Allow me to stick up for Simon Cowell. Full disclosure: I don’t much like his programmes but that is cancelled out, I reckon, by the fact that I have met him and he was utterly charming. So I’m pretty neutral. In any case, my interest is confined to Cowell’s face, for which he gets a great deal of abuse. Cowell is a fan of “tweakments”, non-surgical cosmetic procedures such as injections of botulinum or dermal fillers to iron out wrinkles and plump up cheeks.
Cowell, 64, has admitted that “there was a stage when I might have gone a bit too far” but, judging by his appearance on Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway at the weekend, he’s still on the jabs big time. His skin looked like a sausage left too long on the grill: brown, smooth, shiny, ready to pop. Stephen Merchant took the mickey on the show and yesterday the tabloids let rip. I don’t suppose Cowell cares but, still, it feels cruel.
When you point the finger, remember there are three pointing back at you. I’m nearly 60. I haven’t had any tweakments, except I did once get Botox to write about it. People told me I looked years younger. Who knows, if I had Cowell’s money and was on telly every day, alongside a bunch of great-looking people half or one third my age, I too might feel drawn to the needle every so often.
Cathy Newman, 49, of Channel 4 News, told The Times yesterday that “if you’re on TV it’s like, when are you going to have plastic surgery?”. For many women in their forties, fifties and sixties, serious women in serious jobs, regular cosmetic tweakments are now routine whether you earn your living in front of a camera or not. If that sort of expectation/peer pressure extended to men, as one day it might, as it already does in the world inhabited by Simon Cowell, and I met a chap my age who looked ten years younger, and he said, “I’ll give you my guy’s number”, and I had bundles of spare cash, who am I to say I wouldn’t succumb?
• Ireland’s newest beauty fad, injectable salmon sperm
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I wouldn’t do my cheeks, though. When I was a lad, hollow cheeks were all the rage. Why would you want them plump and shiny like David Cameron’s? As for other stuff, though, well, I’m not balding but if I were, would I get a hair transplant like Jurgen Klopp? Hell yes! Would I get my mashed-up collarbone reset? Yep. Would I get my teeth fixed, like Martin Amis? That would be a close call: what I know of crowns, veneers and implants leads me to judge they’re too much trouble. Then again, British diet and dentistry back in the day didn’t do my generation many favours. It’d be nice to put things right. Not the full Klopp, though.
Also, I’ve lost a lot of weight, 35lb, over the past 18 months. Well done me, but I’ve noticed the deflation has left a little loose, dare I say saggy, skin on what would otherwise be a flat stomach. I wouldn’t mind tightening things up: a couple of nurses tugging hard, feet braced on a buttock each, then a doctor to step in with a discreet bulldog clip in the small of my back, and meanwhile round the front, the elusive six-pack might finally appear! Is such a procedure even a thing? I bet Cowell would know …
Digital tickets are rubbish
At the Carabao Cup final on Sunday, thousands of fans missed the kick-off at Wembley because their electronic tickets didn’t work. The paper versions were fine. I’ve seen similar chaos at railway stations when downloads can’t be opened while dinosaurs with printed tickets sail through. It’s the same story paying for a parking meter on your phone: a laborious process, even when it works. Putting coins in a slot was dead easy.
I don’t think self-service tills in supermarkets are up to much, either. To work efficiently, they have to be 99 per cent reliable and they’re not. Either the barcode is too scrunched up to be scanned, or the checkout assistant has to get involved to OK a purchase on age grounds, or there’s a kerfuffle over what constitutes the “bagging area”. My kids say you can’t stop progress. But if new tech takes longer, or doesn’t work at all, and stresses everybody out, it’s not progress, is it? I’ll take a real-life person every time.
The days of my Triffid
Having grown up in the stripped-pine, Habitastic, macramé hanging basket spider plant-crazy Seventies, I’m pleased the British lockdown love affair with indoor foliage has survived the pandemic. Survived, and thrived, with sales of pot plants at Tesco up 130 per cent since 2019. My own home is awash with vegetation in every shade of green, succulents a speciality.
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I only regret getting rid of my extensive teenage collection of house plants when they finally fell out of favour in the early Nineties. I had a monster of a Swiss cheese specimen called Humphrey that, had I not brutally euthanised him 30 years ago, might (just) still be alive today. And occupying the entire house, like a Triffid. As with binning my vinyl, I should have stood firm until the wheel of fashion turned once more.
I’ve kept a Seventies-vintage cagoule that sticks to you like a sodden plastic bag when it gets wet. It’s useless, but I’ve learnt my lesson. One day soon it’ll be all the rage.
