What we think we know
How Brooklyn Beckham griddled his heart in public and some of us felt the flames.
I’m going through some family stuff, not unlike the drama unfolding in the montage of spinning front pages about the footballer, the fashion designer and their privileged son.
My dad isn’t paying a PR firm to plant stories in the press about me (allegedly), apart from anything, he’s dead. But the tender, awful pain that only a close relative can inflict is something I am reaching the end of my tolerance for.
A few days or weeks after a baby is born, a little grey-brown chod falls off their stomach, leaving a belly button. It looks neat and hygienic, sealed against the world and its pollutants. A puckered punctuation mark declaring the end of the physical joining of mother and child.
But some of us know the queasy tug of a phantom fibre there long into our adult lives. It’s not a pleasant, familiar feeling of warm milk and safety. It’s an infusion of acid, making its way into your system, unwelcome, unguarded against. The flood happens and you feel it all the way through you, under the skin, in your hair.
The savage fun we’ve all had with the Posh Victoria avatar and the possibility she might have been drunk and embarrassing at a wedding has made me feel uneasy. There’s a man standing behind her who has shown himself, more than once, to be a bit of a shit who evidently puts himself before other people. But he’s taken almost no heat at all.
The kid might have married someone awful because of the examples he grew up with, but the point is we can only impose stories on them, blank canvasses as they are.
It has to be woman vs woman. Because that’s our favourite and one must be good and one must be bad. Most of us don’t know either woman. They might both be arseholes. The kid might have married someone awful because of the examples he grew up with, but the point is we can only impose stories on them, blank canvasses as they are.
All I can see is a young man driven to detonate what remained of his family bond, not because he has joined a cult or come under the control of a “bad woman”. But because he clearly felt he had to. It’s in every line of that statement, the pain he’s in. You do not do something this final, publicly kerosene the last bridge between you and the people who made you, unless something has gone very, very wrong.
We don’t know anything about the Beckhams that they don’t want us to know.
That alone should tell you something. There is control, pathological levels of control, in the image they present to the world.
I’m sad for everyone involved, but I can’t help feeling particularly sorry for the lost lad in the photo, once treasured and now, so he says, jettisoned because he won’t toe the family line. The Beckhams are a PR invention. Everything is done in public and it has made them very, very rich.
The first one to break cover and say “This is mad” is usually not the mad one.
Russell Brand was back in court yesterday, via Zoom link from Florida, to face new charges of rape and sexual assault in addition to the multiple charges he is set to face trial for later in the year. Do they extend this remote privilege to all those charged with rape, or just the famous ones?
I went to a relaxed performance at the National Theatre last night. I like these half-lit evenings where everyone is welcome and free to get up during the performance if they need to stim or stretch or just relieve an anxious thought.
I went to see The Motive and the Cue there a couple of years ago, another relaxed showing, and a posh-sounding couple kept shushing a woman with Tourettes whose particular tick was to mutter ‘action’ at often perfectly timed moments.
I saw her in the toilet queue and she smiled when we caught eyes while we waited. “Did you hear those two?” she said, more in pity than in dismay. We rolled our eyes.
Cut to me, last night, back after the interval to find my neighbours had brought out the world’s loudest bag of popcorn. I was paralysed. The noise was designed to raise my stress levels. This was a relaxed performance. Did their particular neurodiversity mean they needed to eat loud food or were they just arseholes?
There it is again. I fully and silently hated them for the rest of the half, but I don’t know what their intentions were. So I kept the rage to myself.
David Walliams did an interview at the weekend with his former Little Britain cast mate Steve Furst. You might have seen the headlines about him addressing an audience of 40-odd in a tiny venue in north London.
Apparently he said he might bring Little Britain back to Netflix because they don’t seem to cancel anyone if there’s revenue to be made from their shows. He then referred to a bunch of stand-ups who have said gross things in their specials, perhaps not realising that the creepy accusations being made against him are in a different league to transphobic bullying.
The zip’s gone on my favourite black bag. I experiment with colour sometimes, a pink strap, a red bag WITH a pink strap. But I always come back to black.
Googling for its replacement (the original is from Vinted, an & Other Stories camera bag with a satisfying number of external compartments,) I unfortunately came upon the Acne Studios camera bag in black calfskin and now all other bags are rendered bollocks in comparison.
I almost never want expensive stuff. All kinds of guilt and shame would be bound up in wearing, for example, a piece of jewellery worth more than a hundred pounds. My engagement ring cost £80 and we bought it because it was just the one I wanted, from an antique market in York. And what I wanted was modest, perhaps even a little bit embarrassed to be ‘engaged’. Sorry, it said. But I’m going to get married and you don’t have to tell me how mortifying that is.
This bag retails at FOURTEEN HUNDRED POUNDS. (And yes I know there’s one in Vinted for a fraction of that but it’s still HUNDREDS of pounds.) But it’s perfect. Satisfying zippy bits, the jaunty key tag isn’t very me but I could learn to love it. I think I’m looking at an overpriced handbag because the world is burning and drowning simultaneously. That must be it.
Also, the family stuff. The last time I went through ‘family stuff’ I got tattoos. Maybe I’ll book a tattoo and buy a cheap bag and stop this fruitless longing. It’s like fancying a Hollywood star, wanting that bag.
If Stellan Skarsgaard meets me, he’ll really GET me and we’d almost certainly fall in love, I think. I did see Sentimental Value this week and loved the performances so much but it was too long. And Yoachim Trier should not think himself above a proper narrative, even if he is able to break me in two with a single shot of a walking stick grasped in a man’s hand.
When Brooklyn eventually does his interview/book/Amazon doc series and the rest of the family keep a dignified silence, just remember that his was a cry of pain. And pain is honest.
That’s what I think anyway.