Sugar and Spice.........?

So, the Spice Girls have bad an emotional farewell to us all (AGAIN!!).
Figuring that there was absolutely fuck all to do in Toronto on a Thursday night in February except get pissed, masturbate in a darkened room or watch shite, our heroines decided to give the good people of that Canadian city the chance to do all three by staging their farewell show there last night.

This bunch of surgically modified, thick, pox-riddled, mobile eating disorders (what is the collective noun for a group of people with eating disorders? A retch? A Ryveta?) bowed out after the one with the ginger pubes bellowed: "This is your last chance to see the Spice Girls!!" I suppose she could equally have told the audience it was their last chance to metaphorically contract HIV or have their eyeballs skewered with red hot knitting needles but doubtless the PR men insisted she go with the euphemism.

Yes, in an act of unselfish sacrifice, the "girls" (two of them were in my dad's regiment in the war!) have decided to cut short their world tour because, apparently, some of them had forgotten that they had kids before it began and they now want to get back to them. For God's sake, don't listen to anyone who sounds a note of cynicism by saying it was because they had been ripping each others eyes out backstage throughout and after poor attendances at their opening gigs at the Duck and Gynaecologist in Cleckheaton and the Sailors' Rest Home in Broadstairs they had managed to sell just three tickets for the other 2,357 venues they were due to play worldwide.

So, that's the end of the line, is it? No more Clotheshorse Spice, Fucked Up Spice, Paedo-Magnet Spice, Other Spice and The Fourth One Spice. What a sickening loss to culture and society in general. Still, never fear, we will always have their legacy. You know what their legacy is, don't you? You must remember, surely? The reptilian PR people screamed it at us enough times?..........Yes, it's "Girl Power".

And what exactly is Girl Power? Well, to the ill-informed and blinkered, like me, it is the supposed justification for turning this


into this


Drinking so much blue lighter fuel out of trendy bottles that your knickers descend at the same speed as your partly digested dinner rises up through your oesophagus is, apparently, the result of female empowerment (says 'ere!). Gone are the days when lads like me had to shell out for a trip to the pictures to see some rancid, romantic film we didn't want to see, stump up for a carton of Kiaora and a bag of popcorn and then walk our paramours 15 miles home, after which we were left beating our erections down with damp copies of the Beano because we had been told on their doorsteps how they weren't "that kind of girl" and would only allow us access to their underwear once we had married them. Ah! Happy days.

Nope! Forays into Pantyland come a lot cheaper for the knuckle-dragging, drunken, spotty young males of today:
"Fancy a shag?"
"Yeah, no sweat, hic! But, hic, Trisha's gettin' it over the bins out the back, Sharon and Trace, hic, are gettin' roasted by the barmen in the ladies and our Kylie's takin' it up the, hic, wrong 'un by the fire exit so there's no-one to mind me bag......buy us another WKD until, hic, they've finished!"

I just keep picturing Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson chatting earnestly over a cuppa at Carnforth Railway Station each time I see our trainee pondlife staggering around, necking vats of coloured anti-freeze, puking and touching each other up in pubs and bars these days - "It's so terribly, terribly upsetting, darling."

Girl Power (I keep mentioning it, even though it is patently obvious that there is no such fucking thing and it was only invented by admen to plug an otherwise unsellable product) has also led to a startling change in the apparel favoured by young ladies who venture out nowadays for an evening's fun. I remember going out
with girls who, on their mothers' and fathers' instructions, turned up "under the clock by the cinema" so heavily bedecked in clothing that your initial thought was that you were dating Scott of the Antarctic! Hell, I remember spending two hours with one young lady before she deigned to take off her gas mask!!
That's all gone! The clothing articles of choice today are a 3ins-wide belt and two
elastoplasts for the nipples! - and in summer the girls wear less!! I pity the male youth of today. As with their Megadeath Crashrape Nemesis computer games, they are confronted by sensory overload and have become totally desensitised as a result. Just as they cease to regard shooting, stabbing or "snuffing out" people as undesirable, let alone illegal, they have come to expect, nay demand, that girls should have their tits out in the pub and their muffs on view on the dancefloor when they so much as bend over more than five degrees!

I love women's bodies. They're fab. They've just got so many curvy bits and round bits and neatly arranged bits. Nothing asymmetrical hangs down and flaps about as though it was stuck on as an afterthought by The Creator. I also happen to love strawberries, however, and if I was confronted by more strawberries than you could shake your knob at every time I ventured out of the house I would soon grow tired of them and yearn for a more extreme fruit - until all the fruit had gone.

There's magic in slowly discovering a pleasure. That's the concertinad principle, I
think, behind striptease (sorry girls, but this IS a philosophical argument so bear with me) - it is the "tease" which is the thrill, not the end result. What would constitute a strip show to today's pubescent youths? I imagine some girl would stagger out on stage clutching a rum and Coke, quickly whip off her belt and elastoplasts and stand there buck naked for two seconds before there was a loud "Ta daaaaaaaa!" from the music machine and the curtains closed! Where's the fun in that? Another of the noble arts destroyed.

Where was I? Oh yes, Girl Power. As I mentioned earlier, I know no such thing actually exists and the behaviour of both young women/girls and men/boys nowadays is the result of a much deeper malaise in society but if the admen can conceptualise then I can do likewise.
The euphemistic term for the result of this peer pressure and malaise is "the ladette". Apparently, that means a girl who acts like a young man by getting pissed all the time, fighting, rolling around in gutters, waving her private parts around at anyone passing and fucking anything vaguely resembling a member of the opposite sex or the same Phylum.
Why, in the name of everything outside homosexuality/self abuse, would I want to fuck someone with my own disgusting habits? A lot of people have asked me to go and fuck myself, admittedly, but I've never "got round to it". It's just not my cup of mango juice.
I think that's about it. I seem to have run out of steam and forgotten where I was going with this anyway. Still, there's something to come out of it. Girl Power can go to Grantham.