More Little Women

The Puffin is a well-travelled and well-connected bird. Last week’s unread article detailed the need for little women in my evening job’s bargain retail outlet to tunnel next door to Discount Toy Canyon and steal the toys. Many of the unread comments suggested other females short of inches – some known to readers – who might lend a hand.

Linda Lusardi

Wiser and luckier Puffins than I report Linda Lusardi to be tiny in real life. Perhaps because of a petite frame as, according to Dr Internet, she tips the tape measure at 5’4′. However, there is hope yet for the former page three model. At 65, older than last week’s Susanna Hoff, might Linda be shrinking? Yes, she might. An old Daily Mail article reported the mother of two suffered from degenerative disc disease.

In a thinly disguised advertorial for Ellactiva Chews, Linda revealed not only did she have her babies late, almost forty when Jack arrived, but was ‘hands-on’ when they were little. This took a toll on her lower back, ‘The pain would catch me whenever I bent down to lift one of the kids or some shopping.’

To get out of bed each morning, Linda rolled on her side and launched herself towards the floor as, on account of the pain, she couldn’t swing her legs over the bed to stand up. A trip to her GP plus anti-inflammatory drugs helped, as did ‘two special calcium chews’ a day. Once recovered, Ms Lusardi became one of the fittest fairies on the panto circuit.

In hope of a relapse, one is tempted to put her on the substitutes bench for our tunnelling. However, an ethical issue arises. Nowadays, Linda supports the Willow Foundation, a charity funding and organising special days for ill young adults. Also, the Rhys Daniels Trust who provide ‘Home from Home’ accommodation in support of major children’s hospitals.

The thing is, is she the type who would help to steal toys from a shop? We shall tip our hat to Linda and wish her well while making an excuse, leaving and hastening to one of her former colleagues.

Sam Fox

Puffins are on firmer ground, and with a pretty face closer to it, with Sam Fox. A contemporary of Ms Lusardi, Sam is a utilitarian 5’1′. Exhaustive research of her old modelling photos reminds us she is not small in every department with the possibility of her other dimensions not being conducive to a small space. Given she is now 58, since the shutter stopped snapping she won’t have got any littler.

In a turn of events unimaginable to schoolboys in the 1980s, the Mile End-born beauty is married to a woman, Bridgitte Olson, who appears to be the same height as Sam when the two are photographed together. The pendulum having moved in their direction, it swings the other way again when you ask yourself, would you like to bump into these two being PDA in a dark tunnel? Not to worry. As well as a microwave, fridge and inspirational posters (and buckets and shovels) our little workplace wardroom also provides a conversion therapy service run by myself.

What do they teach them at school these days? Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing amiss with the youth of today. We soon move the school leavers up to speed. They are good workers. But the day they arrive in the exciting world of value retail, you do have to wonder if they’ve ever been taught. Don’t blame the pupils, blame the schools. Not being able to tell the time and thinking there are six days in a week plays havoc with the rotas. Worse still, one new arrival announced herself as ‘gender neutral’. Conversion Corner called.

Moments later she sat in the wardroom with her hands on her lap as per the procedure. As instructed, she tilted her head to one side, looked up at me through her fringe and fluttered her eyelashes while imagining the bright lights of a South East Asian mega-city’s back alley in the 1980s.

Repeat after me, ‘Hello, Mr Worth.’

‘Hello, Mr Worth,’ a little voice replied.

‘See you inside, Mr Worth.’

Likewise.

‘Can my baby have your blue eyes, Mr Worth?’

Word perfect.

‘Pay bar fine for me, Mr Worth.’

Still as per the script.

Couldn’t have been going better but then her mother, who works in our garden centre, walked in halfway through a punchline which would have made even the most hardened Patpong doorman whistle through the gaps in his gold teeth. Guess what? Despite the duet nature of the performance, it was only me who was in two-tier trouble.

As for those inspirational posters, pour encourager les autres they include a list of sackings of, how can I put it, colleagues who’ve been caught taking their work home with them. Presented as a league table of branches, it would be petty to sneer at a particular part of the country, but having said that – stay classy Skelmersdale.

Jyoti Amge

Back with the Puffins’ recommendations, we have a winner. Or do we? At a glance (downwards), Jyoti Amge at 2′ ³⁄₄‘ should be first on the tunnel toil team sheet. But a problem emerges. Among the topsoil, clay and conglomerate we hit a brick wall. As every bargain hunter understands, eye level is buy level. The expensive stuff worth having is five feet from the ground. Through no fault of her own well out of the reach of Jyoti. Worse still, even if she did somehow contrive the booty off the shelves, her tunnel is going to be too small to fit the toys through.

Our loss, not hers. Having been born with primordial dwarfism, Joyti is an actress both in her native India and in Italy where she’s co-hosted Canale Cinque’s ‘Lo Show die Record’. Puffins are on firmer ground, and a better distance from it, with a young lady I should have suggested in the first place – Going-Postal favourite Greta Thunberg.

Greta Thunberg

Often described as 4′ 10′, her lifesize reproduction advertised on The Star Cutouts website measures 4′ 11′ from the soles of her feet (said by those who take an interest in such things to be size two) to the top of her off-blonde centre-parting. As with last week’s Simone Biles and Olga Korbut, Greta’s height is affected by her diet, or rather by its paucity.

In a Guardian interview Greta’s mother, mezzo-soprano and opera singer Sarah Magdalena Ernman, known as Malena, described how Greta when aged 11 began crying herself to sleep, crying in class and crying during school breaks. Teachers would phone up and her parents would have to take Greta home where she comforted herself by petting the family dog. She stopped playing the piano, stopped laughing and talking, and wouldn’t eat. Greta began to have panic attacks that sometimes included howling for 40 minutes at a time.

Greta’s mainstream media profile is lower these days, maybe because of her controversial support for Gaza which includes wearing an ethnic scarf and using the ‘no climate justice without a free Palestine’ slogan in her social media. At the other end of her career, prior to fame, in consultation with the Stockholm Centre for Eating Disorders, the Ernman-Thunbergs pinned a sheet of paper in their Stockholm kitchen and noted everything Greta ate and how long it took her to eat it.

Not a long list, all Greta would take was rice, avocados and gnocchi dumplings made of flour, potato, egg and salt. Eating five gnocchi balls would take over two hours. At first, Malena attributed Greta’s unhappiness to being bullied at school but Greta was later diagnosed with Asperger’s, high-functioning autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). As predicted by the doctors, the Swedish girl’s selective mutism passed with time, allowing Ms Thunberg to engage in a high-profile career in environmental activism.

Younger sister, Beata, is 5′ tall and a singer like her mother. Beata is diagnosed with ADHD, with elements of Asperger’s, OCD and ODD (oppositional defiant disorder). In her 2020 interview, Malena gushed about her peripatetic career,

“We carried on like that for 12 years. It was arduous but great fun. We spent two months in each city and then moved on. Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam, Barcelona. Round and round. We spent the summers in Glyndebourne, Salzburg or Aix-en-Provence. As you do when you’re good at singing opera and other classical music. I rehearsed 20 to 30 hours a week and the rest of the time we spent together.”

But one worries about the effect on the girls. It all sounds glamorous, but with my other hat on I recall Question Time panellist Rose McGowan (5′ 4′) reflecting on her child star youth of limousines and fame. In an interview on the Howard Stern Show she noted, “I don’t know if anyone can relate to this, but it makes you a little sad like when you go to a mall and you see like a mom and a daughter shopping….” There is much to be said for a life more ordinary. Rumours, if true, of a ‘party lifestyle’ when pregnant will also not have helped Malena’s babies.

No matter, these days Malena is a full-figured woman of a certain age and appears to be a healthy height. Her daughters are 21 and 18 but a girl’s final height tends to be determined a few years after menstruation begins. Assuming Greta’s womanhood to be delayed by poor diet, there is hope for her yet.

Ms Thunberg is already average height – for a Guatemalan. According to verywellhealth.com, based on the most recent available data, the average height of an American woman is a little less than 5′ 4′. The average heights of women worldwide range from just under 5′ tall to around 5′ 7′. An inch taller than the average Guatemalan come the ladies of East Timor, Laos, Nepal and Bangladesh.

In the meantime, we will give the Ernman-Thunberg daughters a grounding, quite literally, with £11.44 an hours jobs in our supermarket and overtime in the tunnel. If ever you break your journey at a provincial motorway junction to stretch your legs in a branch of Discount Toy World and become aware of under-foot scratching noises accompanied by muffled chants of ‘the Jews control the weather,’ tap your nose and look the other way.
 

© Always Worth Saying 2024