I’m not a big believer in hereditary privilege, though I will make an exception and become mildly interested in the dramas of the royal family when it comes to watching The Crown on Netflix.
It’s hard to remain put out by the idea of people inheriting power at birth when distracted by Princess Margaret’s wild parties and the promise of Olivia Colman being officially ordained as the queen that she is. But as the saying sort of goes, old photographs of teenage bedrooms are a window into the soul, so when pictures of an 18-year-old Prince Harry sitting in his dorm at Eton resurfaced last week, I immediately clicked on them.
So, too, did Halle Berry, who saw herself in the background, pinned to the middle of a lovely piece of fabric, flanked by two other anonymous ladies in bikinis, who had been beheaded, though thankfully only by the framing of the photo (what is this, 1536?). “Ok #PrinceHarry, I see you,” she tweeted, followed by the laughing-face emoji, a hashtagged lyric from Missy Elliott’s Work It – “#HalleBerryPosta” – and an @-mention of Missy Elliott.
While I’m sure Prince Harry has enough going on right now to get over it, there’s something cartoon-nightmarish about your teenage tastes coming back to haunt you. There is little more excruciating than being forced to confront your half-formed self who, for a time, let’s say, thought it would be a great idea to get a tattoo of the artwork from the CD single for Radiohead’s Street Spirit (Fade Out), just to pluck a totally made-up example out of fantasy air, which is definitely not real and thank god for mandatory age regulations in tattoo parlours. And, no, you didn’t copy out several meaningful lines from The Bell Jar into a special notebook called “Quotes” that you kept by your bed.
For those of us not in the public eye, it’s unlikely that any of our worst bedroom wall transgressions will re-emerge and what a relief.
To flip through my own mental archive of walls I knew and loved, there were “Adihash” posters, collages made by Pritt-sticking overlapping bleak newspaper headlines on to a black sheet of cardboard and, I’m sorry to report, pencil drawings of Kurt Cobain.
It makes me grateful for the fact that blanket internet access and constant cameras weren’t a thing in the 90s and early 00s, because I can’t imagine anything worse than an archived reminder of what we shall only refer to as “the Che Guevara era”popping up on Facebook Memories once a year.
Stacey Solomon: is telling it like it is always wise?
Stacey Solomon led the resistance in a week when celebrity culture turned feral (see the bizarre gladiatorial spectacle of the Loose Women v Kim Woodburn) by tweeting her offence at a magazine cover that stuck the words “boring”, “desperate” and “cheap” underneath a picture of her looking perturbed that she was being called boring, desperate and cheap.
After Solomon pointed out that it was mean, Now issued a statement clarifying that it was just saying that some people on social media thought that and it was sorry “for any distress our story may have caused”; which isn’t quite the same as being sorry for being mean and is basically a “sor-reeee”, the sort of tactic kids use when they don’t really want to say sorry at all.
Celebrity mags usually couch their insults in the tone of a concerned friend, whether they’re pointing out weight loss, weight gain, alcoholism, drug use, bad boyfriends or any of the other grim detritus floating around fame, so this gloves-off straight talk has been a long time coming. It’s as if they’re finally pulling back the curtain and saving us all the hassle of reading between the lines.
Alizé Cornet: an ace response to tennis dinosaurs
I have put clothes on inside out owing to factors as trivial as an alarm going off before 7am, so it’s little wonder that Alizé Cornet found she was wearing her shirt back to front at her first-round US Open tennis match in 35C heat.
Rather than holding proceedings up further by going back into the changing rooms, she simply whipped it off and put it back on the right way. She was immediately issued with a code violation by the umpire. The confusion on her face in that moment is a testament to the stupidity of the sanction, which suggested that the sight of an overheated female athlete in a sports bra is titillating in a way that a sweaty man giving his nipples an airing is not.
After a backlash from women in the sport, the US Open apologised and clarified that, like men, female players can change tops while in their chair.
Cornet’s reaction to the kerfuffle was classy. She used it to draw attention to comments made by the French Tennis Federation president, Bernard Giudicelli, about banning catsuits such as the one Serena Williams wore at the French Open in May. “It will no longer be accepted,” he told Tennis magazine. “One must respect the game and the place.”
Williams was wearing the catsuit because of an ongoing problem with blood clots and Giudicelli’s call for “respect” was ill-judged, at best. “What he said about Serena’s catsuit was 10,000 times worse than what happened to me,” Cornet said.
During her first round at the US Open, Williams wore a lavender tutu, which looked good forwards, backwards, and when she won her match too.
•Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist
