Do I know enough to tell young me that I don’t?
Vogue has asked Victoria Beckham to pen a letter to herself as a teenager. Is this cathartic or self-indulgent?
It’s hard for a 42-year-old woman to issue retrospective advice to her “struggling” 18-year-old self when, within a decade, that teenager will be a pop sensation, married to one of the globe’s most famous and handsome sportsmen. I mean, that 18-year-old’s plan for world domination seems to be pretty solid, doesn’t it? Whereas most popular entertainers spend 10 years or more waiting tables, working at call centres and maintaining a spirited pretence at being an actor or singer, Victoria Beckham (for it is she we’re talking about) was in the Spice Girls’ line-up by the time she was 20.
So it must have been a challenge when Vogue asked its October issue cover star to pen a sympathetic missive to her younger incarnation: “Hang on in there, sweetie! You have two whole years to wait before you join the most successful girl band of the 1990s.” In fairness to Beckham, she manages some convincing sentiments about being the plump girl with acne at the back of the chorus line: “You are not the prettiest, or the thinnest, or the best at dancing at the Laine Theatre Arts college.”
Although I wish she’d jazzed it up by adding, “But you’re the best at pouting, which in time will take you far further than Darcey Bussell’s arabesque.”
And she’s sweet about her first meeting with rising football star Becks “in the Manchester United players’ lounge” – even if she feels compelled to add, “He’s not even in the first team at this stage; you are the famous one.”
However, you can’t help but feel wistful for all the advice left unissued. The sort of home truths no woman utters in a glossy fashion bible. Where, for instance, is the assurance that no one will ever think of Beckham as “Posh” in a post-David Cameron and
Downton Abbey world? SamCam and the Dowager Countess of Grantham she ain’t. And how about telling her younger soul that commissioning gilt thrones and a dinky coronet for her 1999 wedding might not look so chic seventeen years later? She could also warn her naïve self that embarking on a solo career when you’re the Spice Girls’ weakest singer was not your brightest move. Or that calling your oldest son Brooklyn will unleash a perfect storm of name-alikees, meaning every classroom in the UK is stuffed full of kids called Paris, Venice and Dallas (although mysteriously no Staines). A searingly honest type might warn their distant teen personage to never let their husband say he wears his wife’s knickers, or to let him within two inches of a buxom Spanish PA.
Young Victoria might also feel compelled not to give the interview to the Spanish paper that reported she’d never read a book in her life (especially when she’s written half a dozen). None of this would make such a touching letter, but it would resonate more widely with non-superstars.
Most of us make such big, comedic errors in our youth that it only behoves us to come clean about them. To share, so that others may laugh freely at our pain. I would tell my teenage inner ingénue not to get so drunk at a classmate’s birthday party that I kissed her boyfriend in the middle of the dancefloor. I would not get into a yellow Volkswagen Beetle with the registration number “666” and allow its young, stoned owner to driver me and two friends through a “No Entry” sign onto the wrong lane of a motorway. I would advise against taking off all my clothes in the school’s sixth-form swimming pool and allowing my classmates to take incriminating shots. I would say it’s not a good idea to befriend a young woman who claims to be a witch at my Oxford interview and then invite her to my sister’s college digs, where she summoned up a poltergeist. I would not tell my beloved mum, in a fit of hormonal rage, that she was less attractive than my aunt and it was no wonder my dad never took her out.
And I would certainly tell my eighteen-year-old self that my fear of sex was groundless and that it’s harder to get pregnant than your headmistress and parents tell you.
What you know by middle age – or should know – is that your greatest regrets aren’t youthful mishaps, but the things you didn’t do. I wouldn’t just be advising my teenage self to master French and Spanish and the piano or guitar, I’d be bullying them to do so. I’d tell the surly, student me that no one says on their deathbed, “I wish I hadn’t read all those books,” or “Thank God I didn’t travel!” And I’d urge myself to keep a diary, because my memory will be shot by 48. And why on earth didn’t I buy that beach hut in Whitstable that my friend Nick was offering for £200 in 1992?
Of course the truly interesting letter is the one your teen self would write to the middle-aged proselytiser, asking, “What entitles you to be so blooming patronising?” Victoria Beckham’s might lament the fact that the woman who – by her own admission – once dressed like a drag queen, now designs minimalist shift and sack dresses for dour fashionistas.
Mine would say, “If you’re so wise, how come your free-range children ignore you and why haven’t you paid off your mortgage?
P.S. Lend me two hundred quid and you can sell that beach hut for a fortune one day.”