2 Wednesday June 8 2022 | the timestimes2
ALAMYP
lease join me in a big
shout-out to the man on
a British Airways flight
from Antigua who
refused to stop guzzling
his peanuts even though
he was told, twice, that it
might kill a 14-year-old
girl. Bravo. In the IAAM (“It’s All
About Me!”) championship, that kicks
everyone else off the podium, grabs all
the medals and puts them round its
big fat neck.
Poppy Jones, the allergic teenager
who was sitting near by, duly went into
anaphylactic shock, requiring two
EpiPen shots, with the pilot declaring
a medical emergency before she was
taken to hospital. But did the nut-
scoffer give a monkey’s? Hahaha —
duh. “All the crew could do was ask
him to stop eating them but he
wouldn’t,” said her distraught mother.
“[He] just didn’t seem to care that he
was putting my daughter’s life at risk.”
You see her mistake here? She
naively thought, in the MeFirst era,
that a stranger would weigh her child’s
possible death against him being a bit
peckish and conclude that the latter
was less important. Wrong!
She needs to learn that with some
people, “IAAM” always comes first.
Consider those passengers who’ve
been faking disability to demand a
wheelchair at airports to jump the
massive queues.
We all know the airports are a
chaotic shitshow but, ask yourself: is it
right and proper that you passing
through security a bit faster means a
paraplegic might miss their flight
because there are no wheelchairs left?
Of course it is! Kick away old ladies’
walking sticks and smash their
Zimmer frames if you must because,
all together now, “IAAM”.
You may feel guilt when you read
about, say, the woman paralysed from
the neck down who was left alone on a
plane at Gatwick for 95 minutes
because there were no staff to assist
her, but you must ignore that and
crack on with feigning your broken
back. It might backfire though.
I know someone who once
borrowed a wheelchair and faked
paralysis to get through US
immigration faster. But he was left in a
holding area for two hours with other
disabled people bursting for the toilet,
which was right in front of him. But heOh look,
shrinking
Wombles
It’s some years since
Charlie Brooker
described Boris
Johnson as a “mega
Womble” and, more
brilliantly, John
McCririck as a
“partially shaved
Womble”. But we can
all agree on this — the
Wombles were fat, yes?
Mike Batt, who wrote
the theme tune for The
Wombles, flagged up on
Twitter that the pointy-
nosed mammals at the
jubilee pageant were
emaciated shadows of
their former selves. He
was right. It was as if
they’d been on cabbage
soup and had stinking
keto breath. “Not
impressed with those
Womble costumes,” he
said, adding that the
originals “were fatter
and so much more fun”.
Had they been
airbrushed because
someone feared today’s
tubby kids would say,
“Look, Mum — it’s OK
to be obese. Get me
another Big Mac to fill
my XXL shorts”?
Obesity doesn’t work
like that, or we’d all
have been porkers in
the 1970s. I mean, look
at the lard-arse that
was Play School’s
Humpty. But the
Wombles were a bit
sexist. Madame Cholet,
the only female, was
always in the kitchen.
When she came into
season it must have
been utter carnage in
that burrow. I now feel
conflicted that I had a
toy of “Madame Cholet
and her tasty buns”.Even
briefer
briefs
If you’re bored, take
some scissors and cut
the buttocks out of your
knickers. Scoff if you
like, but this is how to
become “bootylicious”
and I, for one, wish to
shake mine. All the
rage are “butt-lifting
pants” that turn out to
be knickers with twobig holes cut in the
back so one’s bottom
cheeks literally hang
out like space hoppers.
But as online tutorials
show, you can save £9
by just cutting two
circles out of your
M&S briefs.
Life must be so
confusing for men. Foryears they knew the
answer to “does my
bum look big in this?”
was: “No, darling — it’s
tiny.” Now, that would
be insulting and the
correct answer is: “Yes,
darling — it’s huge.
You’ve got an arse like
a bag of washing.”
Always here to help.couldn’t get up and walk to it because
he had said his legs didn’t work.
Quelle pisseur, literally.
Don’t let such small inconveniences
deter you, however. As for the fear of
karma, we laugh in its face. Be more
like those MeFirst parents who faked
their children’s autism at Disney
World so they could jump the ride
queues. Fortune favours the shameless.
That’s why I say “respect” to the
mother who printed off a fake doctor’s
letter saying her child had just had
chemotherapy and made him put his
hair up in a baseball cap. Oh, come on.
Who cares about tempting fate if it
means less of a wait time for Space
Mountain?
What we’re saying is that life is so
much better and easier if you resolve
to BAST (Be a Selfish Tit). Start with
small steps. Put your bag on a train
seat and pretend to fall asleep; park
over two supermarket spaces, with
extra points earned if they’re parent
and baby spaces.
Then move on to booking a table for
ten at a restaurant then not turning up
without even bothering to call. Next
you can graduate to maybe leaving a
rude note on the windscreen of an
ambulance that may be blocking your
gate as paramedics save a heart attack
patient. My preferred template is one
from Stoke-on-Trent, when a woman
left a note telling paramedics “move
your f***ing van”, adding that she
“couldn’t give a shit if the whole street
collapsed”. This is exactly the spirit
we’re looking for! Now, off you go and
park in a disabled bay. Because you’re
worth it.Carol Midgley
I
have an addiction. It’s the first
thing I think about when I wake
and the last thing I do before
I go to sleep. At my local
off-licence they reach for what
I’ve come in to buy before I’ve
opened my mouth to ask for one:
an Elf Bar. The super-strong
disposable vape has boomed in
popularity recently to become the “It
vape”, the hashtag #Elfbar having
amassed 727 million views on TikTok.
I used to be hooked on cigarettes,
then it was Juul, the controversial vape
dubbed the iPhone of e-cigarettes.
Neither of those had a hold on me like
Elf Bars do. On a bad day I’ll smoke a
whole one. That may not sound like
much, but each device contains
roughly the same amount of nicotine
as 45 cigarettes. I wouldn’t have
smoked that many cigarettes in a
week, let alone a day.
An Elf Bar costs £5 to £10, so my
habit sets me back more than £150 a
month. I knew Elf Bars were having a
negative impact on my finances but I
hadn’t realised they could be seriously
damaging my mouth, gums and teeth.
While I was scrolling through
TikTok recently videos began popping
up on my feed of teenagers filming
their mouths filled with blood. Two
of the most graphic videos are
captioned “another fallen victim to
gum disease caused by Elf Bars” and
“when you ignored everyone telling
you to stop vaping and now you have
gum disease”.
I was shocked. After all, the
government has pushed vaping as a
healthier alternative to cigarettes. In
October the health secretary Sajid
Javid announced that England could
become the first country in the world
to prescribe e-cigarettes to help people
to stop smoking.
So what is the particular appeal of
Elf Bars? There’s the taste — the 28
sweet flavours include cotton candy,
coconut melon and lemon tart. Then
there’s the look of the devices, which
are brightly coloured and much
sleeker than their predecessors. They
are less hassle too: you can buy them
in corner shops rather than at
specialist vape stores and they don’t
run out of battery or vape juice. After
600 puffs you just bin them.
Less than 1 per cent of 18-year-old
vapers used disposable vapes at the
start of 2021 — by January this year it
was 57 per cent, according to a study
published last month by the
Department of Behavioural Science
and Health at University College
London. And it’s not just Gen-Z.
Elf Bars suddenly seem to be
everywhere, from the mouths of
young professionals on their lunch
breaks to those of drinkers in pub
gardens. In London Elf Bar adverts are
plastered to buses. The products line
the counters of shops on every corner
and are left littered in parks after
sunny weekends.On the UK’s leading online vape
platform IndieJuice there was a
279 per cent increase in the sales of
disposable vapes in the last quarter of- There are a handful of different
brands but two, Geek Bars and Elf
Bars, emerged as the most popular.
Robin Brooks, 19, who works in a
Starbucks in Manchester, took his first
puff on an Elf Bar a year ago and
didn’t think smoking one a day was a
problem until three months after he
started using them.
“First I lost my voice for two weeks,”
he says. “Then my gums were so
swollen that when I brushed my teeth
the amount of blood that would come
out was unreal. The bottom of my
teeth were stained from blood.”
He knew he had to quit. The only
way he could think to do so was to
break the ones he kept in his room, so,
one night, he submerged them in a
glass of water. But as soon as he woke
up the nicotine cravings took over.
“I’d never been in a worse mood in
my life. It was awful. By five o’clock
the next day I’d bought another one.”
His gums still bleed but, he says, “I
feel like it’ll take one of my lungs to
collapse to stop.”
He spends more on Elf Bars each
month than he does on his car
insurance, and visits his local corner
shop so often to buy them that he was
offered a part-time job. He says the
owner told him that Elf Bars were the
most popular thing he sold, and that
he could vape on shift. Brooks didn’t
take the job. “If I had started vaping on
my shift I would actually die.”
Could Elf Bars be behind Brooks’s
bleeding gums? Dr Sham Ibrahim, a
general and cosmetic dentist at Love
Teeth Dental in Surrey, has witnessed
the surge in popularity of disposable
vapes among her 18-year-old sister’s
friends, and is concerned. “It’s the
sugary flavoured ones, especially Elf
Bars, that attract the young kids,” she
says. “In the past year there’s been a
huge boom.
“You see all the kids after school
walking around with Elf Bars,
everyone has one hanging out their
mouth. It’s driven by TikTok. Scroll
through TikTok, you see kids dancing
and someone in the background is
holding an Elf Bar.”
Nicotine, she says, is particularly
problematic for the mouth. “It causes
‘vasoconstriction’, which is when your
gum has a poorer blood supply, so it
makes your gums more susceptible
to infections,” she says. “UsuallyI’m a vaping
When Georgina Roberts saw stories on
TikTok linking a health problem to a
brand of disposable vapes, she was
worried — it was the one that she used
My tooth was
actually showing
through my gum
at the bottom
Amid the flight chaos,
the It’s All About Me!
championships are on