by Rae Earl
Six years later, almost by accident, I ended up there. Everything happened in Nottingham for me, long after everything in this diary had ceased to be relevant. Friends, lovers, job. That city and me just clicked. And it’s where I met my husband Kevin. Quite frankly the best bloke in the world. You wouldn’t be reading any of this if it wasn’t for him. He stopped me from throwing all the diaries out and encouraged me to share them.
One Saturday night in late 2000 or early 2001 (I can’t remember the date but I remember the events like it was yesterday), I was walking back to our flat with Kev in the centre of the city. Nottingham on a Saturday is packed with hen parties, stag parties, drunk teenagers, and merry twenty-somethings. It’s manic – you walk against a tide of people whatever direction you are going in. We were walking across by the Theatre Royal when I saw him: a face among a million other faces. I hadn’t seen him for years. I have no idea why he was there. He didn’t live there. I shouted out his name. He hadn’t changed much. I think in a perverse way I had wanted him to have morphed into a minger – a balding, middle-aged stereotype. He hadn’t.
Conversation went as thus:
ME: HADDOCK!
HADDOCK: Oh my God – Rae Earl!
(HUG)
ME: I’d like to introduce you to my husband Kevin – he’s Australian!
HADDOCK: (to Kev) You’ve got a good one there . . .
I said something I can’t remember, then he said:
HADDOCK: Come for a drink?
ME: Mate, I have to go – I’m working at 6 a.m.
HAD: Please come . . .
ME: Sorry mate – I’ve got to go . . . See you soon.
He disappeared and mumbled something.
That was the last time I saw him.
‘You’ve got a good one there’
‘You’ve got a good one there’
‘You’ve got a good one there’
It was throwaway . . . but it felt like one of the biggest compliments of all time.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I had to explain to Kev about Haddock.
Kev said: ‘Why?! Oh WHY didn’t you go for a drink with him and tell him what he had meant to you?!’
But I couldn’t. It belonged to another age. What was I going to say? ‘Hello Haddock. How’s life? By the way I was in love with you when I was 17? You made me feel better about myself at a time when hardly anything else did? You have still got the best arse I have ever seen’?
Besides . . . the Haddock I bumped into isn’t the Haddock I knew, or even the Haddock I thought I knew. The Haddock I knew now has his own happy ending. I know this because when the first book came out I had to ring him up and warn him what was about to be revealed. That was an interesting conversation. He genuinely had no idea. Anyway Haddock finally realised he was a handsome, witty sod, with a great backside. He put any demons he had to bed, married a fantastic woman and has lovely children. And no – he is not an insurance salesman. He does something as I suspected far more wonderful than that. But don’t go looking for him. He’s very private. He wants to stay anonymous and I think that’s bloody right. Let’s leave him to the contented, great life he deserves.
Anyway, seeing Haddock in Nottingham that time set me on the world’s biggest nostalgia trip. I dug out these diaries. They were still in a ‘Walkers Newsagents of Stamford’ bag and shoved between my GCSE certificates and a shoebox full of Smurfs (Mum never threw them out). I read them cover to shabby cover.
They tackle everything I felt about my life then; but there’s one thing that seems to come out of them. One ‘something’ that is behind all of my diaries. It’s a something I thought was exclusive to me at the time, but it wasn’t. It was relevant then and it’s still relevant now. It underpins all of this and everybody mentioned in the diaries.
We all feel fat, ugly and bad about ourselves sometimes. Irrespective of what we really are. And if we’ve got any sense we do two things. Firstly we love ourselves and that’s our responsibility. Then we find people and things that make us feel even better about ourselves. Because most of us are the same – all we want to be is loved.
It’s what I was looking for, it’s what Haddock was looking for, what my mum was trying to find, what all my friends were looking for. Even the ones at school you think have it all sorted don’t. I know that because after the first diary was published they wrote to me and told me that they felt like I did then. We are all just after being loved and appreciated. Fat, thin, gay, straight, male or female.
I’m sorry. It sounds like the worst kind of generalised American chat-show gush – but it’s true. I believe it.
Anyway that really is it. My diaries have been published and adapted for TV and this Bonfire Night I really do intend to burn them.
And I don’t mind telling you about it all because I suspect you’ve felt some of the same things . . .
Read the prequel to My Madder Fatter Diary,
MY MAD FAT DIARY
It’s 1989 and Rae is a fat, boy-mad 17-year-old girl, living in Stamford, Lincolnshire with her mum and their deaf white cat in a council house with a mint off-green bath suite and a larder Rae can’t keep away from. This is the hilarious and touching real-life diary she kept during that fateful year . . .
My Fat, Mad Teenage Diary evokes a vanished time when Charles and Di are still together, the Berlin Wall is up, Kylie is expected to disappear from the charts at any moment and its £1 for a Snakebite and Black in the Vaults pub. My Mad Fat Diary will appeal to anyone who’s lived through the 1980s. But it will also strike a chord with anyone who’s ever been a confused, lonely teenager who clashes with their mother, takes themselves VERY seriously and has no idea how hilarious they are.
