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Lovely Girls, Very Cheap
Decca Aitkenhead
‘A bar girl in Ko Samui is employed to attract customers. Almost every bar has at least one girl, and some of the larger bars have up to twenty’.
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‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
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‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
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‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
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‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
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‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
Decca Aitkenhead
Decca Aitkenhead’s travel piece from Thailand, ‘Lovely Girls, Very Cheap’, appeared in Granta 73. Her account of her world tour of dance clubs, The Promised Land: Travels in Search of the Perfect E (2002), is published by Fourth Estate in the UK.
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