In my distant youth during the Late Cretaceous, magazines carried advertisements for the Charles Atlas body-building programme, based on the before-and-after on-the-beach principle. “Before” consisted of a wan, etiolated muscle-free stick-insect into whose eyes even passing Little Sisters of the Poor in wheelchairs would kick sand. The “After” consisted of a tanned and handsome Hercules whose bulging biceps rippled with condoms full of huge, undigested walnuts, whose neck-tendons resembled hangman’s ropes, and whose bulging thighs had the palpable power of car-jacks. The kind of chap who put the pant into panty-hose, and for whom a hungry nun would shake free her armoured chastity-belt with a flick of her ankle and a winsome wiggle of her wimple.
“Before” vanished from my life, and I thought nothing more of him until I first saw Simon Harris a couple of decades ago, and lo, there he was, “Before” to perfection. “Before” had since managed to get elected for Greystones, where he apparently resembled the beach so completely that people wishing to skip Greystones’ grey stones over the sea’s surface would skim his feet in artful arcs across the tide, the rest of the Harris torso bouncing obligingly all the way to Anglesea. It’s a rum way to get elected, but that’s politics for you.
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