English Bodies

From "Table Talk" by AA Gill, The Sunday Times, Style section (July 31, 2005):

"What is it that makes English bodies so spectacularly repellent in the daylight? It isn't simply the clammy, adipose, maggoty-white flesh, with its zits and lesions and dry, scrofolous craters. It's the distribution that so noisomely offends. The softly curdled lumps that hang like fungus on beech trees, the swaying underarms, the double nuggets of cheesy flob behind the knees, the exhausted, stretched, who-cares haggis of gut, the shuddering, horrified backsides, with their wrinkled, slippery clefts and creases, the thighs pitted like rain on cold sand -- all of it shaped and moulded and bulged by waistbands and straps that were hopeful three years in the past."