Last night I watched Bridget Jones's Diary. A film I've not seen for years. It came out over ten years ago and I still remember feeling incredibly grown-up when I watched it for the first time. I was so young that there were lots of jokes I didn't understand at all.
I watched it because I wanted something familiar and cosy to watch while I did some sewing and I was transported straight back to being a teenager again (not much of a leap when you are sat in your childhood bedroom) and I thought of young Frances, old Frances. The Frances who thought Bridget Jones was the most grown up film she'd ever seen. I decided to to rediscover her.
New Frances is slightly (very) dependent on twitter, she loves Caitlin Moran and watching Hairspray or Cry Baby. New Frances can cook proper meals and actually likes tea and coffee and gin. New Frances spends too much time ranting about Tories and reading blogs.
But what was I like before all these things? Before I knew who Robert Redford was -- before twitter was invented?
Teenage Frances (proper school girl 15 yr old Frances) only really went online to use msn and wrote books and book, thousands of pages, of diary. She watched the whole of Pride and Prejudice (1995, obvs) on rainy (and sunny) Saturdays. Amelie was her favourite film and her main goals were to have her own Office ballet pumps and babycham trainers. She wore a weird homemade lace choker to school every day, and was no yet so addicted to nail varnish that her nails were never their natural colour.
Her love life consisted of obsessions with Mr Darcy (both Fitzwilliam and Mark) and an insane, borderline stalkerish love for someone she had not spoken to since she was 11.
My current love life is pretty much: when will Alexander Skarsgaard/Joseph Gordon Levitt/Ruan Gosling marry me? Never? Oh well, I'll stick with Paul.
Sometimes I wonder if I've lost myself. The real me, the me that would stay up and secretly watch Ab Fab with the sound off and subtitles on. The me that wrote several pages of diary every single day and who slightly thought nun to governess to Mrs Von Trapp was a plausible life plan. The me wh didn't know how Harry Potter ended. So I am going to reclaim her.
Tonight I am watching p&p. I still know every line by heart.
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