Posh Spice was gutted when she discovered that Becks had snogged a slag. She suddenly wanted to vomit. If only she hadn’t renounced all that at Anorexics Anonymous. She counted to 10 and ate a celery stick. The news had been read to her, since those tabloid editorials can be so text-heavy. And because her eyes were sealed shut when tears mixed her mascara into a cement-like compound. Her ordeal had only just begun.
For those whose subscriptions to The Sun have, like mine, lapsed, the hot goss is as follows: Becks snogged a totty, but told Posh it was bosh that he’d shagged the slag.
Posh said ‘Gosh!” at a posh thrash where she was splashing dosh about. She copped one at Becks, who sobbed. Posh blubbed, too. The dirty love-rat denied hot pash on the physio bench, but then came the Becks sex-text tester.
Disappointingly, none of the reports billed the SMS conversation as ‘Becks’s Totty sham Hots-purr”.
Or ‘Man United with Posh’s fist”. They don’t write tabloid headlines like they used to.
As for the text messages themselves, their content seemed to crouch somewhere between ‘Soft, what burglar through yonder window breaks?” and ‘Wanna breed?” Two people who have dedicated their waking hours to kicking balls and rubbing hamstrings respectively were always going to struggle with the rhyming couplets on the end of their sonnets.
The Beckhams, being middle-class people treading water in a giant aquarium full of money, will probably stay together for the sake of their children. Of course, if they’d really had their children’s best interests at heart, they would never have conceived them to start with — but that’s another story.
So now Mrs Beckham has joined the vast, politely smiling army of women married to men regarded as role models presumably because of their skill at rolling about with models in hotel rooms.
Let’s play a game. Name your favourite living sportsman between the ages of 20 and 30. Now pick a number between four and 10. Subtract one from that number if he has a girlfriend, and halve it if he’s married. Multiply it by five if he’s an Australian Rules player, and by 10 if he’s American. That’s how many groupies he beds on an average tour.
Of course he has a trophy wife, but trophy wives are for producing babies and taking to award dinners. He wouldn’t dream of using her for unmentionables.
After all, as Tony Soprano explained, she kisses his children goodnight with that mouth. No, there comes a time in every top athlete’s life as he begins to mature as a person when he realises that he is demonstrating his love and respect for his wife by indulging in all-night, E-fuelled, vodka-soaked romps with 19-year-old twins. He’s doing it for her.
Shaun Pollock seems something of a come-down after all that, and certainly he is one of that breed of Natalians that thinks e is a sound you put before all words when you want blacks to understand you: please remember to pack away e-hose when you’re done watering e-lawn. But there was something downright sinister about a recent You magazine feature on the Pollocks and their new baby daughter.
Shaun looked jolly proud of his little girl, and Mrs Shaun looked jolly proud of Shaun and the porcelain ducks he has provided her for her old age.
But if one tallied up the facts provided about the couple, one found the following: Shaun is happy, Mrs Shaun is happy that Shaun is happy. Shaun is looking forward to spending time with his daughter, Mrs Shaun is happy about that, too. Shaun looks like Archie and plays cricket, Mrs Shaun is pretty and has babies. Baby Shaun is a girl, so probably won’t be a fast bowler. But maybe Mrs Shaun can crank out a boy to set the world to rights.
A happy family scene, no doubt, with normal conversations and the odd fight. But to You and its readers — and who among us can honestly claim that they have never sat on the loo and started with the celeb goss at the back first? — the piece was about a sportsman, his leggy greenhouse, and a cute disappointment.
Lock up your daughter, dye her blonde tresses brown, and pray for the day that Prince Valium the accountant pulls up in his slightly dingy Camry to woo her. It’s her only hope.