Meaty, beaty, big and Beyonce.

Oh good, Beyonce’s got a couple of big, bouncing, bootyful buns in the oven. I’ve always thought that when your husband cheats on you, and then your sister violently attacks him in a lift, and then you release a massive albums worth of songs that ultimately serve as a bitter, angry attack on your life partner and make it clear you’ll have his balls for earrings if he steps out of line again, that the best thing to do is have another baby. After all, if history and experience have shown us one thing it’s that having another baby is easily the best way to refresh and secure a relationship. Yes, that must be true.
The burning barn of unsuccessful marriages (I’m still at the village fete, blissfully unaware of the inferno) is packed to the hay loft with couples who have gone through all kinds of problems and then rather than sift through the rational options come up with the one thing that’s an odds-on disaster. Another distraction and a new pile of turdy nappies in exchange for a rescued marriage is never another solution. And because it’s Queen Bee Beyonce it can’t be done subtly either. The papers are splashed with a sole image of her kneeling in a bra and veil (not sure why the veil but I’m sure some odious, late 20’s art director with an ironic beard can explain) looking ever so serious and clutching a bulging, baby-brace belly. She could have managed a smile but the message is that she is our self-appointed aspirational earth mother and source of all our hope and since she wants her next baby-related album to sell well she’d better look as if this is business, not pleasure.
Behind her is the least natural background setting yet conceived: a lifeless white room somewhere in a lifeless backlot of a lifeless studio; somewhere I hope I’ll never go to. It makes the background of a car ride in a 30’s film look more convincing. It should have James Cagney spitting feathers behind her. If I were she I be worried at the size of the daft flower display that’s looming up. It appears poised to gobble her up given the chance. Feed me Seymour.
But, naturally, the general reception has been beyond ecstatic.
“I literally tripped and fell at a formal Fulbright dinner because I found out Beyonce was pregnant with twins,” wrote one woman on Twitter.
What, literally? Well that just makes you a clumsy lump with far too little going on in your life. Either that or someone told you using a loud speaker and a sleeping policeman.
“This pic is a powerful statement on bodies, maternity & the sacred. Beyonce continues to push us to reimagine womanhood. A feminist icon,” gushed writer Laura Rankin.
Really?? It just looks like a pampered narcissist in a daft photoshoot to me. It doesn’t reimagine womanhood at all and I can’t quite remember when wiggling your arse in the air and making overtly sexual promotional videos became the stuff of feminist iconography. And blood and faeces and placentas are a long way off what anyone could call sacred. It’s semen and eggs and nature and struggle and pain and, if you’re lucky, joy. I don’t get out a lot though.
As one comedian on Twitter noted, “there are more black people in Beyonce right now, than in Trumps entire cabinet team.”
Proof, as if it were needed, that comedians don’t necessarily have to be funny. Barely a fraction of a comedian in this case, though they might qualify as a mathematician, since they can count all the way up to two. Statements like this really should be kept to oneself. No-one needs to dwell any longer on the deep, deep flaws of America’s new president. It doesn’t all have to relate back to him and in this circumstance I think I’d rather see more of Trump cocking things up and promptly sacrifice the sack loads of fawning, media-soiled creeps gasping their admiration because a tedious, multimillionaire couple have decided to drop another couple of saviours into the human soup.
“BEYONCE WAITED UNTIL BLACK HISTORY MONTH BECAUSE SHE LOVES US SO” wrote New York Magazine writer Rembert Brown.
What unforgivable, arse-licking piff. Shame on you Rembert, whoever you are. I feel a bit of a twerp not realising it was ‘Black History Month’ but if this is the way to celebrate it then maybe I shouldn’t be quite so sheepish. Having more children isn’t going to sort out racial equality and I can justify this statement by finishing with this, a final news snippit which tells you exactly just how much you don’t have to care about a news story that means so, so little.
‘Possible name suggestions included Yellow and Red Ivy – her five-year-old daughter with Jay Z is Blue Ivy Carter.’
Another piece of irrefutable evidence that we’re all doomed. The planet just cannot cope with this kind of crap.
G B Hewitt. 2.2.2017
I took January off, not intentionally, but because January is so relentlessly grim that I somehow retreated into a word hibernation. Not that this post is the first clarion call to Spring.