Right. I’ve got five days to get myself beach-body ready.

To Do:

  1. Lose three stone

Shit.

Melissa Odabash! Help me!

If you don’t know who Melissa Odabash is, it’s probably because you:

a) are a normal person and not a celeb/millionaire/twat

b) don’t read The Daily Mail Showbiz News online, which you must not judge me for as it is the only source of crucial pics of Tom Hiddleston ‘dressed down’ and news of who Victoria Beckham is ‘honoured to call a friend’…

Melissa Odabash (in the pic next to me – I KNOW, we are literally TWINS) is a swimwear designer-to-the-stars. There’s nothing our Mel doesn’t know about beach-bodies.

Her top-tip for feeling good in the sun: “I always say, if you’re self-conscious about your body on holiday, walk in the shade wherever you can. These little tricks can really help with confidence”.

Brilliant practical advice. While the fam are strolling along the beach and frolicking in the waves, I will be a mile back on the pavement, hurling myself into patches of shade between buildings, feeling MASSIVELY BODY-CONFIDENT.

I do so love the way rich, thin women like to constantly remind us poor, fat plebs that being thin and fabulous is EASY actually. My favourite celeb for this is Davina McCall. She is JUST LIKE US guys. She has kids and a job but still manages to fit in seventeen hours of stomach-crunches a day.

I mean she may not work full-time in a job that pays minimum wage, but she still definitely works at least a few days a year and filming adverts is totally draining. And she may not have to clean every inch of her huge house, but she still has to run a cloth over the kitchen side now and then which totally eats into her juicing time. And she may not have to spend hours hunting for bargains in charity shops or saving up coupons for the supermarket or trying to make a meal for four for 40p, but do you have any idea how totally awful it is when her PA gets the Ocado order wrong and the courgettes aren’t organic and are therefore poisonous and inedible?

Madonna is another insanely fit person. Looking at her body makes most women over forty feel like a gigantic, weeping placenta. The difference is, unlike Davina, she’s not making a fortune out of selling dvd’s and books and apps to plebs who need to understand that if she can look like a seven-stone, rock-hard, millionaire celebrity, so should we. No. Madge is just getting on with her job, which is being a Goddess of Pop. Leaving me to get on with my job, which is being a Goddess of Popcorn.

In fact, I’m already perfectly beach-ready. All I have to do on a beach is lie there smoking fags and drinking beer and building a sand castle with youngest now and then and chatting to Gwyneth about what we’ll do for dinner and whether we fancy a dip and gossiping with eldest about boys and hair and whether we’ll let her have a vodka cocktail later. And it turns out you don’t need to be incredibly thin to do ANY of those things…

So here I am in the new cozzie. See what I mean about the layering? Gwyneth is impressed: “Cool, it’s got like, bat-wings”…

And whilst there may be, I dunno, ten thousand kilos between me and Odabash, I think I still look like an actual person. A person who shouldn’t have to walk in the shade, but can strut her stuff in the sun.*

*Though I must confess to being absolutely BLIND-DRUNK as I write this so as to have the courage to place a pic of me IN A SWIMSUIT right next to one of Odabash IN A SWIMSUIT and then post it on the GODDAM INTERNET…