David Charters: smiles in a manner which says “caught you”

Jul 22 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

THE shapely young woman with lime-green eye shadow, ear-plugs and a very short, floral dress crossed one long leg over the other one on her seat half-way down the carriage of the 8.37 train to work.

I was limping down the aisle towards her, giving half my concentration to the suppression of an eager sneeze and the other half to remaining upright on weary limbs, which had not yet been fully lubricated by their daily dose of anxiety, disappointments and unexpected jolts.

There wasn’t a seat to be had, so I turned round to stand behind the young woman’s head, noting that most of her hair was gingerbread-brown, but a little darker along the parting.

“Gosh, the wonders of nature,” I whispered to myself, before spotting the perjink chap sitting opposite her, who carried his 63 or so years on an enviably rigid frame, despite a slight greying of his eyebrows. An office-blue tie was sensibly pinned over a white shirt, behind the modest check of a jacket, which would have eased his way into the secretary’s chair on the committee of any suburban tennis club.

The girl crossed her legs again, this time from left to right, and the poor fellow didn’t know where to look from behind the gloss of his Dr Crippen-style specs.

But he turned away as all polite Englishmen of our generation do when presented with unveiled flesh. We don’t know where to look – the floor or the ceiling; this way, that way, any way but straight ahead. We shut our eyes fast and pretend to sleep or to consult our diaries. Shopping trolleys, mattresses, bin bags, limping cats, and the pattern of weeds growing up the railway embankments beyond the window, suddenly become objects of irresistible fascination. You breathe onto the glass and draw pictures of balloons in the steam.

But eventually some imp stirs within us and we risk a fleeting glance. At that very moment, her eyes meet yours. She smiles in a manner which says “caught you”, before adjusting her dress. You blush, accepting the silent reprimand.

These days, we sometimes see flat-footed burger-eaters on our grim streets, exposing their midriffs, so that we can admire the studs on their tummy buttons. But, to most Britons, flesh really belongs on photographs, where it is safe – otherwise it should be hidden away, in an attic room like a dotty aunt, who thinks she is Joan of Arc. Real flesh, warm and wobbling, should be kept under clothes, to be revealed only on special occasions.

Of course, the exception to this is the swimming baths. There, people cast off their inhibitions and emerge from the cubicles, kidding themselves, as they cat-step along the cold, slimy floor, that this is what nature intended.

A couple of weekends back, my wife and I took our 12-year-old son and two of his pals to the local baths.

By jove, talk about flesh. It was everywhere, quivering mountains of it, on the men, women and children. Then I remembered visits to the baths, when I had been about the same age, the boys in their trunks and the girls in their “cossies”. Maybe it’s just a trick of the memory, but in those sepia days everybody seemed to stand at the water’s brink on knotted, mottled legs, shivering until their teeth rattled, with rib-cages like goosepimpled washboards.

The water steams now, and most people are padded with layers of comfortable flesh. But the other big difference is the number of men and women with tattoos, some on rather bold parts of their anatomy.

When you are young and your skin is smooth and firm, it might seem sensible to invite a stranger with a twinkling needle to inject ink into your left buttock until its vividly coloured streams and pools form a likeness of Amy Winehouse in full throttle.

However, on the flesh-sagging days ahead, you may come to regret this enthusiasm for the bluesy songstress. A picture of the future looms into my mind. An ardent admirer, now arthritic and raddled, is hopping about with surprising zeal on one foot, while aiming the other one into the appropriate hole of his underpants. It is the introductory night to the Autumn Mists Retirement Home.

“That’s a nasty bruise, you have on your bottom, Albert,” observes Matron, clearly not a fan of Miss Winehouse.

The solution to this when I was a child was the tattoo transfer. These were pictures of your hero printed on a card, which you dampened and then pressed on to an appropriate patch of skin. The picture could be scrubbed off in a few minutes.

In matters of the flesh, I have always been rather cautious.

LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk