Guilty Pleasures

Dinner tonight was provided by the good offices of Queen's Takeaway, what with my slide into the batchelor junky lifestyle. Hopefully by September I will be malnourished enough to qualify for a student grant. Anyway, I couldn't be bothered to cook. The sight of my housemate chopping his healthy veggies filled me with a kind of mortified self-loathing, so I decided to fill the hole with some Singapore rice.

So I found myself sat at the chinese takeaway, waiting for my dinner. I knew it would be a little while, as Queen's is not like the Golden River on Tudor Road at all. There, any meal, no matter how large, would appear within a minute and a half, come hell or high water, and on one memorable eveing, both. I am not sure how many times it has been shut down by environmental health, but I am willing to bet it's more than one. Crunchy rice and suspiciously tepid roast pork are good for you anyway, lending a ruddy hue to your cheeks and hardening your immune system against more harmful things like bird flu, or global warming.

So I was there for a while. I had a book with me, though. Quite a classy one, actually, a Reclam text. These are a particular type of book you get in Germany, tiny little books printed on A6 paper in even smaller print. They do a staggering range of classics and so on, obviously mostly in German. I speak German to the level of a dead giraffe, so I was sat trying to look classily interesting and interestingly classy reading the English language Reclam edition of the scripts of Fawlty Towers. Still, the blurb on the back was in German, so perhaps someone blind might be fooled.

This ruse wasn't to last. Because where normally sits a modest pile of copies of Mobile Home User magazine, or a glossy edition of Rutland Living (Barbour and Land Rovers, basically) was a huge, teetering heap of copies of Cosmopolitan. And like all men, everywhere, I very quickly found myself reading them.

It's such a shameful thing to admit to. It goes against all male expectations. Because magazines are very, very good at defining what we should be. According to the magazines aimed at men, we all like titsandlagerandfootballandmotors. One thing we titsandlagerandfootballandmotorloving men can't ever do is wonder about our weight, relationships or just who's shagging who. The fact we only do wonder about these things when we are in the presence of a copy of Cosmo is something of an oddity. Really, the imaginary gender differences these magazines propagate aside, I shouldn't give a tiny toss about fifty new ways to please my man. As a man, in the real world, I think 'turn up' is numbers one through seventeen on the list.

They deal in fiction. Everyone knows this. It's not like they really even try to look like they aren't just spoting rubbish. The edition I was looking at had a section on how the single woman could enjoy Valentine's Day (I never said it was a new edition), the next page a feature on how to win an argument with your boss (dealt with in probably less than 500 words) and the next page a slightly larger article on how to tell if your man is a good long term bet (will occasionally stop watching football to make frenzied animal love to you till your fillings fall out, and then cry about how beautiful you are). This was filled with approximately two pages of adverts for every page of content.

They also deal in hatred. We all hate Lindsay Lohan, it seems. Really hate her. Grr, what a bitch, with her... erm... her... uh... hold on... Because we all hate her alright, but we are not too clear why. Heather Mills is even more loathed, despite being actually quite an inspirational type, what with her missing leg, ad work with fluffy animals. But stick her in a magazine and we're pasting her photo on a wall and flinging darts at it. Of course, because the entire reason for our hatred of these people ('Who do they think they are, being famous? I certainly can't think that putting their every move in our magazine has anything to do with it') is so ephemeral, we need to purchase the next week's Heat to read that week's reason for hating this person who we have never, and will never, meet.

Why bother with a product which is so manifestly poor, and so manifestly unwanted? Because I have met very few women who actually do pay attention to the shrill and brainless imprecations of Cosmopolitan magazine. Any that did would be unemployed, totally bankrupt and dead by now. And of all women I know, they all know it. I suppose it's a combination of habit, and that we all like to complain. It's how ITV still gets an audience. It's how come I have something to write about.

In actual events, my friend Gillian got married, we had my Nan's funeral and I went to IKEA in a van. But that's another story.

Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal