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Judging Miss Iceland, October 2000
So there’s me and Miss World and the candlelight. It’s the end of dinner, that soft post-prandial moment when conversation gets mellow and the hands start searching for something else to do. The current world champion is Miss India and she is everything you could wish for in a first-class stewardess. It would have to be first class because she’s a bit broad in the beam. Don’t get me wrong, you wouldn’t throw her out of a sleeping bag for taking up too much room.

When I say there’s me and Miss India, there are a few others here in the private dining room of the Rex Bar, Reykjavik’s only Conran-designed restaurant, but they’re mere shadows with the sound turned down. Mademoiselle Le Monde and me only have eyes for each other. I feel as if I’m falling into two mysterious, velvety, deep brown pools full – as they used to say on the telly – of eastern promise.

“Well, what would you do?” Miss India enquires, slightly more sharply than my mood requires. “What would you do if you were Miss World?”

And because my mind is already playing pass the parcel with her sari, I don’t really think before opening my mouth and have that all too common experience of hearing a voice that sounds remarkably like mine say, “Me? If I was Miss World, well, goddam, I’d go to bed for a year and play with my tits.” Hee Haw.

It wasn’t the right answer. It wasn’t even the wrong answer. It was so utterly beyond any sort of answer that fell within Planet Reasonable that Miss India’s face closed up with a clang, like off-licences on a Sunday afternoon used to. She in turn searched for the appropriate final riposte.
“You are,” she said from the bottom of her soul, “a very stupid man.”

It was, I must say, a fair comment. I was a very, very stupid man. How often does one get to chat up Miss World? Well, exactly – and I had to go and make with the smart-ass remark. It was my first day on the job, the dream job, and I’d fucked up. Stupid, stupid boy.

Ever since we were about 15 we have had this collective fantasy about the job. We had the interview with the careers bastard and enthusiastically said we’d like to cash in our GCSE metalwork for a job as Ferrari’s design consultant and part-time bikini-line waxer in the Playboy Mansion and he said, “Ha ha. Be realistic. What about the cardboard box factory? There are a lot of openings in cardboard boxes.”

I don’t think anyone’s ever actually quantified the furious spur to achievement the careers bastard has been to generations of boys. I’ve never met anyone who was told, “Son, you can do something exciting and fun and innovative that’ll make you respected and rich.” It was always the cardboard factory box or something. And, from that moment on, we started to have hot fantasies about the job. The perfect job. The ideal, I-don’t-believe-it, pinch-me-I’m-dreaming job, and when we landed it we’d go back and find that careers bastard in his hideous suburban semi and we’d grab him by his spindly neck and tap his head on his Georgian-style doorjamb and say, “I”, thump, “got”, thump, “the job”, thump, “cretin”.

When they say that men think about sex every 20 seconds they’re wrong. What we’re thinking of is the job that has endless, crude, pneumatic sex as a perk. Well – and let this be a beacon to those of you who think the offer will never come – I landed it for three days. I had that job and it came out of the blue. I didn’t even have to apply for it.

I was sitting in a café in downtown Reykjavik – actually there is only downtown Reykjavik – and a woman I had just met gave me an odd look and said hesitantly, “You wouldn’t like to be a judge for Miss Iceland, would you, by any chance?” Of all the questions since the question mark was invented where the answer “No” is not even a conceivable option, that’s right up there with “Would you like to minutely examine Christy Turlington for imperfections?” and “Would you like to run over Carol Vorderman in a steamroller?” I knew that this was one of life’s exclamation marks. That the glittering lottery finger from CV heaven was hovering just over my head. This woman called Linda, who by chance was arranging the Miss Iceland finals and by further chance had herself once been Miss World and was another woman I’d happily examine for imperfections, made me a job offer I couldn’t refuse.

So two weeks later I was back on the afternoon flight to Reykjavik airport, having torn up the diary. I was supposed to be in Hollywood reporting on the Oscars. Forget it – a lot of neurotic, self-obsessed plastic diva-dolls wearing designer net curtains and talking about egg-white enemas. Forget it. Stuff the money, stuff the sun, stuff table-hopping at Spago. I’m going to the frozen north to a city that looks like a tin model of Dundee, where the ground bubbles, a tree is a landmark and everything smells of rotten egg. I’m off to the northern-most capital in the world where they have man-killer winds and they grow the finest women in the universe.

That’s the thing, you see. Being asked to judge Miss Switzerland or Miss Israel or Miss Wales wouldn’t be worth bothering directory enquires for the number of your careers bastard, but Miss Iceland is something else. Icelandic women are the benchmark against whom all others are found wanting. It’s all a matter of taste, I hear you say. Well, up to a point. You may personally yearn for the fiery dark-eyed voluptuousness and thong-fraying buttocks of Copacabanas; you may grow purple-tipped thinking of the elegant, swaying, cone-breasted princess from the appropriately named Horn of Africa; or, indeed, there may be a few who lust after nothing but the softly fawn-eyed, caramel-tummied, blossom-bedecked teenagers of the South Seas. But the point of Icelandic girls is that it’s not just skin-deep. We’re not talking some two-dimensional centerfold fantasy.

In Iceland, what’s under the bonnet is quite erotically high-octane as the bodywork. While other nations may boast women of a sublime pulchritudinocity, convention and caprice, custom and culture mean that the eye writes cheques the body is never going to cash. But not in Iceland. I have never been to a place where predatory sex is such an equal-opportunities employer. The girls have a directness that borders on rudery. There is a vaunting national self-confidence that almost amounts to Posturepedic arrogance.

That’s not, I hasten to add, to say that the place is one long, easy lay – an 18-30 Nordic shagathon that’s just gagging for charabanc-thank-you-mam sexual tourists. Quite the opposite. Icelandic girls tend to cut the crap. They’re nobody’s fools or floozies. They’re not just anybody’s, but they do think that anybody could be theirs and that’s what makes them so attractive. Sexuality, sexiness and nubility are all things that come from the inside and with Icelandic girls it shows on the outside.

How they got to be like this and so unlike the lasses down your local is a mystery. It also turned out to be a bit of a blow for the Miss Iceland competition. You see, a blind man with a sense of smell could pick the contestants for Miss Iceland and come up with a good selection. My initial reaction to seeing the contestants was, “Well, yes, this is a fabulous collection of very pretty, self-assured girls but why isn’t the waitress one of them? Or that girl I just passed in the street?”

Beauty pageants are, as we all know, faintly ridiculous, reducing sexuality and attraction to the dimmest lowest common denominator but, even given this premise, choosing Miss Iceland is still invidious. It’s like choosing the prettiest apple in an orchard or perhaps the tastiest without being able to take a nibble. Oh, what the hell – I should complain.

My fellow judges were Claudia Schiffer and, unfortunately, Tim Jefferies plus the ex-Miss World (1988), Linda Petursdottir, and a couple of Icelandic gents, one of whom was called Thor. But despite all the excitement and rioting beauty, I became obsessed with Miss India. It’s a sad truth that I always want to impress the one person in any room whom I know despises me. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I’m ashamed to say I came close to stalking her. Apart from her obvious and sickly addictive antipathy to me, she was just so odd. The window into the life of a reigning Miss World was fascinating. She spends a year as a sort of glittering refugee – being shoved from one airport to the next, picked up in taxis, taken to dinners, photographed and shoved off again.

Miss India travels with a chaperone – a plain, middle-aged lady with all the gimlet-eyed thin-lipped malevolence of her calling. A woman who knew, on her charge’s behalf, how to say “No” in 37 languages, she’d been chaperoning Miss Worlds for most of her career. “I love every minute of it,” she lied. Imagine that as a job-caught forever carrying the tickets through someone else’s glory years. Changing the hotel rooms, explaining that she won’t eat pork and won’t be photographed in the swimming pool with the Minister of the Interior’s son. The world rolled past her: Miss Turks and Caicos; Miss Fiji; Miss South Africa; Miss Lost Life.

The two of them together were a sad couple. I spied them going back to the hotel after a gala banquet with speeches. Miss India doesn’t stay late; she doesn’t nightclub or dance; she needs her beauty sleep. Miss India towered over her minder. Neither spoke, having obviously run out of conversation a dozen airports ago, having never become friends, joined by this ridiculous title and its absurd ambassadorial role of bringing love and peace from no one who matters to people who aren’t listening.

The phoney, semi-diplomatic role of Miss World is highlighted by the fact that the chaperone at all times carries a plastic bag that contains a special box. In it is the crown and sash of office, like those of the presidents of Russia and America. It is always there in the background – the peace and love version of the nuclear button. Miss World the special envoy from Planet Smile, here to spread the word on behalf of hugely tall, pneumatic girls with hard-hat hair and 1976 make-up.

Miss India herself is a perfect example of the catwalk diplomatic corps. She is utterly, utterly humourless. I’m not just saying that because she didn’t laugh at my jokes. For her, humour is plainly a gigantic human failing and an expression of an absence of gravitas. She has dozens of degrees in things as disparate and appealing as accountancy and zoology. She also plays the classical sitar, but what makes Miss India particularly suited to her role of ambassador is her attitude to sex. She’s against it. Not in principle, but as recreation. She thinks most men are silly. Their attitude to her huge, bouncy-castle body and sphinx-like face is demeaning and pathetic. It is obvious that the men she meets on her travels are only after one thing – well, maybe four or five things, but all in the same general ballpark. Sex belongs in marriage and marriage, contrarily is best brokered without thoughts of sex. In this she ideally evokes the Miss World ethos, which is sexless sex.

You don’t have to be Desmond Morris to understand that lining up a lot of girls and picking the most beautiful is all about humping, but Miss Worlds are supposed to be sexless. They aren’t just virgins for a year, they have to be Barbie virgins. Even to imagine they might own organs of fun is a heresy. Girls have been stripped of the chaperone’s sash and crown for having children, an irrefutable sign that sex of some sort must have taken place on or near them. Boyfriends or husbands are not only discouraged by are also a heresy.

This was Miss India’s first visit to Iceland. It was her first sight of snow, something she approached with the insouciance or a Persian cat being shown a hot bath. I tried to imagine Iceland as seen through her eyes. This cold white land of hot blonde women was the antithesis of everything she believed about intergender bodily contact and attraction. All of us judges were taken for a morning’s snowmobiling. It’s funny and fast and silly. Snow makes you silly. We threw snowballs, fell over, laughed, pushed each other and generally behaved like children. That’s the point of snow. Miss India sat in a hut and watched through the window. The heavy weight of her responsibility as ambassador of poise forbade her from joining in.

“I expect you’ve eaten all our lunch,” I said in a jolly, joshing manner, in an attempt to build bridges. She just rolled those huge eyes at the ceiling and whispered, “Stupid, stupid man.” Done it again.

The pageant itself was remarkably good fun. Dinner in a revolving restaurant that made everyone feel queasy, and then, before the televised catwalk bit, we judges were left backstage to do the all-important questioning of the contestants. This is very nerve-racking, for us not them. It’s difficult not to appear as a sleazy slave dealer looking over the merchandise. The girls were wearing sheets while they had their hair and make-up done. Some of them were wearing more sheet than others. Tim’s big question was, “Could you change the wheel on a Land Cruiser?” This being Iceland, the girls laughed at him pitifully. Of course they could change the wheel on a Land Cruiser. Could he? Er, no he couldn’t. “Never mind, just stay with your vehicle,” they shouted. “One of us will be along shortly.”

Claudia asked if any of them wanted to be models. Very few of them did. They wanted to travel, to have fun, to get on with their studies. Not one said she wanted to work with children or for world peace. None of them said their turn-ons were kindness, sunsets and baby animals; or their turn-offs bad breath, argumentative people, pollution and intolerance. They thought Miss World was a bit of fun. None of them took it seriously. Neither did their friends. They didn’t much mind who won except that the travel scholarship would be useful. There certainly, definitely, wouldn’t be any tears.

Miss India looked on with blank horror. What, I asked wittily, was their favoured form of contraception? I might well have asked what their favourite fabric softener was. You have sex; you take precautions. Who’s so weird as to have a favourite bit of rubber or gel or chemical? Quite right – it was a dumb question.

One girl flirted outrageously, standing very close, giving it lots of eyes and teeth and lots of touching. Now I have no illusions about my irresistibility – well, of course I probably have tons of illusions, but not when it comes to 46-year-old men in suits interviewing 19-year-old girls in sheets. She did it just to see if she could, just as a bit of amusement.

The parade was a weirdly Nordic affair. A mix of in-your-face leering and a social workers’ convention. In between the parading girls there was a speech by a Down’s syndrome girl. Anywhere else this would have seemed like screamingly bad taste. Here it was a natural setting of priorities. Some things are just more important than others.

The final decision was quite quick. We weren’t going to argue the toss and, actually, watching Miss India in her supermarket monarch crown and end-of-the-pier sash, I suddenly thought, “I don’t want to inflict the possibility of a sterile year in VIP lounges with a chaperone on any Icelandic girl." Perhaps if you’ve come from the middle classes of Bombay and the corset of steely etiquette and polished smiles chimes with your own culture, then being Miss World mightn’t be an unreasonable way to spend a year. It might even be a title she could wear with modest pride in the years to come. But for an Icelandic girl, for whom everything it represents cuts against the sophisticated and deeply liberal modernity, I can’t think of anything worse. To inflict that diplomatic sexless baggage on one of these young women would be simply cruel, although I insisted my flirt came third. I thought it would amuse her.

The winner was a very photogenic girl who did want to be a model. She already had an agent. Claudia said her face was “very now”. She could be a great success. The title might help. There was a problem though. As Claudia had to announce the winner, she wrote down the name.
“How do you spell that? D…o…g. She’s called Miss Dog?”

At the party in the disco afterwards the girls got faceless, danced until their clothes fell off and snogged lucky boys. There were no tears. Miss India went home to bed. I caught sight of her the next day in the airport, trailing her nanny and the bag off to God knows where in the waiting Mercedes. I shouted, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” She flashed a big smile, and didn’t mean a single tooth of it. What a woman. I’ve never met anyone who was so suited to being Miss World.

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