Her upper lip plumped up. Permanently puckering. Ever-ready for sex or stimulated by food or bruised, or – most likely – fluffed
and buffed by the collagen of publicity.
Nigella Lawson: buffeted by the break-up of her marriage to
Charles Saatchi; embarrassed by salacious evidence given during the trial of
the Grillo sisters (former personal assistants whose successful defence against
fraud charges rested on discrediting Nigella as a prosecution witness).
Not Grotto or anything like it, but the Grillos are dunnos when
it comes to inflating themselves; whereas
Nigella must always have known (with a name like ‘Nigella’, perhaps she always had
to). In the tilt of her chin and the set of her mouth as she is seen going into
court, the domestic goddess keeps faith with self-promotion (requiring tireless
dedication to the sacred cause).
Motto: manifesto ergo sum; manifesto ergo ego.
Meanwhile on the BBC Radio Four Today programme, with pencil-thin lips (drawn on like a second moustache in the midst of his clerical beard) Anjem Choudary will not
condemn the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby, butchered on a London street in May.
Choudary will not enter into the personal domain where normal persons are seen
to have acceptable feelings, because he is there to promote the Not-I, the
annihilation of self. How I feel is not the most important thing, he insists. Compared
to Islam, he seems to be saying, we are nothing. And for saying this, he is
pleased to receive plenty of attention.
Manifesto ergo non sum; manifesto ergo non ego.
The negatives cancel each other out. Nigella and Anjem are mirror images of each other: posing and
deposing the supremacy of self; in their opposite ways, both equally selfish.
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