Cellulite on the brain, coffee on the bottom

"YOU’LL never believe the women at work," said my husband, mystification flashing across his face. "They keep a drawer of magazines with pictures of celebrity cellulite. Isn’t that weird?"

Oh puh-leease. Or more politely: no. Nothing’s more heartwarming than poring over a new issue of Heat with my female colleagues, marvelling at the thigh dimples and cottage cheese buttocks of Britney Spears, Nicole Kidman, Jerry Hall and Beyonce. It’s the best ten minute boost to female self-esteem ever invented, and I’d be the first to award Heat a gong honouring their services to womankind.

Mostly the media do just the opposite, feeding us a steady diet of fascinating yet simultaneously demoralising glamour, ranging from coverage of Oscar fashions and endless stories of astonishing celebrity weight loss, to the lavishly over the top "At home withs" found in the big colour glossies. You know the sort, where not only the movie stars, but their homes are groomed to within an inch of their lives, provoking double the angst among those of us whose dust bunnies demand regular feedings.

Another strain of journalism shoves vast quantities of T&A down our throats in the form of lads’ magazines relying on heavily photo-shopped portraits of pulchritudinous and nearly nude pin-ups splayed about the place to lure in their male readership. Real women just can’t compete.

It’s only fair, then, that for every picture of Kelly Brook draped in a sequined "gown" barely covering her firm, smooth buttocks, we be allowed these wee glimpses of reality; the shot up the skirt that instantly reassures us that the very women we revere as style icons are - sigh of relief - also mortal and not unlike the rest of us. They merely scrub up better. (As well they should, for all the professional help they receive.)

But A-listers and punters alike may have reason to rejoice, for a new "miracle cure" is at hand-or should I say cheek. This week the Austrian firm Palmers started retailing a pair of "coffee" pantyhose designed to shrink bums and thighs by more than half an inch in just three weeks.

Microscopic ampules of gelatine containing caffeine are woven into the fabric. As you wear them and they heat up, the gelatine melts, dispersing caffeine all over your legs to be absorbed through your skin. (Skin is the body’s largest organ, I’ll have you know.)

Here’s the science bit: the Austrians claim that caffeine slightly speeds up the metabolism (well it does, key word slightly), helping you burn off all those excess calories running to fat and causing that unattractive bodily ruching.

A spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association says this caffeine is a "red herring," and that the tights probably work like support hose, by compressing the legs, stimulating circulation and eliminating water retention, since they’re a snug fit.

But, she warns, when that water is displaced from the legs, it has to go somewhere else. Don’t I know it. In fact the main thing keeping me from splashing out on the tights (apart from the fact that they don’t come in black), is a fear that I’d slither into a pair and sprout a second head.

It’s not such a far-fetched notion; I’ve seen it happen. Years ago I spent six months hitchhiking around Europe with a pal, living fairly roughly. Under those circumstances, like it or not, you quickly throw modesty out the window and become intimately acquainted with one another’s bodies. I was surprised, therefore, when years later and back in New York, I attended her wedding. The bride was resplendent in a meringue of epic proportions. She was also-bafflingly-stacked. My formerly flat friend sported cleavage that even Jordan could be proud of. I knew she hadn’t been to a surgeon, so after manually realigning my eyebrows from their roost up around my hairline (but leaving my jaw on the ground), I blatantly pointed.

"Oh those," she laughed. "I’m so fat I need an industrial strength girdle to get into this dress. It took me hours to wedge myself into it and I was left with all this stomach that I didn’t know what to do with, so I kept pushing everything upwards and made it into a pair of boobs. Like them?"

Like them? I gave them, and her ingenuity, a round of applause.

Makeover madness

ALTHOUGH she hasn’t an ounce of cellulite, everyone’s favourite girl detective, Nancy Drew, is about to get a makeover as the franchise, first launched in 1930, is updated for the Twenty-first century in time for her 75th birthday. This prompted me to adopt my most curmudgeonly voice to shout, Fiddlesticks!

Nancy Drew books took up all of one long shelf in my bedroom. I can still picture every one of those yellow spines, cracked from repeated readings, each sporting a magnifying glass and the title in black ink. I remember the covers, too, evocative old-style paintings of girls in clothing redolent of a bygone era, so unlike what we wore in the 1960s that it added another layer of exotic mystery.

Even the titles were faintly old school: The Secret of the Hidden Staircase; The Ghost of Blackwood Hall; The Clue in the Jewel Box. Today’s books sound more like romance novels: No Strings Attached; Whispers in the Fog.

The worst crime of all is that they’ve waved the PC wand over these books and modernised the language. I say a pox on your publishing house! Thanks to Nancy Drew I learned how to correctly employ words such as chagrin, coupe, and Titan-haired (this was before she’d gone blonde, in the days when Nancy was still interesting) while still a young girl. I also learned that Nestrelda could be a girl’s name.

I wasn’t traumatised by George’s moniker or her way with a toolkit, nor did I stigmatise Bess because she loved frills and chocolate and tipped the scales at rather more than one ought.

No, this project deserves a rethink. We don’t need Oliver Twist trucked out in Tommy Hilfiger and rapping to be struck by the power of his tale, nor do the Bennet sisters need a mini skirt makeover to delight and entertain. I say if the Naughties need a new heroine, invent her. Don’t insult kids intelligence by presuming they won’t fall under the spell of literature steeped in history. Even our friend Harry Potter has a whiff of the olden days about him, and it hasn’t done the boy any harm.

Sting in the tale

FINALLY, a gentle pat on the back and the honesty award of the month goes to actor Ralf Little, who frightened fans by collapsing at a charity football tournament last week and spending the night in hospital.

What did he do in the morning? Check into the Priory claiming "exhaustion"? Nah. He announced that he’d been roaring drunk a night earlier and was merely suffering from a raging hangover. We’ve all been there. Why I remember walking with my father in lower Manhattan when I was in a similar state. Seconds after murmuring "Excuse me," I vomited into the nearest street-side trash receptacle. He was suitably terrified. "Sorry Dad, " I had to say. "I’m just hung over." Funnily enough, it was the day after my busty friend’s wedding. Now I’m not particularly proud of this incident but, as I said, we’ve all been there and it’s refreshing to hear someone admit their culpability instead of playing the diva.