The Babe Year

They say that every woman has her peak in life. Her ‘Babe Year’. This is the year that one is thought of by sundry men (and boys) as a ‘Babe’. The time in life when codicils such as ‘for your age’, or ‘considering you have given birth to two large and hungry infants who are now Babes themselves’, or ‘discounting the stretchmarks/wrinkles/immense bagginess’ are not attached to the phrase ‘sexy’.

I have discovered mine. 1976. The long hot summer when I was hot and many a boy had urges to, untangle my hair and share my tent and get into my stylishly cut speedo swimming costume.

These recently unearthed photographs prove my point:

(I'm the one without the beard)

This is what happened:

‘Look at these photos we found,’ my Mum says.
My sister looks. ‘You were a Babe.’
I look. ‘Ah those were the days when boys were boys. Plentiful and totally lacking in technique.’
My brother looks. ‘What did you ever do with my orange tent?’

It is yet another example of life’s great injustices. I was a Babe, the boys were queuing, and when they reached the end of the line and into the Babe the sex was crap. It took another ten years for the quality of the sex to improve, at which point I was engrossed in a life of fidelity.

Now that my life of fidelity appears to be over (probably because the Beloved didn’t actually know me in my Babe year) (and therefore doesn’t actually realise that I was a Babe) I glance over my shoulder in a spirit of hope and desire. The queue appears to have disappeared. I am justly surprised. My Babe year appears to have been 31 years ago. I am justly surprised.

I see what must have happened. The members of the queue, some of whom sported the above terrible facial hair, have starved to death standing in line. Or possibly it was dehydration that did them in. Or they waited until 1977 and joined punk bands, had terrible piercings and expired from bad music and dubious taste.

Still, I may have been a Babe in 1976 but my 2008 bum is now a famous book cover:

Please form an orderly queue.