This is Norway

A friend brought this to my attention:

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There. Now you've got it.

Tilly: The formative years

So my mum attended a Tom Jones concert this week. Envious. Whatever you might think of Tom Jones, his concerts tend to be tons of fun. Or I might be a bit biased as he was my first concert experience - I think I might have mentioned that before.

What I certainly haven't told anyone though was his part in my journey to womanhood (BWAHAHA that sounded a bit too "Dear Penthouse, I never thought this could happen to me..." for comfort. I swear nothing in this entry is TMI. God.)

You see: About the age of ten, my two main pop cultural modes of reference to masculinity were, thanks to my mother, Tom Jones and Boy George.

Well there was Elvis Presley too, but as far as I could understand he was more of a Platonic ideal of masculinity, a sort of demigod that had come to show mankind what they should strive for in manliness, and then departed leaving Man with the knowledge that he could never compare. So that left me with Boy George and Tom Jones.

And Tom Jones was different - I have gone most of my life with a certain naiveté when it comes to references to carnal knowledge, but even to my ten-yearold ears it was pretty clear what Tom Jones was singing about. Sure my friends and I never reflected on the meaning of songs like Spice Girls' '2 become 1' but it was much harder to miss what a song titled 'Sex bomb' might be about. I was fervently searching Tom Jones' lyrics for sex references just so I could feel worldly and knowingly nod my head, "Oh I know what you're talking about..."

What I'm saying is that at one point Tom Jones' catalog of songs represented pretty much the entirety of all I knew about sex. Think about that for a minute.

And with my great deductive powers, I obviously came to the conclusion that Tom Jones, in the nineties, was the world's sexiest man. This wasn't what I personally felt mind you (I really had no idea what "sexy" entailed at the time), just what I'd concluded based on the facts known to me. There was a picture I spotted in a tabloid paper at the time - I can still see it in my mind's eye: A pinup shot of this ancient, hairy, chubby Welshman splayed out at the poolside wearing nothing but tiny black-and-white spandex trunks and a come-hither look. With knitted brow I'd look at that picture and think "In a few years I bet this photo is just going to drive me wild."

I can't think of a way to conclude this entry. Maybe something like, all things considered I turned out relatively normal...?