The big issue

TELEVISION’S sexiest woman as a role model?

Fantastic. Great idea. But for the wrong reason.

Curvaceous Christina Hendricks voted “Sexiest Woman Alive” by female readers of Esquire magazine, is an “absolutely fabulous” physical role model for girls, says Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone.

The star of TV’s brilliant Mad Men, set in Sixties Manhattan ad agencies, is a curvy size 14, and, according to Lynne Featherstone, just the antidote to all those size zero models, airbrushed almost to non-existence in the pages of glossy magazines, and who put young women under “dreadful pressure” to achieve the completely unachievable body.

Such images, she says, are causing “a crisis in body confidence”.

Not in Middlesbrough they’re not.

Quite the opposite.

I was on chauffeur duty in Middlesbrough on Saturday night/Sunday morning just as everyone was turning out of the bars and into the clubs. The average girl stumbling across the road right in front of my car was, I guess, a size 16. Some were tiny, but many more were a great deal bigger, as indeed am I.

Body confidence? This lot had it in bucket loads. No fear of the flab, no disguising the wobbles, no embarrassing cover-up. No slim-line stripes or all-enveloping tents. Just loads and loads of size 22 flesh.

As I carefully manoeuvred the car around the gangs of girls – they could have given it a sizeeable dent – I gawped at their confidence. At that age – and a lot, lot smaller than most of them – I was so self-conscious that I would willingly have embraced the burqa to hide myself away. Not this lot. Jelly thighs, bingo wings and midriffs that were an independent life force. Wobbly and proud of it.

You can’t even blame it on the drink. The same girls out when stone cold sober in daylight are likely to wear clothes equally revealing. And unlike Christina Hendricks, they are clearly not gripped by supportive, constrictive underwear.

Because unlike the girls of earlier generations, they won’t stand out.

They are not unusual. There are lots like them. They are in fact the norm.

Yes, of course there are still plenty of girls and young women suffering the agonies of anorexia, but I would guess there are many more with quite a different problem. So there’s safety in numbers. Why worry about it?

Well for many reasons. Not least that when enormous becomes average we build up horrendous health problems for the future.

Marks & Spencer has just announced a new range of plus-size school uniforms – 23in waist for fouryear- olds, school trousers with up to a 41in waist. A friend’s 16-year-old daughter has just had to buy an age 12 skirt for school… and still had to have it taken in. That’s scary.

Even our dogs are obese – a third of dogs are heading for an early death because of their size, says the PDSA, who blame it on too much of the wrong sort of food and not enough exercise. Sound familiar? We are all, people and pets, getting too big.

So yes, the voluptuous Christina Hendricks is a great physical role model for young girls, not so much for them look up to – but rather as a target to slim down to.

NEW versions of Enid Blyton’s books are going to have an updated vocabulary as today’s children apparently find it tricky to cope with words such as “mother”, “father”, “house mistress”

and “school tunic”.

I expect they could manage. In my state school childhood I enjoyed hundreds of old-fashioned school stories without ever knowing what the “Remove”

was. Come to think of it, I still don’t. It never spoilt the pleasure.

What will really baffle today’s readers are stories of children allowed to roam the countryside unaccompanied...

no supervision, no bike helmets, no health and safetyapproved instructors, no hard hats for riders, no pizzas or burgers, no tweenage fashions, no 24-hour television, internet or mobile phones...

and above all, children having to think for themselves.

Compared to that lot, sorting out what a school tunic was seems to be a doddle.

WHAT children need most of all in the summer holidays, of course, is freedom. Freedom just to be children. Freedom to explore. Freedom to be bored.

Previous generations of children were chased out after breakfast, given a jam sandwich and told not to come back until tea time. Today’s children are largely organised, supervised and chauffeured hither and yon from course to playscheme and activity day. No time to get bored.

Shame.

Learning to cope with boredom is one of life’s great achievements and best learnt young. It forces you to think, forces you to get up and do something, forces you to make an effort, the ultimate self-reliance.

On the other hand...

Many years ago Smaller Son, bored, decided to turn the back garden into a putting green. An admirable scheme, you would think.

Until yesterday when, on hearing the phone ring in the house, I turned briskly and caught my foot in what had been, I think, the fifth hole. Still there. Still lethal. Like the zip wire he fitted up for his Action Men to get from the bedroom to the plum tree – and with which I nearly garrotted myself as I came round the corner with the washing basket.

Not as bad as a friend who came home to find her kitchen on fire. Her quite bright and apparently normal ten-year-old son, had decided to light a fire on top of the kitchen table.

Why? “Dunno. I was bored.”

So yes, although freedom is wonderful for children and although boredom can be inspiring, perhaps you can have too much of a good thing.

Especially when there are matches around.

Enjoy the school holidays.

The high price of failure

BP boss Tony Hayward, pushed into resignation after his handling of the oil leak disaster, is walking away from his job with a £10m pension pot – a pension of £600,000 a year.

If that’s the price of failure, what on earth would he have got if he’d done a brilliant job?

Slow motion

OFCOM, the telecommunications watchdog, has said that the gap between broadband speeds advertised by providers and what users actually get is widening.

Out in the sticks – even with a top grade package – we're lucky if our broadband speed creeps up to 2.5.

And that's only in fine weather.

When it rains, the damp must do something to the cables, because then the whole thing almost packs up altogether. Just like Granny's old knees used to do.

We're a mile from the A1 and we're still waiting for the 21st Century to arrive.

Best of friends

DAWN French says she and former husband Lenny Henry are now the best of friends since they split up after 25 years of marriage.

It’s always so much easier to get on well, isn’t it, when you live in separate houses.

Backchat

Dear Sharon,
I WAS interested to read that we spend £800m a year on cleaning up litter and I agree we should have much more stringent laws to encourage people to clear up after themselves. I also cannot see the logic that prevents long-term welfare claimants from undertaking such socially useful tasks that would be to everyone’s benefit.

Sponsored litter pick-ups are also much more useful than a mere sponsored walk. Instead the trend seems to be people asking for sponsorship for exotic schemes such as cycling the Great Wall of China or trekking in the Himalayas, which seems more of a holiday than the easiest way to raise sponsorship.

You hit the nail on the head when you mention respect, but sadly in this country we seem to have lost our self-respect in many ways and the rubbish on our streets is proof.

D Church by email.