Welcome to our world, Gwyneth, where a few wee drinks is called a quiet night

Do you ever get the feeling that some people just aren’t really trying? Leaving out the most glaringly obvious practitioners of achieving nothing and taking the longest possible time about it, what about that Gwyneth Paltrow, then?

Now, she’s normally a pretty busy kind of gal, what with making the odd movie, maintaining civilised relationships with her exes, giving her children daft names, claiming to be unworthy of winning her tearfully-accepted Oscar, cooking up healthy delights aplenty and running a lifestyle company that covers everything from enriching face oils at 98 quid a pop to “wellness cruises”. Including flogging candles that claim to smell like her “doonstairs dipartmint”, as they say in these parts. So to speak…

(Leaving aside even the vaguest possibility that anyone in their right mind would actively choose to have that particular aroma permeating their otherwise blameless home interior, the immediate advice from anyone with even the flimsiest grip on reality would be: “Get that seen to PDQ, love.” But I digress.)

In her defence, she is a woman who seems to throw herself into whatever she does with a certain level of vim and commitment, but it appears that lockdown has not been kind to La Paltrow and we can all identify with that, even if we fall well short of her beauty and millions and celebrity boho existence. Sympathy comes to a screeching halt, however, when we realise that she shamefacedly admits to going “totally off the rails” during the pandemic. How? What could she possibly have done that would sit alongside some of the appalling behaviour perpetrated by idiots from dirty campers to vaccination deniers?

This Paltrovian horror apparently manifested itself in eating bread, pasta and having two alcoholic drinks every evening. My reaction? A cross between “Pshaw!”, “Amateur!” and “Welcome to my world”. Only the rails in my universe are obviously a bit further apart than hers and require more lubricating with mind-altering beverages than two paltry measures of an evening. And I would lay odds that her bread was wholemeal and the pasta was made on her own machine to her own vegan-friendly recipe. (I actually typed “friedly” there, which is a foodie Freudian slip if ever I saw one. But let’s not get silly about this…)

My answer to her self-deprecating comment: “I mean, who drinks multiple drinks seven nights a week?” is: “Me. Me. Me!!!” It didn’t actually need lockdown to

make it happen, either, but that’s a story for another occasion, presumably once the pubs open again and we can all get out more to get thoroughly buckled in public.

And as I shamelessly sip my second merlot and chow down on the delights of the Phoenix Bar’s chilli dog in a roll, I shall think of Ms Paltrow and muse: “Eat your heart out, Gwyneth!”

Blast from the past

In a moment of soggy nostalgia this week, I felt more than a pang of sorrow and regret when I heard a dull thud in the hallway and beheld, lying behind the door, the latest telephone directory. Yes, dear reader(s), they do still exist but even we, aged and clinging to past glories as we are, threw out the last ones so long ago that I’d forgotten their propensity to turn up unheralded every so often, like someone you haven’t seen since the start of lockdown and kind of forgot you ever knew.

It was a bit sad, thinking how fat and jolly and robust they used to be, just packed to the gunnels with contacts you couldn’t

live without, accessible at the flip of a wellthumbed page. Those tubby tomes were even used as an indication of strength – it apparently needed 8,000 pounds of force (whatever that is) to tear just one in half.

Not so now. In these days of downloading apps, consulting th’interweb and storing numbers on yer moby, the slim volume that floated almost silently on to my doormat could be pushed over with a wellmanicured pinky. It looked kind of weedy and pointless, not honed and toned or lean and mean in the entirely laudable pursuit of providing you and me with vital info. It was just kind of, well, limp and unloved.

I felt quite choked up, especially as the print is so small that you would need a magnifier the size of Jodrell Bank to make out individual elements, like any given digit of that increasingly endangered species, a landline number. Yes, I looked to see if we were in it. And we are. Call me a dinosaur if you like…

Now it feels like another example of all those things from the past that a younger

generation would have trouble getting to grips with, like party lines, pressing button B, horizontal hold, cars with chokes, Five Boys chocolate, loon pants and politicians who resign on matters of principle.

Try explaining the significance of Yellow Pages to anyone under 30 and they’d look at you as if you had escaped from a tattered volume of Dickens.

Or maybe from a dog-eared copy of an old phone directory.

Those tubby tomes were even used as an indication of strength

CONFESSION: Gwyneth Paltrow reckons she’s gone off the rails by eating bread, pasta and having a couple of drinks each evening.