Hot Flushes All Round

Jaywalker over at Belgian Waffle posted this yesterday.  I was particularly struck by her reference to a teenage  crush on one Mark Shaw, front man of an angsty indie band called Then Jericho.  I too loved Mark Shaw.  I thought he was dark, brooding, slightly Byronic, fashionably heroin chic and someone my mother would totally disapprove of.  Therefore he was legend.

Mum had a wonderful way of cutting through my teenage fantasies.  She would look at the picture of whichever person I had picked at the time, sniff and say disapprovingly: ‘Well, he looks like he needs a good wash.’ and that was that.

It turns out that Welshgirl also had a thing for Mr Shaw.  I’m glad to know I wasn’t alone in this.  Jaywalker informs me that he hasn’t aged well.  I believe her although I do not wish to look. I prefer to think of him with misty, age softened memories than in the harsh light of reality.  I am still reeling from the fact that Adam Ant, one of my first great loves turned from this:

Image of lusty young godhood.  To this:

image of pie faced lunacy.

It’s not right.  This is one of the things that cheer me up immensely about the ageing process.  It seems so utterly random.  Ugly children turn into gorgeous and striking grown ups, beautiful young things turn into tubs of lard with hair coming out of their ears.  There is some justice in the world.

I know it is not fair to be so judgemental or indeed bothered by looks. I am, as the woman who printed a post about the most excellent and scurrilous ‘dog or dish’ game, the first to hold my hands up to a massive streak of shallowness in this department, saved it has to be said in my favour, only for celebrities and not for ‘real’ people.  Yes, yes. I know they are real people with feelings etc, etc.  But on the other hand anyone who accepts payment for pictures of themselves in hotel dressing gowns draped across some Austrian blinds and looking wistfully into the middle distance is fair game in my book.  With the understanding that should I ever meet such people, they will naturally turn into ‘real’ people immediately and become exempt.

So, with this dubious moral standard as my justification I thought I would share with you a random list of weird crushes I have had over the years.  It is not exhaustive.  Hormone surges in the mid to late nineteen eighties meant that there were far too many objects of lust to be encapsulated within these pages.  I have just included some of the oddest.  These range from childhood right through to the present day.

The Milky Bar Kid

For those who don’t share my rich cultural heritage, Milky Bars are a brand of white chocolate available in buttons and bars which have been around for about forty years.  It was a firmly held belief in my day that Milky Bars were healthier for children than ordinary chocolate. We were  fed quite a lot of it as babies and toddlers.  It is of course total bollocks.  White chocolate is full of sugar and not much else.  Nevertheless we did not turn down sweets, so we gamely ate them.

The adverts for these products starred a small Albino style child dressed as a cowboy.  He wore glasses.  He was a geek.  I loved him.  I used to dream that the Milky Bar Kid was my boyfriend.  Of  course there have been hundreds of Milky Bar Kids over the years due to the marketing people’s failure to stop children growing up into ugly adolescents.  Here is a random sample.

It worries me now that I never cared which Milky Bar Kid it was.  Perhaps I was in love with the uniform, or my belief that he had a bedroom full of free chocolate.  I don’t know.  Needless to say, by the time I was ten I had realised that he would be a social nightmare and had gone off him totally.  Youthful love is surely fickle.

Mark from Battle of the Planets

Battle of the Planets was a Japanese cartoon set in space.  Mark was the leader of the gang who saved us all from something evil and bad that I can no longer remember.  I loved him.  I remember even at the time being slightly weirded out by the fact that I had a crush on a cartoon character, but what the hell:

You have to admit that he is pretty fit.  He is undoubtedly ageing well too.  The only problem would be his wings.  A bloody nuisance.  And the white suit.  Always getting stains down it.  Let’s face it, with a body like that, he is bound to be gay.

Tucker Jenkins

Tucker Jenkins was a character from the groundbreaking kids television show, Grange Hill.  Grange Hill started when I was a kid and my mum was horrified. For a long while we were not allowed to watch it.  It portrayed life in an inner city comprehensive.  It had mixed race kids, swearing, kissing, bullying and amazingly flicky hair dos.  We loved it. Tucker Jenkins was the archetypal cheeky boy with a heart of gold.

He is the actor Todd Carty who also played Mark Fowler in the hideous soap opera Eastenders.  I didn’t love him after he stopped being Tucker.  I ricocheted between wanting him to be my boyfriend and wanting him to be my older brother and beat up all the people who were horrible to me.  I reckoned if he were my older brother I might be able to go out with one of his mates.  Then I realised that his mate was Fat Alan and I went off that idea rather quickly.

Gerard Depardieu

I watched the film Green Card with Gerard and Andy McDowell about twenty times.  I don’t know if I was more in love with him or her lovely roof garden.  Now I think I’d take the roof garden every time.  He is still a bit of an icon, but I don’t know whether I could live with the nose long term. 

Alan Titchmarsh

Alan Titchmarsh is a gardening god.  He used to present the iconic television programme Gardener’s World.  A staple of Friday night viewing for everyone over forty.  Then he moved on to the evil programme Ground Force where him and his team of braless ginger loons would creep into your garden while you were away for two days and transform it into an ocean of pea shingle and water features, thus rendering you speechless and tearful when you got home.  I don’t know why I liked him.  I think it had something to do with him being a horny handed son of the soil.

Maybe it was the first flashings of menopause.  Who knew.  Still, I’m over it now.

James May

James May is a recent addition to my collection.  He is quite charming in a useless, annoying, boyish way.  He has foppish hair, ridiculous jumpers and a tendency for sulking that can’t be good.  Nevertheless I find him weirdly appealing.  See for yourself:

Hormones have a lot to answer for I think.

I think we’ve seen enough although this could run into several volumes should I feel strong enough at a later date.  Enjoy and please feel free to make me feel less of a freak by admitting any weird crushes of your own.