Living, as I do, in a hovel a matter of yards from a Somerfield's supermarket, I often do not have much in the way of food in, and have a daily visit to the little establishment. As I wait in line for a pensioner to find the required number of ten pence pieces from the jar in the bottom of her handbag, my eyes pass over the reduced Jean Claude Van Damme films to the woman's weekly magazines.

One cover always amuses me, because it has the tag line 'Real Life Has Never Been So Good!!'. This tag line would not be quite so hilarious to my cynical mind if the front cover didn't always promise stories about a mother bullied by her daughter, a wife who lost her husband in a plane crash and a woman who ate part of her own face. Aside from the whole 'I'm glad I'm not them' factor, is there anything actually good about these slices of real life?

Of the other publications from this loathsome genre, five of them had pictures of Katie Price, aka Jordan, on the front.

My brain, now persecuted by this shop's CD of jazzed-up Christmas Classics since October, drifted into reminiscence mode. It coming up to the end of the decade, it is fitting that I cast myself back to a the_jon_m that was ten years younger than the current one. I was a student here in the rainy city. I lived in a student hall converted from a church, and my room had a door. The door is the important thing in this flashback, because I decorated it. Mostly, I had used amusing postcards that I'd picked up from the Students Association, but I occasionally had flyers up. One was for a club night where the big guest was Jordan, from the days before she was Kate Price aka Jordan. The picture was one of her wearing not much, clutching her
implants and giving a look that either suggested she wanted to bed you or was about to run over your dog.

I moved forward in my memories a few years. Now I was a professional something, working in the city centre of Manchester. In the square outside the building, Jordan (still pre Katie Price aka Jordan) was making a public appearance for one of the local radio stations. When I dashed past, the crowd consisted of two bored researchers and Jordan, dressed in some pink clothing altogether too small for the cold, wet conditions. Given her public profile at that point, it was a pleasant surprise to me that I actually recognised her.

I've never understood the profession of Glamour Modelling. I've never been against it. I have nothing against the Sun dedicating Page 3 of its paper to a topless woman, but I don't really know why they have it there. I can't imagine that actually makes the day of the man or woman reading it go any better. I think that is the least of its problems, I'd personally prefer it if it didn't try and tell everybody what to think and wasn't so hypocritical in its attacks on people.

Admittedly, I'd prefer, also, if the new breed of lads mags did not have covers of a plurality of topless women when they are stocked at children's eye levels in shops. What is it about these women? All first names? Am I supposed to know who they are? Am I supposed to be glad that two of them are touching breasts? Am I supposed to be enthused that every second issue is a special boobs issue?

What actually happens to ex-glamour models? Can this be a viable career choice? What do these girls say to their career advisors at school? Do they say that they want to get their fun bags out for the lads for a few years? Then what? Now that Big Brother is over in the UK, what chance that its celebrity sibling will be there to recruit a handful of ex page-3 models each year? Most concerning, now that more and more foreign footballers are making their living in our leagues, less English players are earning incomes that can sustain a WAG lifestyle. Without footballers for them to marry, the job centres are going to be overflowing with large breasted, under skilled, platinum blonde twenty-one year olds!

Anyway, back to Katie Price aka Jordan. There was a time when I felt sorry for her. She had to raise a child with learning difficulties on her own. She bubbled along in the back reaches of the public conscious with liaisons with the normal range of footballers and pop stars. Then came 2004.

I was at a concert once in Essex when, as the headline act Peter Andre came onto the stage, the whole crowd turned and left. If you had said that the 2004 edition of I'm a Celebrity... would lead to the wedding of Katie Price aka Jordan and Peter Andre, then I may have been surprised, I wouldn't really have been interested. Aside from being two 'celebs' that I had seen at the tail ends of their fame, nothing about it sparked my imagination. Of course, if you said that this program would have also led to John Lydon fronting a series of commercials for butter, I would have laughed you out of the room.

This, as we all know by now, led to a marriage, some book deals, some tortuous records; by the time the TV series following the plastic pairing in America appeared on our screens, Katie Price aka Jordan's publicists had scraped every barrel going, so they announced they were splitting up.

Pretty much for the past year, every woman's magazine has had Katie Price aka Jordan or Peter Andre on their cover. I fail to see how two a week on average can have exclusives with the woman. Exclusives just somehow suggest that she won't talk to anybody else. I'm pretty sure that if you waved an ice cream cone at the woman she'd give it a previously unreleased tit-bit about her love life, thinking that it was a microphone. She seems to have even backlogged interviews, so that when she returned to that west London sound stage which Ant and Dec claim is really the Australian jungle, there were enough stories to keep that loathsome bandwagon going.
So, why do I care? I don't know really why she aggravates me so much. Perhaps it is that tonnes of the world's resources are being used to print this rubbish on. Perhaps it is that the only reason people are selling these rags is because they believe people will buy them. Perhaps it is because rather than doing something useful or self improving, a large section of the population seems to hang on her every move.

Maybe, one day, she will ask for an end to this media intrusion that she will claim is ruining her life. Perhaps we won't see the hypocrisy in inflicting every detail of her shallow life on the populace when it suited her, but shutting them out when the tables turn.

Sadly, I know what actually does annoy me about this. It is how I would feel if I was her kid. If one day I grew up to finally realise that my mother was the kind of woman who played her break-up for the press. This is not to mention the videos that exist of her online.

Please, as we enter a new decade, can we just forget about this woman, and concentrate on our own real lives, rather than some plastic alternative to one.

Love, Peace and Blues

The_Jon_M

14.12.09 Front Page

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