Beautiful Girl

My 20 year old son is home. He rolled in at eight this morning having rolled out almost exactly 48 hours earlier. His girlfriend had driven half way across the country to meet him, and picked him up while we were all still asleep on Sunday morning.

They spent the day in Eastbourne and the night in a hotel he had paid for (or you could argue that any one of a number of people had paid for - the kid has his own National debt), before discovering that she was allowed to go out fishing with him when he went to work on Monday. She spent the day on the boat and while he worked she was either throwing up or having panic attacks about throwing up some more; all day. The whole crew went home at the end of the shift, leaving the two lovebirds alone on a smelly crabbing vessel, how sweet.

This morning there were too many crew so he took the day off. His poor beloved drove him the ten miles home and dropped him, unexpected, on our doorstep, before starting off on her own 200 mile journey back to reality. Apparently she was crying, but I'm not too certain why, whatever he says. Could be relief.

Anyhow I got the two younger ones dressed and out to school almost on time, in spite of the 6' plus frame of their older brother seeming to be lounged across every inch of sofa and stood looming in every doorway, all at once; even in spite of him channel hopping the TV from the news to something more to his taste, which is always guaranteed to have the kids more interested in that than their breakfast and destroys any limited appreciation that they have of time passing.

So, I'm back home and trying to do some work, or at least gear my brain up to a state where it can think, long enough to work out which work to do. Andrew, of course, 'keeps out of my way' by channel hopping the TV, loudly, until he settles on something that has him laughing hard.

I gave up and ended up laughing with him and have wasted the entire morning on........ the 2003 'Made for the bin' movie: Beautiful Girl (see title for clip), about a cute little tubthumper who goes up against a load of varyingly anorexic broomsticks in a beauty pageant.

Its not the cast that got to us, not the premise, nor the slapstick and so-called comedy hooks like the mother's laugh, no it was the serious bits, the 'hearts and flowers' underlying messages of the whole movie as displayed in the pageant. We were wetting ourselves.

First there was the green goddess swimming costume. How they squeezed that poor girl into it was beyond me, if she'd farted she would have ripped stitches and given her bum cheeks friction burns. You could have taken an electric drill to one of those buttocks and got nowhere, so tightly were they packed. I hope she sued for the pain of nappy rash / bed sores / whatever you would call that sort of torture.

How in hells name can anyone make a 'big is beautiful' movie and then dress the girl like she's been through a trash compacter to shave off a few inches? Hypocritical, you think?

Then there was the song 'I am beautiful' and the end speech about how everyone is beautiful and being individual is what makes us special. Fine, I'm all for the truth of that, but it was done with so much syrupy sentiment, so over the top and gushy that we were wetting ourselves laughing, whilst trying not to puke at the same time. We were also waiting for a flase eyelash to take off and flap round the auditorium, or for the four inches of red lipstick to crack and start an avalanche - yeah plenty of natural individual beauty showing through that job.

Behind all of that was the outrageously conceited concept that you can base half of a movie on the 'message' that fat girls and thin girls can be friends. Doh, no, really, can they? Gosh mister, you have saved my life, I never knew. Revelation.

I was going to say they overdid the saccharine, but hey, I suspect it was aspartame.

Back to work now, I guess, as soon as I can figure out which work, where..........