Paper Monitor
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
The Daily Mail's new-look Femail magazine, as ever, has set Paper Monitor to thinking. "Why DOES Kate Moss look so haggard?" (Does she? Maybe in certain lights, but don't we all?)
"Why do you work, Mummy?" (Perhaps female readers might like to count the ways...)
Finally, and most mystifyingly, who really thinks white trousers are the perfect picnic outfit? (Perhaps Liz Hurley might like to count the ways...)
But Femail's contains a nugget worthy of 10 things.
If she has had Botox treatment, it's worn off, says a cosmetic surgeon, who can tell because La Moss is able to use her corrugator muscle. "Here we see it working as it should, pulling the whole forehead forward and lowering the brow, which is nature's way of shading the eyes from the sun, far safer than sitting in the sun with a frozen face."
Good for her. Paper Monitor is also rather heartened that the aforementioned cosmetic doctor suggests no nasty procedures to smooth Moss's wrinkles, but "a few glasses of water and some good moisturiser".
The Daily Mirror also piles in to tick off Moss's sins against her flesh:
"Frown lines: Squinting in sun
Broken capillaries: Alcohol
Discoloured teeth: Smoking and alcohol
Dehydrated skin: Smoking/alcohol/sun damage"
Still, she scrubs up well.
Aptly, (a previously undiscovered segment in the Mirror's Your Life section) features the verse Woodbine by Carole Coates.
"Light up. I want to sniff/that first sharp instant/of a cigarette."
But it is no ode to smoking for smoking's sake. It is, Carol Ann says, "both love poem and elegy". But, Kate-watchers, its not about some scruffy troubadour who might benefit from a shower. Its subject is the poet's father, a long-distance lorry driver with a donkey jacket and a spotless hanky.
And finally, back to the topic of holiday snaps, it's rare for a grin 'n' snap shot to make the papers unless there's something unusual about it. Perhaps something ...