Page 15 of The F*cking Fabulous Forties Club

15 August 1994

Dear Future Me,

This feels really weird, but here I am, writing a letter to the me I’ll be in thirty years’ time. I’ll be forty-six or forty-seven. FORTY-SEVEN – that’s actually really, really old. Not like my-granny old, but you know, the kind of old where you’re happy to sit in the house and watch Coronation Street or Casualty in your slippers and cardigan.

Mum is forty-seven and she’s always complaining about wrinkles and grey hairs, or her back hurting, or the change of life (which she whispers in case Daddy or Ruairi hear her and, I don’t know, accidentally grow a vagina or something).

She’s always telling me to enjoy my freedom now because once I settle down, I’ll ‘know what’s sticking to me’. But, of course, she never lets me do ANYTHING so I’m not entirely sure what ‘freedom’ I’m supposed to be enjoying. Freedom to wash the dishes? Freedom to hoover the stairs?

Laura and Niamh are allowed to go out every weekend to The Embassy or Squires and I’m sure their parents know they’re drinking too – even though they’re only sixteen and took the Pledge on their Confirmation Day. Mum says she’ll talk to Dad about letting me out, maybe when I’m seventeen and as long as I don’t drink, have all my homework done for the weekend, and my grades don’t start slipping. She’s obsessed with my GCSE results and what A levels I’m going to study for. There are other important things in life!

The thing is, I don’t even want to drink when I go out. I’m a bit scared of how it might make me feel, and what if it makes me make a complete eejit out of myself?

That’s without even worrying about the fact it’s illegal! I’m only sixteen. I don’t need to get in trouble with the law. Knowing me and my luck, I’d get caught the first time I even tasted a West Coast Cooler and arrested and carted home in the back of a police Land Rover.

I’d never live down the shame, and I’d probably be grounded until I’m actually forty-seven.

Anyway, I just want to go out and dance and maybe meet someone. It’s so embarrassing that I’m sixteen and not so much as had my first snog yet. I’m starting to think I might die alone.

Niamh says I won’t because I’m a babe, but I think she might only be saying that to be nice. If I really was such a babe, surely I’d have snogged someone by now. Niamh has snogged four different boys already. And she was chatted up by a thirty-year-old in The Embassy. She told him he was old enough to be her da and to get lost.

Laura says there’s not much talent to be had in Derry anyway. That’s why she is mad about Soupie. (That’s not his real name by the way – he’s called Colm Campbell = Campbell’s Soup = Soupie). He’s from Belfast and in Derry studying at Magee. He’s eighteen and Laura is dying about herself because she’s going with an older man, but not a creepy older man like the fellah in The Embassy.

I wonder if Derry will still be called the Maiden City when I’m forty-seven? Will all the good fellahs here still get snapped up early by the Majellas? Laura says the ones left behind tend to have all the appeal of a mouldy banana. Still, it would be nice to find this out for myself.

But anyway, that’s not what this letter is supposed to be about. This is me setting out what I want my life to look like by the time I’m forty-seven.

I don’t want to end up like my mother who wears a sour face all the time, as if she’s disappointed in the way her life has turned out. Cheers, Mum, by the way, for making one of your actual children feel like they annoy you just by breathing.

I want to live a fabulous life. I want to travel the world and walk along the Great Wall of China, or climb Kilimanjaro and watch the sun set from inside my tent high up on a snowy slope. I want to run along the moors in Yorkshire and imagine I’m Cathy’s ghost searching for my Heathcliff. I want to wash my hair with Timotei shampoo under a waterfall in some tropical island before spending the rest of the day reading while swinging in a hammock, one leg lazily draped outside. I want to drive along Route 66 in a convertible car with my hair blowing wildly behind me, listening to Hootie and the Blowfish or the Gin Blossoms.

If I do get married, I want it to be to someone who looks like Fox Mulder from The X Files. But I’m absolutely not looking to get married any time soon. (And given that I haven’t even had my first snog, that one is probably going to be easy to achieve.)

If I have the choice, I really would like to be in my very late twenties or early thirties – and will have done all my travelling and seeing the world. Maybe I’ll marry someone I met along the way. A hunky Italian or something. That would make Laura pea-green with envy. After all, having an Italian lover would be way, way cooler than a boyfriend from Belfast.

Me and my gorgeous new husband would settle down in our beautiful home by the sea (of course) and maybe have two children – a boy and a girl. I’ll not be like my mother. I’ll be cool and chilled out and when my teenage children want to invite friends over, I’ll let them order in pizza and not just get one of the cheap frozen ones out of the freezer instead. Those things never cook right. One minute they’re still icicles, and the next they are charred remains of something that used to look like a pizza once, a long time ago.

We’ll definitely have a den where the teenagers can hang out, so that my Italian husband and I – who will still be hopelessly in love – can snuggle together and drink wine in the evenings like the very sophisticated people we are. I will not walk around with a face like a slapped arse just because I’m having a hot flush.

Career wise? What I’d love is to be a journalist working on one of the big magazines like Cosmo, or More, or Vogue (Actually, maybe not Vogue. I don’t think anyone who works there ever eats anything and I do like to eat, and I’ve never really had the kind of figure that could get away with size-zero clothes). Maybe I’ll have my own column with a picture byline, and perhaps be invited onto TV talk shows, like This Morning with Richard and Judy. I accept I will never be size zero, but maybe this puppy fat will have disappeared – although given that I’m almost seventeen and it’s still here, I’m starting to think it’s actual full-on dog fat and it’s never leaving. Laura is a size ten and Niamh is a size twelve. I’m a fourteen and feel like a mountain beside them. I hope it will even out and I’ll be the kind of woman who can wear tailored suits and high heels and my Italian husband will really, really fancy me.

I suppose the only other thing I really, really hope is that Laura and Niamh and I are still friends like we are now. I’ve been friends with them since our first day at primary school and I don’t remember my life before they were in it. I just hope we’ll always be there for each other.

Much love,

Me xxx

Becki Burnside, Aged 16

11

NOTHING BUT A HOUND DOG

If sixteen-year-old me was sitting here beside me in this room right now, there is so much I’d want to say to her. I’d tell her to be nicer to her mother for a start. And let her know than neither forty-six or forty-seven is old, thank you very much. I might even tell her that, in my experience thus far, snogging boys is more trouble than it’s worth. Although that might send her into a depression cycle that could negatively affect the trajectory of her life – and God knows her life isn’t jetting off to a happy-ever-after ending anyway.

Ultimately though, I’d apologise to the young Becki for letting her down so badly. It was up to me, after all, to carry the baton of her hopes and dreams forward and live the incredible life she’d imagined for herself.

Instead, what have I achieved? I am a divorcee, and have not so much as met Fox Mulder, never mind married him. I do not write for a major glossy magazine and nor have I ever done so. My career has only reached the dizzying heights of copy writing for a B2B marketer, where I spend my days writing and rewriting the same articles, just putting a slightly different spin on them depending on who our latest client is. It does not excite me or make me eager to get to my desk each morning. There are few, if any, perks outside of gifted branded mugs and pens from our clients. Although I did once get a really good golf umbrella which has been a life-saver on dog walks.

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