I’ve been on a serious trip down memory lane this week, firstly thanks to a features meeting at work, where someone mentioned that 14-year-olds are all obsessed with Arctic Monkeys now. That’s weird, I thought, I’m pretty sure I was obsessed with the Arctic Monkeys when I was 14. I’ve since discovered that the band turns 20 this year, so my memories stack up. Weirdly, my fashion aesthetic at the time – enormous baggy jeans, crop tops, skater trainers – has come back around too. I find it mildly hilarious to see the ultra-posh schoolkids on Wandsworth Common all dressed like they’re in a 90s hiphop video, but I must have looked ridiculous at the time too, especially when it rained and my jeans would soak up water to knee height.
Another bout of sentimentality came during the launch of the new Hunsnet book that I attended this week – The Hundamental Guide to Life, to give it its full and proper title. The launch party was held (appropriately) in All Bar One on Regent’s Street, and I can thoroughly recommend perching on a bar stool at 8.45am while Cascada’s Everytime We Touch is played at full volume and confused commuters look in through the windows. The book centres largely around a culture that emerged post-ladette in the Noughties – that of WAGs, Heat magazine and furiously Live, Laugh, Love-ing while trying not to spill woo woo down your Miss Selfridge halterneck (if you know, you know). It takes me back to my early twenties in London, where we would religiously watch X Factor before donning our platform heels and heading off to Covent Garden. Follow the Instagram account if you need more enlightenment.
I also headed back to my hometown of Penarth in Wales last weekend, which – although I thought it was the most boring place on earth when I was growing up – is actually lovely. A lot has changed since my years of roaming the P-Town streets, with younger people moving here and the inevitable bouji bakeries and tapas bars popping up to feed them oat flat whites and croquetas. My hometown is also by the sea, so of course the wild swimmers are now splashing around like mad at dawn, something no self-respecting person here would ever have done while I was growing up.
I was back home to celebrate my fifth wedding anniversary; my husband and I stayed at a hotel on the seafront after dropping off our little darling with my parents for the night. Joy! Before I was allowed to leave for the hotel, my mum sent me on a perilous trip up to the attic to retrieve my old Sylvanian Families, which my daughter is finally deemed old enough to play with now that she’s unlikely to try and bite the head off an unsuspecting hedgehog. Of course, she loved them – what is not to love about a toy barge manned by a family of frogs? – but seeing your own kid play with your childhood toys is a heart-wrenching reminder that you too were once an innocent little sprog whose main concern in life was acquiring the Sylvanian Families’ windmill and matching furniture set.
When you’re out and about with a toddler, random people like to stop and tell you to enjoy every minute, because it goes so fast. When your toddler is in the middle of a full-blown tantrum because you opened their banana incorrectly (‘not like DAT mummy’) or you’ve had the audacity to make them wear a jumper when it’s minus 10, this advice can feel a little grating. However, I know one day I’ll look back on these (sometimes testing) toddler days with almost painful sentimentality, the same way I now recall listening to Napster-downloaded Arctic Monkeys tracks with my teenage girl gang, going to Roadhouse in New Look heels with my fellow huns, and sloping round Penarth making ridiculous ‘horror films’ with my friends on a Sunday because we had nothing else to do.
My worst parenting habit is that I’ll extrapolate endlessly from one difficult morning, leaving the house and letting its hardship percolate around my brain like a bitter coffee. One of the most useful things I’m increasingly learning to do is to park the shit bits as quickly as possible – and instead hold on to the gorgeous bits, like the moment where your two-year-old first sees the Sylvanian Families windmill and looks as bloody chuffed as you once were.
Beautiful 💗