Trash in bed?

As a frequent sufferer of insomnia I allow myself the odd trashy celeb magazine purchase. In an effort to stimulate seratonin production some people opt for hot milk or a hot bath while others avoid alcohol. For me there is something about paparazzi snaps of Amy Winehouse running through the streets of London in her tattered pink ballerina slippers, dripping Rimmel liquid eyeliner and blood everywhere that I find soothing.

Soothing, that is, until I opened up Elle magazine the other night to read a writer's account of being sent on assignment to Africa with Bill Clinton. Somehow she managed to stop drooling and quivering to type up her story for the December issue. And whilst she doesn't want you to think that she fancies the pants off him or anything ("The va-va-voom of Clinton's touch has dissipated in the years since I first met him. He appears older than his years. And he knows it.") but the poor woman just can't help herself and blurts out, "He seemed to pulse with pheromones, and a moment's eye contact had been a sexually discombobulating experience." But OH. It gets better. This writer should seriously rethink her career; she'd make a great Mills & Boon novelist.

"At every hotel and every restaurant and on every tarmac, he pauses to press the flesh, and there's always so much to press...His intellectual and humanistic appetites remain voracious, and when his gaze sweeps the dinner table and catches you, you feel as if you have been X-rayed by the eye of Sauron, the flabbiness of your own cerebrum exposed."

Do you feel really heady and uncomfortable, too? Like, you just read someone's explicit diary entry about how they've got a feverish crush on your close friend's father? Yeah...me too. So much for the trash in bed theory. Tonight it's The Economist.