Diary – 3 June 2005

Am I losing my puissance or has something gone disastrously awry with the nation’s young women? It used to be at this time of year — just as the sun started to shine and the first green blob of plum showed itself upon the twig — that they put away their shapeless cold-weather clothes in preference for a lighter, better fitting and more colourful summer garb. For that reason, how happy this time of year always used to be. But alas, no longer — not in the West Country at any rate. Down here the new fashion is to look as sickly and repulsive as possible. The teenage girls of Taunton have taken to dyeing their hair black at the edges with a heavy matt-white crest on top. This they call (for no reason I can divine) a ‘chevy’ and on top of their ‘chevies’ they spray some sort of fruit-flavoured dust. We have all noticed the pink protruding band of blubber at the midriff and the exposed plastic harness or ‘thong’ that barges its way down the buttock cleft. These peculiar and disconcerting sights are common to the whole nation, but in the West of England things have got far worse.

One particularly worrying fashion among the teen-girls (or ‘Bevs’) of Wiveliscombe is for mutilating their thighs and arms with razor blades to create a slashed criss-cross effect of scars that is supposed to look both trendy and redolent of inner angst. To their mouths these same women apply a vicious, stinging gloss that distorts their lips; their necks and jaws are covered in shiny puce love-bites, so that they gad about town looking like plague victims of the 14th century. ‘If you think I’m a bitch, you should meet my mother,’ declares one of their tops. ‘I’m a virgin (but this is an old T-shirt),’ proclaims another.