Like most women, Kate Moss gets slated for ageing and vanity

Still a babe: a dewy-faced Kate Moss snapped in the street earlier this year
12 April 2012

Another day, another airbrushing scandal. Earlier this week, Snappy Snaps netted itself some fine publicity on the back of claims that customers were increasingly requesting their holiday photographs be digitally enhanced to iron out the blemishes.

Fat thighs, yellow teeth, ill-advised trysts with Stavros the waiter all can be erased with the flick of a brush.

The papers were awash with indignation(hubris/foolishness/end of civilisation as we know it, etc) but quite why anyone is surprised by this news I'm not really sure. A cursory glance at Facebook will tell you all you need to know about the vanity of your fellow folk. Do you really think any of them look like that in dear old real life? Most folks these days have ­photoshop or some other image manipulation software on their home computer: rare is the person who doesn't post his or her party snaps on Facebook, Bebo or Flickr without first brightening teeth, shading in cheekbones or, at the very least, getting rid of red eye. It's just the way things are.

Which brings me to Kate Moss. This week, photographs have surfaced of her holidaying on a yacht in St Tropez looking — hold the front page! — wrinkly. The wrinkles, it is alleged, are the result of too much sun, fun and cigarettes.

She might be enjoying herself now, runs the subtext, but look at the dire consequences! Let Kate Moss be a lesson to all women that fun is bad, punishable by saggy jowls and crow's feet.

Honestly, we're damned if we do and damned if we don't, it seems. I mean, let me get this straight: if we retouch our photos, we're vain and shallow. But heaven forfend we allow anyone to snap us as we really are, on holiday and without make-up. We live in an über-critical world where, for women at least, the merest signs of weight gain or ageing are pounced upon as evidence that we have let ourselves go/lived a louche life/been a Bad Girl. If Kate Moss — by anyone's standards still a babe at 35 — can be slated so mercilessly, is it any wonder that the rest of us are queuing up at Snappy Snaps to get the Palma pics retouched?

But here's the thing that really ­rankles. Just as photographs can be retouched so the subject looks better, so they can be retouched so the subject looks worse. We don't hear so much about this dark art: after all, who in their right mind would employ it? Who, indeed.

I've seen Kate Moss in the flesh, though admittedly not on a yacht in St Tropez (my invite for that one must have got lost in the post).
Guess what: she doesn't look that wrinkly. Nor, I'll wager, does one-time EastEnders actress Natalie Cassidy look that fat, former model Jerry Hall look that dimpled or Madonna look that ­sinewy. We live in a pretty sick world where our ageing bodies are used as a stick with which to beat us, and our vanities are mocked when we fight back.

Hillary Clinton's outburst

Whatever your political persuasion, the question " and what does your husband think?" is surely one that unites all women in an ardent dislike of the asker.

I loved Mrs Clinton's angry reaction but something still puzzles me. French might be the most common language spoken in the Congo but even if Hillary's interpreter was translating from Munukutuba, Teke or Mbosi, what are the odds that he got the words "President Obama" muddled up with "Bill Clinton", as has been claimed?

Covering up the gaffe only succeeded in adding insult to injury.

Children don't profit from this television

Have you been Waybulooed this summer? Viewing figures for CBeebies' new flagship programme have just reached the three million mark but I'm not convinced. It's like Hollyoaks for the under-fives: badly scripted, poorly directed and mostly unintelligible (and if I don't understand what the Piplings are mumbling on about, I don't know how a four-year-old will manage).

Filmed in Renfrew, at least three of the children who appear as "Cheebies" are Scottish, yet they all seem to have been dubbed over to have the same posh English accent.

There is something cynical about the whole programme that galls, particularly when you compare it with the labour of love that was Teletubbies or In the Night Garden. So why am I not surprised that 15 different licensees have been granted the right to churn out Waybuloo merchandise this autumn? Profits first, quality second, it seems.

I'm itching to bathe in some sunshine

As if the crappy weather isn't enough, now news breaks of a wasp epidemic. Brilliant. Is there any point in getting out of bed at all? I didn't used to be afraid of wasps, until a singularly cheeky one flew up my shorts and stung me where the sun don't shine. Sore, but I'd rather endure 10 wasp stings than the hell of being bitten by a mosquito.

Mozzie repellent wasn't top of my list when going for dinner at Geales in Notting Hill. We chose to sit outside because a) for once, it wasn't raining and b) one of my companions had brought her charming Irish wolfhound, Nancy, who wasn't allowed indoors. Not only was the meal disappointing (as a Scot, reared on lard, I can't abide it when restaurants don't change their frying oil often enough), the next day my legs were covered in mosquito bites. Be warned: London's damp and humid summer comes with a sting in its tail.

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