A RAMBLE AROUND SKIRTS, PRIESTS AND CATWALKS

I think I need to point out for those who didn’t spot it that my blog of 14th Jan, Dharmaruci’s Advice Column, was actually a spoof. The “Christian arms dealer” who wrote to me with his problems was a satire on George Bush, and the chart I analysed in response was Bush’s.

I was down the local hospital the other day, giving a lift to a friend who’d bust his Achilles tendon chasing a school kid who’d lobbed something into his class, and I noticed that the nurses were all wearing trousers. It wasn’t their choice, it was their uniform. It looked quite good, and you could see they felt good in them. What I want to know is, why hasn’t there been a corresponding move by men towards wearing skirts? Unless, of course, you’re a Scotsman or a Roman Catholic Priest, who’ve worn them for centuries anyway. And as long as they’re not wearing underpants, there are no insinuations about the Scots’ manliness- if anything, the opposite, with those cold northern winds blowing around them. As for the priests, my lips are sealed.

There was a programme on TV a few months ago in which it became clear that a lot of the problems around RC priests and their sexuality lies in the fact that they have always been celibate and are suffering from arrested development. Celibacy is given a lofty spiritual status, but what these poor suckers don’t realise is that it was introduced by the church for financial reasons: it was cheaper to support a priest who didn’t have a family.

I was chatting to the same friend the other day, who teaches Religious Education, and he reckons the idea of renunciation in Christianity came ultimately from Hinduism, and God knows where they got it from. Some of them have practiced really extreme asceticism for thousands of years. Which brings me on to Ruth Kelly, a British Cabinet Minister. She’s in her thirties and is a member of Opus Dei. It’s pretty normal amongst them to practice some form of mortification like whipping yourself or wearing metal spikes that rub into your thigh. She’s one of these ghastly New Labour women who talk in earnest soundbites from behind a huge defensive wall. She makes me think that maybe David Icke is right, we really are ruled by 14ft bloodsucking reptiles. “I do not like her, she is not a man and she is not a woman,” as President Giscard D’Estaing once said of Margaret Thatcher.

These hosepipes that you get on the fashion catwalks aren’t women either. They’re NOT sexy, and I don’t know why they’re held up as an ideal. It must be to do with Neptune in Aquarius. Neptune is fashion, and Aquarius isn’t exactly the most embodied of signs. There it is: it’s currently fashionable to be disembodied, it’s sexy to be unsexy.

With Saturn currently opposite Neptune, there has been protest building against this trend. Spain and Italy – Latin nations that aren’t hung up about sensuality – are prohibiting girls who are too thin from going on the catwalk.

Neptune will move into Pisces in 4 years time, a sign that can also be disembodied, and which easily expresses this by getting overweight. The problem in Aquarius’ case is a detached or superior attitude to the body and instinct; in Pisces case, it is lack of boundaries, lack of a grounded awareness of what they’re doing.

So instead of hosepipes we can expect to see great balls of female blubber being hauled along the catwalk by teams of white stallions. Fat will be the new thin. These models, unable to move, will be waited on hand and foot by male eunuchs. Pete Doherty, himself a Pisces, will encounter Kate Moss’ fury as he has a string of affairs with these creatures.

I find it odd that while on the one hand the models get ever thinner, there is a growing problem of obesity within the population. I don’t think the obesity is a Neptune/fashion thing. It is more like Pluto in Sagittarius: death (Pluto) by expansion (Sag, another sign that gets fat). Is there anyone normal out there, anyone with a healthy covering of flesh who doesn’t feel bad about themselves?