John Walsh: If only women loved their bodies as much as men do...

Notebook

I can take a lot of female navel-gazing, but goodness there's been a bumper crop of it this month. Two weeks ago, I was in the audience at the Cheltenham Literary Festival listening to Caitlin Moran, author of How to Be a Woman, explain to the veteran BBC arts journalist Paul Allen the words she uses for various bits of her body, and the relationship she's enjoyed with said bits over the years, as they got bigger or hairier. Her observation, "Lying on a hammock, gently finger-combing your Wookie whilst staring up at the sky is one of the great pleasures of adulthood," is one of the quotes of the year.

This week, the Daily Mail published an article in the same Cartesian vein, in which five women were asked to write a letter to their bodies. Readers' eyes widened or glazed over at the shocking chronicle of dysmorphia, breast reductions, skin excisions, face-hatred, thigh-dislike, eye-loathing, pluckings, tannings, dyeings, the chronic need to change everything. Ladies with lovely long backs wished they could have had long legs instead, and vice versa. A couple of contributors managed to say, grudgingly, they'd learned to "respect" their bodies, but the consensus was the line, "Body – you don't want me to be happy." When I had finished marvelling at the self-flagellation of it all (commissioned, I'm sure, by a male editor) I wondered why men never explore this territory. We have bodies, after all, we have (sometimes quite large) egos, we've experienced the embarrassments of youth and the ravages of time.

But I know with utter certainty that you'll never, in a hundred years, find a male writer dilating on the joy of fondling his groin, in a hammock or anywhere else, or explaining why he calls his scrotum "Mortmorency"; nor can I easily imagine five men objectifying their bodies in print as if they were some piece of clothing of which they used to be fond, rather than being part of an organic whole that includes the brain. The only "Letter to My Body" you'll get a man to write goes as follows: "Dear Body, your limbs seem to be aching a bit, so you'd better go for a swim this week. Your face went unshaven this morning, so you'd better do something about it tomorrow. Your stomach is starving, so you'd better nip to the canteen for gammon steak and mash. You're seeing your pals Paul and Harry tonight, which explains your pre-libatory craving for beer at 4pm. You've picked up a shocking wheeze so you should try to knock it off with the fags, again. You looked a bit portly in the loo mirror, but only sideways-on, so remember not to appear sideways-on when there are women around (fill in details later)." It's not very sophisticated, I'm afraid. But unlike women, men know instinctively that their bodies do want them to be happy.

A marvellous row has erupted at the World Scrabble Championship in Poland, where the English grandmaster, Edward Martin, has been accused of cheating, by his Thai opponent, Chollapat Itthi-Aree. It seems that, when their match was over, one tile was found missing – the letter G, worth two points – and the Thai player claimed our man had concealed it about his person. He insisted that officials took Mr Martin to the lavatory for a thorough search. They declined, asking players instead to turn out their pockets, and ruled there was no evidence of cheating.

I take issue with Mr Itthi-Aree's idea of how to cheat. Nothing can be gained by inserting any Scrabble tile inside one's body cavities, because of the awkwardness of retrieving it later. And no player would conceal a G about his or her person, because how would it come in handy? One conceals an S up one's sleeve, so it can be added to the end of a long noun. Or a U inside one's wristwatch strap in case one picks a Q (10 points) out of the sack.

We Scrabble cheats hold these truths to be self-evident. There's nothing about G in the cheat's rulebook.