Lee Randall: I don't like the capital's new Buddha belly look one little bit

Published on Tuesday 10 August 2010 12:39

THOSE of you who are reading this and who are based in Edinburgh will have noticed that there are a lot of extra bodies floating around town. OK, not floating, so much as careening off each other like greasepainted skittles.

Yes, it's festival season, and the streets are, as I've learned to say in the local patois, hoaching.

Judgmental cow that I am, I cannot help noticing - gawking at, actually - the astonishing array of tacky costumes on show. And it's not the performers I'm on about.

Fair enough - no-one, not even us locals, knows what to put on or leave off. Friends have often teased me about not having separate summer and winter wardrobes, but as the years pass, and more and more tourists return to their native lands shaking their heads in disbelief about our lousy weather and the jumpers and tights they were forced to buy on their summer holiday, to stave off hypothermia, it's become less of a running gag.

What I can't get over, however, is the sheer number of women I'm seeing who are wandering around in super-tight clothes with their bellies showcased.

I have caught myself making way for endless apparently pregnant young women, only to realise - catching sight of the beers and the fags and the sheer youth of them - that these ladies aren't helping to keep Earth's numbers up.

Mixed emotions? That's an understatement. You have to understand that I have spent my entire lifetime arranging my wardrobe to hide my protruberent bits - to the best of my ability, at any rate.

Loose, floaty tunics? Check. Baggy T-shirts? Check. Well-cut blazers? Check. Wide-leg trousers? Check. You getting the picture?

I realise I'm not fooling anyone - my size is there for anyone to see - but it's ingrained deep in my psyche that one should try to hide one's flaws from view. You could say that I'm an adherent of the Jiminy Cricket school of fashionology, which says that one's clothes should accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. As for Mr Inbetween - well, if he's jutting out into the street, he needs to be swathed in some camouflaging draperies!

Yes, part of me wants to admire these youngsters for their fearlessness, and the way that they run around in their too-short skirts; skirts that ride up, necessitating constant hemline tugging and giving them a herky-jerky sideways gait - two steps forward, two wriggling left and right, to adjust everything, and then onwards once more.

Part of me wants to applaud the brazen display of their pronounced, round bellies. I marvel at the way they're there for everyone to see, jammed into pencil skirts, and swathed in lycra leggings and figure-revealing shirting.

But part of me wants to go: "Euw, why would you want to advertise that?!"

So I feel guilty. Here I am, banging on week after week, urging everyone, myself included, to see the beauty in a wider range of sizes and shapes. I complain that I feel unlovable and unattractive because of my shape. Yet I am slightly queasy about girls who have no such compunctions.

I'm conflicted. Yes, I waste too much time worrying what other people think about me, and especially about how I look. I yearn for them to see past the cellulite and know me for the fabulous creature that I am.

But I can't stop staring at these girls, and not in a good way. I don't like the Buddha belly look one little bit, and especially not on girls who are still teenagers, or in their early twenties.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Lee.

Judge not lest ye be judged is top advice. Is it any wonder that I feel as though I should wash my mind out with soap?