Red Alert

IT’S been a while since Geri Halliwell delivered “baby Bluebell” to an appreciative world.

And what looked like bad timing back then – the birth of Geri’s first child coincided with the messianic arrival of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt – now seems like providence.

Bluebell is the slow burner, the proverbial tortoise in the race; Shiloh is the impatient-to-be-noticed hare. Or hair. It is our duty to report that Bluebell is a ginger.

This in itself is no bad thing. Really. Bluebell can have a relatively normal life. Geri, no stranger to ginger tones, has a career rooted in her ginger, well, roots.

What is shocking is the non-gingers’ reaction. Bluebell is as ginger as a Jamaican cake, a Duracell battery in bonnet and booties. She is a grill head. She is a ginger.

But here comes OK!. And it tells us that Bluebell looks like the baby out of a Pears soap advert. You know, the child with the “shortbread-blonde hair”.

So much for girl power. So much for Ginger Spice. So much for truth. It’s not we who stare, says OK!, it’s the others who refuse to see the person beneath the hair. Granted, they need re-educating, shaking from their blonde, black and brown-headed ignorance. It is just that – for now – no ginger can be accepted in showbiz circles without a struggle. Bluebell needs to be reclassified. She needs to be a “shortbread blonde”.

“Careful,” warns Geri, and we fear a tirade every bit as fiery as her hair is about to erupt, “four of my girlfriends have got pregnant after holding her!”

We look again at Bluebell, checking that she is indeed a little baby girl and not some perverted, randy little man with a nappy fetish. “I think she’s like some kind of fertility doll!” says Geri.

It is hard not to feel for Bluebell, for whom colour is all. Bluebell is a biscuit. She is an advert for soap. She is a phallus, a rubbing post for ovulating women. It is too cruel.

But, still, shortbread, bourbon or ginger snap Geri loves her. “She has basically taught me what love is,” says Geri. “My heart has exploded. The other thing she’s done is taught me how to be a woman.”

Geri describes Bluebell as “simple”, demure and sweet”. Were it not for the hair, it might be hard to ally the child with the woman who spent her time spilling out of a Union Jack-print dress, stroking her fellow Spices and posing topless. Less-than-demure Geri tells us how “you can actually feel the uterus being pulled back into place”.

But Bluebell is more than a mere flower. She is Bluebell Madonna. Geri says “if she doesn’t get her own way I suddenly see this little diva come out. The Madonna!”

Being religious types, we have long believed Madonna to be a pretty demure type, virginal even. But to a feisty Geri even Madonna is a raunchy woman with opinions she is not afraid to express.

She is in touch with her inner ginger…

Posted: 3rd, December 2006 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink