I don’t know about you, but the public sparring match which is Nigella Lawson and Charles Saatchi is riveting me.
It’s a tabloid editor’s wet dream, of course, with all the salacious ingredients almost guaranteed to sell newspapers. Gorgeous curvaceous TV cook, millionaire art dealer several years older than her, publicly threatening behaviour, drugs, foreign servants, huge spending on fripperies and allegations of fraud by aforesaid foreigners. What could be better?
Apparently the tide of public opinion is supporting Nigella but that is hardly surprising. She is beautiful, talented, rich through her own endeavours and constantly on our TV screens. He is old, ugly, secretive and reclusive and not just rich but obscenely rich through the talent of others and plain old good luck in investment (you might argue he had foresight and exercised shrewd judgement, but that’s much less fun).
It seems that each new day brings further lurid allegations of wrong doing, law breaking or lack of morals. If it isn’t the fact (bandied across the front of various tabloids this morning) that they spent £25,000 on flowers in one year it’s their multi million pound collection of silverware stored in a special room and which costs £9,000 to clean (who cares? They can spend their money however they like). If it isn’t the coke sniffing, it’s the special fat free noodles which Nigella has allegedly been eating to attain her new, slim line figure. All grist to the mill!
I bought some of those noodles the other day in Holland and Barratt because say what you like about the rest of it, Nigella has lost a staggering amount of weight and surely it can’t all be due to stress? As you’ll know I’ve tried various diets over the years and not really had much success with any of them, or if so only short term. Whilst Christmas shopping at the weekend, I tried to find a new dress for Christmas Day, and failed because sadly, without putting too fine a point on it, I have an enormous overfed belly! So come post panto (about the third week of January) I plan to have another assault on the lard and therefore bought the noodles in anticipation (you may like to know that in an ironic twist, I am eating a homemade mince pie as I type this!).
To say fat free noodles look and feel weird is understating it. In appearance they look like nothing more than thin white worms, not noodle like at all. They have the feel of wet slimy string, all oozing about and slippery in the packet. I can’t honestly say they appear appetising in the slightest. They weren’t particularly expensive, but they certainly weren’t cheap and the packets are very small. I’m going to give them a try; but I don’t see them being a long term thing, although perhaps if you can afford to spend money on stuff to sniff up your nose and on costly flowers all year you don’t really care about that.
All the nasty allegations about one of my favourite TV chefs are rather disappointing (by the way she is also The Hubby’s favourite due to the food porn nature of her programmes. She’s lovely to look at, has curves in the right places and she can cook – what’s not to like?). No one is a saint, but she does seem to have had a rather colourful life over the last few years which, despite her earlier heartaches, can’t really be excused or justified. Mind you, Mr Saatchi certainly isn’t a saint either, so it would be completely wrong to apportion blame for the marriage break up to one or the other (allegedly he used to go round the house looking for dirt and make her grab the Marigolds and clean it up then and there – good job he never comes round to mine, then!).
No doubt this saga will run and run. There will be more scandalous allegations, and the press will have a field day. Nigella will bounce through it and after a short break will come back into the public consciousness more popular than ever (much like happened to Kate Moss when she was caught snorting coke on camera) and make loads more cash to fritter away on flowers. Charles Saatchi will disappear into his reclusive hole to be forgotten about by most and see his wealth increase further.
And no doubt some other public panto will come along with a couple more celebrities to entertain us. All depressingly familiar, and just showing what a shallow society we have become.
