Tony Parsons on Life, Death and Breakfast. Tony Parsons
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some airport security dimwit who couldn’t make it as a traffic warden confiscates your eye drops. No point in having an aneurysm because some gum-chewing simpleton is texting on his mobile during the third act of The Departed. No point in having a brain haemorrhage because you arrive at your hotel and your room doesn’t have a chocolate on the pillow.
But only young men fresh from having their laundry done by Mum have any excuse to tolerate the world in all its venality and stupidity. The grown men know better – they have been around, and seen it all before, and we know that if you save up and splash out for two weeks in the One and Only Ocean Club, Bahamas, and your room is not ready when you arrive, then you have every right to blow a gasket. In fact, you are showing exemplary restraint worthy of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King by not smashing up their lobby. I will never again be that twenty-two-year-old, stunned by the sight of an economy seat and a mini bar, excited by the thought of seeing Thin Lizzy in Philadelphia, and I can’t pretend otherwise.
The trouble is, there’s no end to the anger. You get in your car – and you want to kill someone. You go through airport security – and someone who has never actually made anyone more secure starts bossing you around. You go to the cinema – and then one day you can’t go to the cinema any more.
When does it end? It doesn’t. The rage comes as youth goes and we shall never be free of it. It feels like an ancient emotion, a hereditary anger – something that has been handed down through generations of men, a bug-eyed fury passed down from angry grandfather to angry father to angry son.
I can’t help feeling that the anger is somewhat wasted on the generations born in the second half of the twentieth century. I can’t help believing that this rage was used for more constructive purposes in the past – to fight for survival, to free the world, to build better lives for people with nothing.
Perhaps male rage will die out with time. Perhaps decades of peace and prosperity will make the anger fall away, like a coat of fur on Neanderthal man, or a set of fins that are no longer needed on dry land. Perhaps angry men will disappear into history – like men in hats, and men in uniform. But not yet. And not for you and not for me. For us there can be only one honest response to cruelty and wickedness and stupidity, and people who don’t say please or thank you.
Grumble, old man, grumble.
Until a man has actually made love to a woman with fake breasts, he can never really know what they are like.
Round, juicy and tempting they may be.
But then so is a bowl of plastic fruit.
For no matter how good they look, the spell is broken the moment they are touched by human hands. The real things somehow manage to be both firm and soft, they feel undeniably human, they move, they are alive.
In comparison, counterfeit breasts feel as though they have been stolen from the morgue. Replicant breasts are so hard. Bogus breasts are so numb, so lifeless, so dead. Once they are outside the two dimensions of celebrity magazines, a pair of phonies are suddenly a million light years away from the objects they seek to imitate.
And real breasts are warm. The fake breasts I have encountered have always seemed cold to me, but that may have been my appalled imagination. Certainly you will get the best out of them if you look but don’t touch.
But then that’s almost the point of fake breasts. They are not there to be fondled, kissed or felt, they are there to be admired, discussed, lusted after and photographed.
The moment they are touched – and I mean in the heat of passion, rather than out of curiosity or in the interests of scientific research – then the spell is broken. And this is true of all fake breasts, no matter how much money has been spent on this act of female self-mutilation.
Some women have reconstruction forced upon them. I watched my wife’s mother die of breast cancer. The battles that women like my wife’s mother have fought are insulted by the pumped-up twiglets on the cover of Heat.
The women who survive breast cancer – and even today, only lung and colon cancer kill more – are faced with hard choices. A lumpectomy – breast-conserving surgery – has to be followed with radiation treatment. A mastectomy – total removal of a breast – can be followed by reconstruction. But that means yet more surgery. These are all devastating choices for any woman.
But the overwhelming majority of women who have breast enhancement do not do it because they have fought cancer. They do it because of vanity. They do it because it has become a fashion option. They do it because they have an IQ somewhat smaller than their bra size.
And the brutal irony is that breast enhancement – boob jobs, in the baby talk that portrays it as akin to a getting a spray-on tan – makes everything from a benign lump to a malignant tumour infinitely harder to detect.
You would think that would be enough to put anyone off. And yet somehow it isn’t.
In a bar at the end of the world, there was a story they told of a man who loved a dancer although the dancer could not love herself.
She was a great dancer, and most nights of the week, if you were in that club at the rough end of a rough street in that rough city, you might see her. And if you saw her dance once, then you would never forget her.
Physically, there was not much of her. She had the natural-born dancer’s lack of waste. This man loved to look at her, and he thought that she was an undeniably beautiful woman. But-like many women who are told they are beautiful by men who have only just met them – she disagreed. The dancer had what a head doctor would call ‘body issues’.
She was small-breasted. That was the heart of her complaint about herself. The man had always liked her exactly as she was, and thought she was perfect – but these small breasts were a big thing for her, an insurmountable barrier between her and true happiness.
She had great legs, a great little bum, a lovely face-but in her mind it all added up to nothing because of her small breasts. She started talking about her breasts more and more – how she would have more confidence if they were bigger, how she would dance better, how she would finally reach a point in her life when she felt good about herself.
She wanted surgery.
Naturally, he told her that he thought she looked great already. And he meant it. But it became clear that what he thought really didn’t come into it.
She wouldn’t be doing it for him.
She would be doing it for herself.
And he thought that made sense – it was her body and she was free to do what she liked with it. And also he was young and dumb – he didn’t realise how the surgery would change everything between them.
So he got the money and gave it to her. He did it because he loved her. Then he went away. And when he came back to her town, he watched her dance and he drank his San Miguel and then he held her hand all the way home.
And – how stupid was this man? – he only realised that he was having sex with a woman with fake breasts after the moment of penetration. He had not noticed them when she was dancing.
But now he noticed them, because he could hardly miss them. They did not feel even remotely real. They felt as in-authentic as alcohol-free lager or sugar-free sweetener. Even faker than that – because they were no substitute for the real thing. They were impostors.
How unnatural those breasts felt in his hands and mouth, how bogus on the tip of his tongue, how hard pressed against his chest – that’s the thing that shocked him most of all, the knock-on-wood hardness of the bloody things.
She had ruined herself. Really, he could not think of it any other way. Her silhouette now had something of the pouter pigeon about it. It broke his heart to see what she had done.
He did not stop loving her.
But