyway, back to my photo. I think the reason this photo has karmically landed on my floor this week is because I have been guilty of taking the mickey out of my 18 year old student cousin, Pete, who visited a couple of weeks back. Pete arrived with a manky old suit jacket on (my photo: check!), hair defying the laws of physics and fashion, in need of a good wash yet set hard with crunchy cheap hairspray (my photo: check!), ill fitting clothes meant for a member of the opposite sex and possibly once belonging to a person now dead (my photo: check!) and badly applied eyeliner (my photo: check!). Actually Pete didn’t have the eyeliner yet, but I expect that’s in the post.
My friend Tracey has just looked at the photo and called it “Lest Ye Forget”. There’s only one thing comforting me about this scene, and that’s the knowledge that the two friends with me in that loo looked just as bad as I did. I’m sure my pal, Barbara, would have been wearing her old lady peach-coloured mac, and my other pal, Joanne, would have had peroxide hair so chemically burnt that there were some bald patches on her scalp.
Finding the photo has also inspired me to write a proposal for a reality TV show. Now that we can’t buy and sell our houses, afford any plastic surgery and fund any wardrobe make overs we have to find something to capture the zeitgeist. I’m calling it Nostalgia Makeover. It’s a mix between Gok Wan and Dr Who. We find a subject who wants to go back in time and sort their previous selves out for the sake of humanity. No permed mullet, nor shiny drainpipe suit would be beyond our powers. I shall be the first subject and we will be traveling back to that very loo (which I remember being a cafe in Bath after we’d got chucked out of the Bath Student’s Union at 5am by security guards for attempting to sleep on their floor once it had shut for the night). I will be bodily assaulted by a hairdresser, put into actual non charity shop clothes my actual size and meant to be worn by an actual woman, and that beret will be surgically removed from my head in a one hour operation under anesthetic by a leading Harley Street surgeon.
I expect it to be a success, and even now I can envisage a Celebrity version with the members of the newly reformed Spandau Ballet.
Nostalgia Makeover, copyright: me. Coming to your screens soon. Applications being accepted now. Apply in comments box for my consideration. Ex-Goths particularly welcomed.
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