Jilly Cooper - Men and Supermen

It takes at least two months for them to be bearable to look at again.

I can’t think why they’re so reluctant to grow their hair. Not only is long hair pretty, it also covers a multitude of sins, such as an ugly hair line, a dirty neck, protuberant or dirty ears, and carbuncles.

Dreadfully square men who fancy themselves often have it cut short at the back but slightly longer at the front, so that it curls on their foreheads and makes them look boyish.

BEARDS

I’m not wild about beards on men or women, particularly if the men have very full red lips, or their beards are always getting clogged with soup, cream or melted butter. I suppose if you shut your eyes you can fancy you’re being kissed by some furry animal who might be Jupiter in disguise.

THE COMMON MARKET

IN THE NEXT few years, the country will be flooded with foreigners, Frenchmen who would a-wooing go, Italians who take every remark you make with a pinch of flesh.

Wives will greet their husbands with the question: “Had a good Dago at the office, darling?”

When I was eighteen I spent a fortnight in Majorca with a girl friend. The beauty of the Majorcan men affected us like a fever and they soon returned the compliment. The first day we sat on the beach we suddenly became aware of hundreds of small, dark, handsome men edging inch by inch towards us on their stomachs like an army on manoeuvres, and soon we were surrounded. Every night we seemed to go out with at least six men.

After a few days my friend settled for a flamenco dancer, but I couldn’t make up my mind between a taxi driver and a telephone mechanic called Angel, until one evening the taxi driver took me for a long walk along the beach. A huge white moon had turned the sea to gunmetal.

The taxi driver removed his coat and hung it on a breakwater, then took my scarf and spread it out on the sand. How like Sir Walter Raleigh, I thought, very moved, and was preparing to sit on it when I was firmly pushed out of the way and he sat on it himself. He was damned if he was going to have his new suit covered in sand. After that I settled for Angel.

What other single men is a girl likely to get off with on holiday? Sexual athletes from the Gorbals in their prehistoric shorts and their sandals and socks. Pallid Belgians in snorkel masks, airtubes and flippers looking like something out of Doctor Who. Germans who spring 100 yards across a crowded beach to light your cigarette. Danes so impossibly blue-eyed and beautiful that they couldn’t be interested in women at all.

Beware too the French gigolo with his curls and flat stomach, his flashy crawl and his superb English. If you spill Ambre Solaire on his shirt, he’ll drop his accent in a trice and turn out to be some hairdresser from Palmers Green.

Even the stolid English wolf will find his sheep’s clothing too hot on holidays and emerge in his full colours as Playboy of the Western World.

When he gazes deep into your eyes and murmurs: “Let’s spend the rest of our lives together like that ah, um, you know, that classical couple who spent their lives together” he doesn’t mean it. Holidays produce beautiful ephemeral relationships but rarely husbands.

Angel the telephone mechanic turned up in England that winter. Without his suntan, without a job, but with gold teeth and a shiny suit, and speaking no English, he was a far less attractive proposition.

When Sexual Norman goes on holiday he gets drunk on the B.E.A. flight going out and sings ‘Valencia here I come’.

MAN AND HIS RECREATIONS

“I’D RATHER HE had his hobbies than other women.” I think a lot of male-female resentment stems from men spending so much time away from their beloveds—not even earning money, but spending it instead in clubs, pubs, or playing games.

THE CLUB

One of the last bastions of male chauvinism. Not only do they discriminate against women but also against each other. If you are Jewish or foreign and want to get into one of the more august clubs, you have to change your name not once but twice in case they ask you what your name was before you changed it.

If a wife rings up to speak to her husband, the call is taken by the porter or the steward who puts his hand over the receiver and asks: “Are you in, my Lord?” After lunch at a boys’ school, dining in one of the ladies’ annexes is about the most unglamorous thing in the world. Awful décor, overhead lighting, cress on everything and musty waitresses called Dolly with indiscreetly dyed hair. The ladies usually consist of a few felt hats, and their pale daughters fingering their pearls and about to go back to school.

HIS FRIENDS

“Darling, you must meet Leo and Roger, my oldest friends.”