The Road to Little Dribbling Read Online Free PDF Page A

glass, the kind so subtly colored that you feel like turning to the person sitting beside you and saying, “Is this glass lightly tinted or is Littlehampton ever so slightly blue?”
    In fact, the bus when it wheezed in had none of these features. It was a cramped and airless single-decker filled with hard metal edges and molded plastic seats. It was the sort of vehicle you would expect to be put on if you were being transferred between prisons. But on the plus side it was cheap—£4.40 for the journey to Hove, which was less than I had spent on a pint of lager in London the night before.
    I was still cautiously excited for I was about to travel through a succession of small and, I hoped, charming resorts: Littlehampton, Goring-by-Sea, Angmering, Worthing, Shoreham. I imagined them as the sort of happy villages that you would find in a children’s picture book from the 1950s—high streets with pleasant tearooms and shops with bright striped awnings selling pinwheels and beach balls, and people walking along holding cones with globes of yellow ice cream. But for the longest time—a good hour or more—we never went near the sea or even any identifiable communities. Instead we rolled through an endless clutter of suburbia on bypasses and divided highways, passing nothing but box stores, gas stations, car dealerships, and all the other vital ugliness of our age. An earlier passenger had discarded a pair of glossy magazines in the seat pocket beside mine and I lifted one out now in a moment of bored curiosity. It was one of those magazines with a strangely emphatic title— Hello!, OK!, Now!, What Now! Not Now! —and the cover lines all seemed to be about female celebrities who had gained a lot of weight recently, though none that I saw looked exactly sleek to begin with. I had no idea who any of them were, but their lives made fascinating reading. My favorite article—it may be my favorite thing in print ever—concerned an actress who took revenge on her feckless partner by charging a £7,500 vaginal makeover to him. Now that is what I call revenge. But what, pray, do you get with a vaginal makeover? Wi-fi? Sauna? Regrettably, the article failed to specify.

    I was hooked. I found myself absorbed in the sumptuously mismanaged lives of minor celebrities whose common denominators appeared to be tiny brains, giant boobs, and a knack for entering into regrettable relationships. A little further on in the same issue I found the arresting headline “Don’t Kill Your Baby for Fame!” This turned out to be a piece of advice from Katie Price, a former topless model with a pneumatic chest who has refashioned herself as a thinker and magazine columnist, to a rising star of similar pulchritude named Josie. Ms. Price is not a writer to mince words. “Listen up, Josie,” she wrote, “I think you’re absolutely disgusting. Having boobs and getting an abortion doesn’t make you famous!” Though intellectually and emotionally I was inclined to agree with Katie on this point, it did rather seem from the article that Josie was living proof of the contrary.
    The photographs of Josie depicted a young woman with breasts like party balloons and lips that brought to mind those floating booms they use to contain oil slicks. According to the article, she was expecting “her third son in two months,” which I think we can agree is quite a rate of reproduction. The article went on to say that Josie was so disappointed at having another boy and not the girl she had longed for that she had taken up smoking and drinking again as a signal of displeasure to her reproductive system. She was even considering having an abortion, which is why Ms. Price had leapt so emotionally into the fray. The article noted in passing that young Josie was considering book deals from two publishers. If it turns out that my own publisher is one of them, I will personally burn down their offices.

    I hate to sound like an old man, but why are these people famous?