I’m writing this from the south of France. Provence is hot. The whited limestone flags are hot. The Roman ruins are hot. The figs and the flaking allées of plane trees are hot. The black bulls in the field are bloody hot. And naturellement, the girls are très chaudes. They’re hot, cycling along in little summer dresses. They’re hot, looking sulky and existentialist in town squares. They’re hot in pedal pushers and espadrilles. The waitresses are hot in waistcoats. They’re hot, with black hairy pits. Hot with ponytails. Hot with gamine bobs, and hot carrying straw baskets of peaches. They’re hot, because everything is hot. French girls look beautiful because we expect them to be beautiful. Because this is the home of beauty and, most important, because they confidently demand that you find them beautiful. In truth, forensically, if you look with a disinterested eye at French girls, they’re not genetically blessed. If you took a hot French girl and said she was a Belgian, she would become tepid. Belgium is not a nation of beauties; it’s a nation of confectioners and war-grave janitors.

This is the greatest truth, perhaps the only truth, about pulchritude: beauty is not in the eye of the beholder; it is in the eyeliner of the beholden. Beauty is a birthright; it is also a sleight of hand. It is a distraction. It is the nurture of nature. When I fly back to England, I know that I will notice two things: the old place will look surprisingly and miraculously green, and the girls will look like recycling bin bags full of windfalls, with a relentless, stroppy, obstinate and defiant plainness. When everything is wet and cold, English girls glower beneath their frizzy split ends, with their baggy pink eyes, defensively regarding the world over broken veins and puce, dripping noses, pursing their thin lips over badly shuffled teeth.

The summer is when those bodies, long held in supine, chip-rich darkness of shapeless unisex comfort clobber, are set free like blind, hairless, albino moles; the grey adipose flesh slops over waistbands and shoulder straps; bunioned and varicosed feet shimmy in shower slippers; arses are sliced by cheese-wire thongs; wobbling, pocked thighs flap and chafe like drunken mates. But nothing could be worse than English girls when they make an effort, dressed up for a night out: it’s then that they reach the heights of precipitous frightfulness. The clacking cankles. The tortured hair. The evil clown’s make-up. Predatory breasts, like pink water bombs. Flapping arms and glistening chins, and second-division mouths. The farmyard aggression and the zoo sex. It’s not just a class thing; it’s not only chavvy ladettes in the provinces. Look at the state of the totty tumbling out of Boujis, or waving chipped-nailed fingers at Glastonbury. Go to any £1,000-a-head charity ball and see the English memsahib, 3st above her fighting weight, swagged in a gypsy’s shower curtain, with a barnet that might have been spun in a sugary centrifuge. The granny jewellery and the blue eye shadow, the unhumpable hell of them all.

It is a truth that the English don’t expect to be beautiful. They don’t trust beauty. It intimidates them. Just tell an English girl she’s beautiful to her face. More than likely, she’ll punch you in the shoulder and snort that you’re being a prat. Look at the way they dissect and downgrade beauty. Look at the naked pleasure in a bad photograph of Kate Moss. Look at the magazines devoted to cellulite and sweat stains and plastic-surgery scars. The English at heart know that beauty is a cheat; it is an unfair advantage, a distraction from the real qualities that you want in a girl: the ability to fry a breakfast with a hangover, have sex in the rain without complaining, flatten an intruder with a left hook, sink a pint, tell a joke, take a joke, be a brick, be a mate, be a mum. Have balls. Of course, there are beautiful English girls — we’ve all got the list: Julie Christie, Charlotte Rampling, Kate, Keira. But they’re like finding diamonds in a coal mine. They are the exceptions that prove the plain and simple rule. There is something very unEnglish about this list. They seem to be not quite us, not righty Blighty. A far more English pantheon of inner beauty would be Edith Evans, Ottoline Morrell, Fern Britton, Joyce Grenfell, Margaret Rutherford, Janet Street-Porter, Hattie Jacques, Maureen Lipman, Edith Sitwell, Judy Finnigan. That’s our comfort list; our centrefold.

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