Prince Harry’s lost messages from his 20s hit hard, but not due to his court case
Between waiting for my second batch of hot cross buns to rise – Geoff Slattery’s foolproof recipe – and going down the rabbit hole of comparisons of Lindt and Aldi chocolate bunnies, the old brain is working thanks to a slew of historic Facebook messages.
By the most unexpected of unforgettable writers. Prince Harry.
Haz’s “hello cheeky cutlet” style messages from 2011 and 2012 are more impressive to me than the part from her ghost-written book describing her very poor kitchen wrestling match with Prince William.
In them, Harry flirts wildly with an equally flirty tabloid journalist named Charlotte Griffiths. The woman, who befriends the prince on Facebook, calls him the “H Bomb” and “Mr. Mischief” and is almost mad at him for setting her on fire on the motorway “in your fucking Audi”.
Harry, then a 27-year-old lad, was in ecstasy. He tells Griffiths (“sugar… we missed our hugs in the movie”) that he’d be “hungover by the third day” and that he hates that army duty spoils his party plans: “I’d be there and I’d be playing and drinking with you under the table, of course!!”
“Mwah!” He signs by saying. and streams of kisses.
The messages were revealed in the UK High Court this week as part of the duke’s privacy claim against a media group. As I burst into tears from the shaking of Harry’s legal fist, the Facebook messages from the Vault of Lost Tapes came strangely to my mind.
Not because they were scandalous or damning or even because they exposed Harry’s repressed authentic self, but he has been reeling ever since from Montecito’s diet of edible flowers (though he was much more optimistic in the old days).
This is because they are so painfully, noticeably young. There’s something touching about how ordinary they are. They were the people most of us were in our 20s, cheerfully bland, straightforward, a little dusty on Tuesday arvo, existing almost entirely in the present.
They make it clear that we’ve all been someone we used to be a little ashamed of.
And yet.
Everyone has a version of these messages somewhere; In the diary or old email account, we defined a good week by how big the weekend was.
When we’re careless and self-obsessed, when our friends are our family and no one needs stuffing or a juice box.
We are growing, of course. We have to. We claim to prefer our evolved self. But are we really?
Whatever your faith, the question that comes to mind at Easter, which is traditionally about sacrifice and transformation, is this: Will you return? If you could, would you slip back into the skin of the looser, less sheltered, more instinctively joyful version of you?
I guess the optimistic answer is that we don’t have to choose. The rust of growth and experience imposed on us by decades of responsibilities and mortgages does not erase who you are. Your 27-year-old self is still there, a little appalled by your skincare routine but basically fine.
The more disturbing answer is that we change. Truly, fundamentally and out of necessity.
Maybe the person at your next party or Jim Beam and fried rice session wasn’t actually your highest self.
So leaving behind who you are isn’t a betrayal, it’s actually the point.
Harry’s cute, lame messages from when he was a happy-go-lucky man looking for fun 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 exactly about longing for youth or even freedom, it’s about living in a time and place before deciding what adventure means.
I would instantly revert back to my past self due to the sugar rush of wearing green eyeliner and making stupid, brilliant decisions because I was unstable and bulletproof.
Playing billiards at the hotel on the way to Lorne, making friends everywhere, feeling like the journey will never stop. Having a great bust and a checkbook.
Like Harry, we were all shameful. The question is whether we know something that we should not forget.
Kate Halfpenny is the founder of Bad Mother Media.
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