The model Katie Price gave birth to her fourth child recently, a son. She and her new young husband, Kieran, an innocuous-looking chap with a lot of bleached teeth and aggressive musculature, called their son Jett Riviera. Jett will be a brother for Price's other children, Botoxia and Boobjobbia.
It is difficult, after all these years of observing Price and her deflating and reinflating mammaries, to remember why the woman is actually famous. Suffice it to say that the term “model”, which usually accompanies airbrushed photographs of the 35-year-old and her oceanic hair extensions, refers to her professional willingness to get her kit off in front of a camera rather than to her exemplary citizenship.
A career that began on page three (before editors made the gallant decision only to feature non-surgically-enhanced topless pouters) launched the entrepreneurial Price.
Now, with a business empire that includes an equestrian clothing line, perfume and the occasional stab at being a singer, as well as her highly publicised and much- photographed marriages, the gal is worth an awful lot of millions (more millions than she’s had birthdays, apparently).
She once candidly remarked about herself: “Some people may be famous for creating a pencil sharpener. I’m famous for my tits.” This is an amusing statement, delivered with the grace and panache of a punctured colostomy bag.
Just another glossy Monday
I woke up on Monday morning feeling about as jolly as a jam sandwich in the bottom of a school bag, and soon after found myself in the local newsagent sagging in despair at the prospect of going home again to read about the budget, I bought myself a glossy magazine that promised a world exclusive on Price's life.
I was hoping to catch some more pearls of wisdom dropped from her bee-stung, Clostridium botulinum-filled lips, or at the very least take my mind off a breakfast of gravely healthy brown bread and a handful of pumpkin seeds (I'm so sick of these random bursts of self-denial).
In reality, I would have been better employed lobotomising myself with a corkscrew, preferably the same one that unleashed the “special offer” bottle of Pinot Noir the night before.
Mr Wrong, Wrong and Wrong again
The long and short of it, for those among you who have busy, fulfilling, disciplined lives that don't include pretending you're not eating lumps of cheese on your slab-heavy brown-bread doorsteps, or collapsing all over the kitchen table, dribbling coffee and scorn on a nice clean magazine while attempting to read its noxious contents, is this: Price's previous marriage, to a cross-dressing cage fighter (the bloke she married after mislaying her former husband, the simpering, vaguely tuneful Peter Andre), is over, and, what's more, he stalked off with all her slingbacks (okay, that bit's not entirely true).
Since then, her relationship with a “doe-eyed” Argentinian model who took her home to meet his mama has also run its course; now, despite “wagging tongues”,“uncertainty” and “speculation” about her latest whirlwind foray into domesticity, Price has tied the fraying knot with the aforementioned Kieran, 10 years her junior and father of Jett.
Kieran is a builder and stripper, but despite Price’s self-proclaimed jealousy and emotional insecurities, she doesn’t feel threatened by his profession. As the couple explain in the magazine interview, which took place in Price’s Sussex mansion, Kieran strips in “cabaret”, with many costume changes, and it’s “funny”.
Oh yep, this one has longevity tattooed all over it.
Poor old Katie, eh? Once the babe who launched a thousand implants, with her celebrity dentistry, mane of acrylic eyelashes and breasts that were a barometer of a nation's taste, she now appears anachronistic, almost antique. The tabloids have moved on: now they vie for a sulky look from under the beanie of Cressida Bonas, Prince Harry's frosty squeeze; or a shot of Pippa Middleton's demure derrière.
Price does have one thing in common with those fairy princesses though: she too is a horse lover. Once she tried to buy a table at a prestigious polo event sponsored by Cartier, where Prince Charles presented the rosettes. She was refused admission – still too chavvy, apparently.
Those fine gentlemen, astride their sweating mounts and crumbling empires, didn’t want to fraternise with a girl who peeled off her T-shirt for a living; they didn’t want all that spray-on tan and hair glue sullying their gracious tables.
I hope Katie finds happiness. She got me through a grimy Monday morning; she can pull up a chair to my messy kitchen table any day.