Notes on Kate Moss

The iconic blonde model turned forty this year and it feels like I've seen her on a cover of a magazine or read about her at least six times a week for the last fifty years in the Evening Standard, usually for taking drugs and/or tumbling out of a nightclub at 4am. It's hard for me to think of many people less interesting than Kate Moss. She's not nineteen anymore and her behaviour, aged forty, is just plain tedious and immature. I don't even find her very attractive, let alone beautiful. Skinny women with bodies like thirteen year-old boys just aren't my thing.

Yet I feel like I've grown up with her; we both hail from South London; both similar ages. It could be said that our similarities end there. She's a presumably rich, beautiful, famous, fashion icon. I'm not. She's yet to grow up and get a proper job and be a responsible person, even though she's married and has a child (naturally from a previous relationship). She's an appalling role model for girls. Sally Jones from Chatham would be more inspirational.

We know all about Kate Moss yet she remains slightly aloof and intangible, like Naomi Campbell. Maybe it's to do with the passivity required of being a model. She embodies the mythical sort of punk rock ethos of doing it her own bland way (except she's been rich and famous all her adult life). Like that other annoying blonde model Patsy Kensit, Moss went according to cliche and dated a succession of rock stars.

There are women like Aung San Suu Kyi, Michelle Yeoh and Martha Wainwright in the world, and, you know, just decent people, single mothers doing their best, aid workers in Africa, doctors and nurses. Then there's Kate blimming Moss, snorting coke (she'd be more controversial sipping Horlicks), stumbling out of a nightclub at 4am after attending an art gallery opening in Mayfair, and she's on page three of the Evening Standard. Every week. And she's not even interesting. What is her child doing? What's her husband up to? Do they approve? Shouldn't someone say something?

All the praise that gets heaped upon her, I just can't fathom it. She wears clothes for a living. And gets paid a lot for doing it. She has a pretty easy job that requires little skill. And did I mention she's not even very attractive or interesting?

Not to be confused with: Kate Mosse, author, also similarly bafflingly impossibly popular.