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Anorak News | Ma Cherie

Ma Cherie

by | 29th, September 2005

‘BEAUTY is in the eye of the beholder, and looking at the Mirror’s front-page shot of Stephen Smerdon, we see no glasses perched on his nose, nor an obedient Labrador dog by his side. Smerdon’s eyesight seems faultless.

Did Cherie turn Stephen to drink?

So while we peruse the national archives for pictures of his classmates from many moons ago, we are forced to accept his news that “Cherie was the prettiest girl in school”.

And lucky old Stephen was in clover when he became, at age 7, Cherie’s first true love.

Since hindsight gives us all 20-20 vision, the pub landlord is able to tell the Mirror with great clarity how he and Cherie shared a first kiss under a railway bridge.

“I will never forget it,” says Stephen, who now runs a pub in Hertfordshire. “She was such a pretty girl. Every boy was after her, and I was the one that got her… She was the prettiest girl in school by a mile.”

He goes on to say how while in the park with a group of other children, he and Cherie craved privacy. So they headed for the Iron Bridge. They kissed. “It was heaven and wasn’t rushed,” says he. “It was long and lingering.” And: “I felt elated afterwards.”

All very lovely, we’re sure. But while Smerdon reminisces and dreams of what could have been, we wonder why we’re being told this gem of intensely personal information now?

The Mail says Smerdon’s lips became unsealed when Cherie, in Brighton for the Labour Party conference, approached an Ordnance Survey stall.

Looking at the Liverpool street she grew up in as a child, Cherie “came over all misty-eyed” when she spotted the aforesaid bridge and remembered her first kiss. And the boy’s name.

That triggered a hunt to find this Smerdon character. And the papers found him. And now Smerdon is not all that happy. “If I saw her today I would kick her backside for naming me like that,” says he – although if he did, he’d most likely be given an Asbo.

Not that Cherie is a hard woman on a mission to turn the world of diplomacy into a supermarket trolley dash. No, she’s a girl who dared to love…’



Posted: 29th, September 2005 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink