MILLENNIAL DIARY

IN Ireland we expend a lot of energy bitching about Trump and the country that elected him. We make jokes about ignorant Yanks eating themselves into oblivion and we return from holidays Stateside telling anyone who’ll listen about the unreasonably large portion sizes beloved of American food outlets. America has always made us feel a bit better about ourselves. For all their tall buildings, they’re really just a load of adult toddlers with poor impulse control.

For decades, Krispy Kreme has operated all over America, selling doughnuts to Americans at any hour of the day or night. It has done this, with no problems whatsoever. In its innocence, it thought it could seamlessly slide into the market of Ireland, peddling deep-fried sugardough to us in the same manner that proved so successful in the US. But we all lost our damn minds.

For all our highminded jest, it seems we are still in thrall to America and ready to jump on whatever cultural import it deigns to throw at us. We beeped and roared and kept the residents of Blanchardstown awake and after a week Krispy Kreme had to alter the model they’ve been using for generations in the US and close the Dublin drivethrough at 11.30pm.

This is why we can’t have nice things. Let’s remember this next time 24-hour alcohol licensing is mentioned. And so to a woman who hasn’t eaten a doughnut in over a decade. Kim Kardashian apologised last week for explicitly glorifying eating disorders in an Instagram story from back in July. I can see where her initial confusion about the acceptability of this might have arisen — she has forged a career through implicitly glorifying eating disorders, and no one seems to mind.

In the story, Kim appears in some kind of skin-tight, shiny body-suit-leotard-legging confection and films her sisters’ reactions: “I’m really concerned, I don’t think you’re eating,” says Kendall, “Whaaaaaat!? Oh my god, THANK YOU!” squeals Kim to Kendall, the latter’s unsure smile faltering. Kim follows Khloe around extracting dubious compliments, “She’s anorexic here [gestures to waist], her arms are like pin thin, they’re like my pinky”.

Naturally, people found this deeply unsettling and not a little problematic. On body-positivity icon Ashley Graham’s podcast, Kim said: “I 100pc completely understand where people would be coming from that felt that way... I know people that have serious eating disorders that have been in and out of the hospital for 15 years, close people. So, I’ve been through, I’ve experienced it enough to have known better... It was insensitive.”

As apologies go, it was actually pretty good. However, we all know that Kim is literally paid to promote a zero-tolerance approach to any perceived imperfections. The apology feels hollow when she has still refused to engage with criticism of her advertising of appetite suppressing lollipops on Instagram.

She doesn’t think women should eat. She thinks that anorexia is a compliment. Shut up, Kim Kardashian. On the podcast, Kim concluded she lost weight in a healthy way — working out with a body builder and using weights. Yeeeeeah. Okay.

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In totally unrelated news, two British women have recently died as a result of having Brazilian Butt Lifts (BBL). The operation, which hundreds of women travel abroad to get done cheaply, involves injecting fat from the stomach into the buttocks. In that sense, it’s killing two birds with one (drastic) stone. The death rate following the procedure is about one in 3,000 and happens when fat is injected incorrectly into the blood stream and passed into the lungs. It appears to be a procedure offered by cowboys with insufficient medical training; so many women are desperate enough to put their bodies and lives in the hands of anyone who promises results. It’s easy to blame the shallow women for their own silly deaths, because that means we don’t have to confront the more disturbing truth that we’re all part of a society that tells women they are only valuable if they are a specific kind of ‘hot’.

The latest BBL victim, Leah Cambridge, died following surgery at the Elite Aftercare Clinic in Turkey, a name that will be familiar to fans of TOWIE who follow its reality stars on social media — Lauren Goodger, Georgia Kousoulou and Amber Turner have all made trips there, as well as Geordie Shore’s frighteningly proportioned Chloe Ferry. Leah’s partner said that she had become ‘paranoid’ about the fat on her stomach after giving birth.

This is the inevitable conclusion of a world that worships at the altar of Kim Kardashian and her like. We should all take pause before hitting the ‘follow’ button. We should think twice before whinging about our bodies to others. Let’s not be a part of it.

****** ****** I tried. I really did. I tried to read the 8,000-word GQ love letter to Johnny Depp, alleged wife-beater. The magazine cover describes Depp not as an accused abuser (obviously, that’s not sexy) but as an ‘outlaw’, with all the romance and sexy mythology that goes with it.

Like a blockbuster movie poster it promises ‘The divorce. The violence. The excess. The vengeance’, as if it’s all a (sexy) swashbuckling adventure, as if we can forget the photos of Amber Heard’s bruised and swollen face.

Before he meets Depp, the journalist encounters two men who work for Hawthorne, a PR firm specialising in dealing with crisis management for companies and high-networth individuals.

Depp wanted a do-over of a recent bleak Rolling Stone interview (which ran in our own LIFE magazine). And what a doover — I’d say there were champagne corks popping in Hawthorne when the interview rolled off the presses. The photos, the simpering interview by a man who apparently has “never seen anything like” the sleeveless white shirt Depp is wearing, conspire to paint a picture of a man who is very cool.

Depp looks soulfully into the camera, his fingers resting on piano keys (such sensitivity!), Depp makes a concerned face, bathed in darkness, lit from above — as if he’s in a cell! It’s a tone-deaf cluster f **k, which GQ tries to wash its hands of writing: “All I wanted to do was come to Depp and ask him to give his side of the story, which up until now has not been properly heard. Before we met, it was agreed with his advisors at Hawthorne that both parties would go into this meeting with one simple aim: to record what happens candidly.”

It’s a cop-out. They emphasise this is ‘his’ truth — because in an era of fake news that’s apparently reason enough to give an uninterrogated sycophantic platform to a man accused of domestic abuse. I really tried to read all 8,000 words — but, if I were you, I wouldn’t bother.