Between waiting for my second batch of hot cross buns – Geoff Slattery’s foolproof recipe – to rise and going down the rabbit hole of comparisons of Lindt and Aldi chocolate bunnies, the old brain has been ticking over thanks to a stash of historic Facebook messages.
By the most unlikely of memorable scribes. Prince Harry.
Written in “hello cheeky chops” style by Haz in 2011 and 2012, the messages are more fascinating for me than his ghost-written book, the bit about his piss-weak kitchen wrestle with Prince William aside.
In them, Harry’s flirting madly with an equally coquettish tabloid journo, Charlotte Griffiths. Friended on Facebook by the prince, she calls him “H Bomb” and “Mr Mischief” and quasi-rails at him for burning her off on a freeway in “your bloody Audi!”
A stripling 27-year-old at the time, Harry’s rapt. He tells Griffiths (“sugar … miss our movie snuggles”) he’s “gonna be hungover for the third day running” and hated army duty derailing party plans: “I would have been there playing and drinking u under the table, obvi!!”
He signs off with “mwah!” and streams of kisses.
The messages were disclosed this week in the UK High Court as part of the duke’s privacy claim against a media group. While I’m bored to tears by all Harry’s legal fist shaking, the Facebook messages from the Lost Tapes Vault have weirdly hit home.
Not because they’re scandalous or damning or even reveal a secret Harry, some suppressed authentic self which has since been stultified by all his Montecito diet of edible flowers (although he’s much more upbeat in the olden days.)
It’s because they’re so painfully, recognisably young. There’s something poignant about how ordinary they are. They’re the people most of us were in our 20s, cheerfully vapid, open, a bit dusty on a Tuesday arvo, existing almost entirely in the present tense.
They spark a recognition we all used to be someone we’re slightly embarrassed by.
And yet.
Everyone has a version of those messages somewhere, in a diary or old email account, where we defined a good week by how big our weekend was.
When we were oblivious and self-obsessed and our friends were our family and nobody needed grommets or a juice box.
We grow up, of course. We have to. We claim to prefer our evolved selves. But do we, really?
Here’s the question I’m sitting with at this time that is – whatever your beliefs – traditionally about what must be given up so something new can rise: would you go back? If you could, would you slip back into the skin of that version of you which is looser, less guarded, more instinctively joyful?
I reckon the optimistic answer is we don’t have to choose. Growth forced on us by decades of responsibility and mortgages and the patina of experience doesn’t erase who you are. Your 27-year-old self is still in there, slightly appalled by your skincare routine but basically fine.
The more uncomfortable answer is we do change. Genuinely, fundamentally and out of necessity.
The person who lived for the next party or Jim Beam and fried rice sesh was perhaps not, in fact, your highest self.
So leaving behind who you were isn’t a betrayal but actually the whole point.
Harry’s lovely, lame messages from when he was a footloose fella looking for fun have made me wish I still had the Facebook messages my husband and I wrote the week we fell in love, when we knew something seismic was around the corner and anything could happen.
It’s not missing youth exactly or even freedom, but it’s about that thing of living in a time and place before deciding what the adventure meant.
I’d go back to my past self in a flash, for the sugar rush of putting on green eyeliner and making stupid, fabulous decisions because I was unmoored and bulletproof.
Of playing hotel pool on roadies to Lorne, of making friends everywhere, of feeling the ride would never stop. Of having a terrific bust and a chequebook.
Like Harry, we all used to be someone embarrassing. The question is whether we knew something we shouldn’t have forgotten.
Kate Halfpenny is the founder of Bad Mother Media.
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