Bank Holiday Sunday. I got in from a hideously hungover day at work and cooked an enormous pepperoni pizza. I KNEW, I just KNEW I was going to eat it all. It was one of those days. So to 'level things out' I added a bit of avocado and a packet of rocket to the top of the pizza, which seemed to make it all acceptable. I put my pyjamas on and ate the whole thing in one sitting whilst watching the Voice and re-runs of Desperate Housewives. Then I had a Galaxy Ripple, just in case my sweet tooth was feeling left out. I genuinely felt like I was winning at life because the pizzas were two for £3 at Sainsburys and I had a voucher that got me 50 Nectar points when I took advantage of the offer. I knew I'd regret not buying that Ripple, so I bought it and it turns out it was really, really brilliant, above average, as Ripples go. And after being eight weeks behind on Desperate Housewives on Thursday, I'd managed to get myself up to date in time for the new episode that night. So yeah. I was smug, feeling like I had my shit together. And what, I wondered, could make the whole situation ten times better? What else, but inane Hollywood gossip in bitesized chunks with more spelling errors than a Year Two SATS paper. Yes, you've guessed it.
TIME FOR SOME DAILYMAIL.CO.UK.
After glancing over a few articles which focussed solely on what Kim Kardashian had posted on Twitter that day, another link caught my eye. In fact, it was thrust into my eye, it being the TOP STORY on the website's feed. 'The ugly truth,' read the headline, 'Katherine Heigl hits the gym in unflattering workout trousers.'
As you can imagine, the thumbnail threw me slightly. 'But she looks fine,' I thought to myself, 'maybe a bit of VPL, but its not really feasible to expect a woman to wear a thong to the gym. These Hollywood starlets, their exercise gurus pretty much encourage them to double their heart rate in 0-60. Why inflict further discomfort on oneself?' I clicked on the link, foolishly expecting Daily Mail to be plugging a range of seamfree knickers. The truth was far worse.
'As an often-photographed Hollywood actress,' began the post, 'Katherine Heigl might want to seriously reconsider her workout gear.
Though she isn't known for her fashion sense, the 33-year-old should have known better than to wear clothing that fully displayed her flaws.
The grey yoga trousers she wore to a gym in Los Angeles yesterday were not flattering.'
OK, OK, OK. What is this? No, really. What is it. Why is this happening? Firstly, why would anybody care what an Emmy Award winning actress looks like on her way to the gym? And secondly, as a friend pointed out to me - shouldn't the fact that she's on her way to the gym be enough for you psychotic journos? If you don't like her bum, THAT'S FINE! She's doing something about it! RIGHT NOW! If I had a different attitude towards my body, this article alone would probably have been enough to make me want to scoot to the bathroom and purge my pizza, because while I'm not morbidly obese, I'm no Katherine Heigl. The woman is a babe, and has a body that most girls my age would kill for - AND SHE'S TEN YEARS OLDER THAN US.
Which brings me neatly to what I have come to term 'Daily Mail's Counteractive Article of the Week'. Those of you in the know... you know all about this. With remarkable regularity, the Daily Mail web writers produce two articles, the messages of which completely counteract one another, and then places them on its homepage, more often than not side by side.
This week, the article in question comes from none other than Liz Jones herself, the Daily Mail's bodily dysmorphic Queen Bee, who recently wrote a piece entitled, 'We're proof that glossy magazines can give you anorexia'.
This article was featured on the website at the same time as the Heigl article, and clearly states that Liz's interviewee, Rachael, 'obsessed over photographs of super-slim celebrities in magazines', and became anorexic as a result.
Being 'super-slim', which Heigl is, is one thing - but Heigl being criticised by the world's most read online newspaper because her backside has changed slightly since she hit puberty is surely making these issues ten times worse? SURELY?
Back to the matter at hand, anyway. After I'd had a little daydream in which I, too, was a beautiful actress in a Golden Globe winning series, with legs the length of Chile and a bottom that 95% of women would certainly not complain about, I hyperventilated for a moment about my lack of acting skills and all of the saturated fats coursing through my arteries post pizza-and-Ripple-and-four-hours-of-TV-instead-of-exercise-gate, and then... I carried on reading the Katherine Heigl article.
Well.
Wow.
That's pretty much all I can say.
At the bottom of the article is a photo of Heigl wearing a Breton striped top and a pair of skinny jeans, with the acerbic caption, 'The Knocked Up star got it right for once while having lunch at House Cafe in LA Friday'. (nb. Katherine, I really wouldn't take that to heart - sly digs are never worth noting unless the sentence they're buried in is grammatically perfect.) So that's a nice way to end things. Prior to that, the writer filled readers in with a bit of background info about Heigl's life at present. It is noted that Heigl has recently adopted a child, a little sister for her other adopted child, and is actively supporting an animal rescue charity, as, amazingly, on top of being such a great actress, she cares about other living things.
She sounds like quite a nice person, doesn't she? But I mean, what do I know? I'm paraphrasing. I'm not even sure if that's exactly what the article says. I wasn't really paying attention, cause lets face it, just like the rest of you, I'm way more concerned with how terrible her arse looks in those trousers.