Happy New Year, Blogverse! I know I’ve been MIA recently, but Real Life has been slightly mad over the past few weeks and shows no real signs of getting back to normal, but I have at least vaguely remembered how to write. Here goes…
As you probably know by now, my taste in men is somewhat eclectic (much like my taste in art, films, books, music, shoes, clothes…hey wait, I’m sensing a theme here…) This analogy also extends to sport. Well, to sports MEN at any rate…I’m the first person to admit that I love rugby more than any other sport as much for the (ahem) talent as for the game itself; there’s something to be said for hulking great forwards and super-speedy backs, and I even find the broken noses attractive. Well, in some cases, at least. But, fickle woman that I am, my early adolescence was shaped by my complete and utter devotion to football. Not for the game itself, you understand – I support West Ham, for gods sake; it’s a running joke among my friends that this means I don’t understand or like football – but for the men who played it. My first crush was Ryan Giggs (ahh, Giggsy…*sigh*) and then I fell headlong into the path of Liverpool’s ‘Spice Boys’, headed by Jamie Redknapp. By the time David Beckham came along, I was a fully-fledged adolescent WAG-in-waiting. Long after I turned to other specimens of masculinity to lust after, there was still a teeny-weeny part of me that hankered for WAGdom.
And why not, I thought? After all, when your other half earns X-many squillions a week and all you do is (seemingly) shop, what’s not to love? To be able to say, “Ooh, original vintage Vivienne Westwood pirate boots? I’ll take six pairs please!” – Well, that sounds like my kinda heaven! I dreamed of being a ‘lady of leisure’, buying tons of gorgeous outfits so that when the cameras spotted me in the stands on Saturdays being ‘supportive’, I’d look good on the big screens. And I could holiday ANYWHERE I WANTED. In the WORLD! Cushty…I’d even make like the Victorian philanthropists of old and do Good Works, giving time and money to charity while looking stunning in the latest outfit especially designed for me by Alexander McQueen. And all I’d have to do was look vaguely interested on Saturday afternoons and pretend I understood the offside rule. Piece of cake. And we loved them, didn’t we, the WAGs? They were like gorgeous, glamorous butterflies who, for the briefest of moments, captured the country. No, make that the world.
And oh, how I wanted to be one; to be gorgeous and glamorous and jet out to Bali for a month in the off-season without thinking about it! But then I grew up. I don’t have the face, the figure or the hair to be a WAG and, as footballers were replaced by others in my affections, my dreams of WAGdom became just that: a dream; a gloriously childish fantasy I had once indulged in before actors, rock stars, vampires and rugby players took over. (What can I say; I had a thing about James Marsters in Buffy, ok?)
But then, as dreams do, things started to turn sour when the reality check finally kicked in. Getting married in Vera Wang and having the whole thing covered in OK magazine seemed less appealing when the revelations started; infidelities, affairs with lap dancers and prostitutes...suddenly the whole thing seemed less glamorous and more tawdry, and we realised that being a WAG and ‘standing by your man’ meant so much more than freezing your D&G-clad arse off on the side of a football pitch. Wayne Rooney, John Terry, Ashley Cole…not even the Queen of the WAGs, Lady Beckham herself, was immune to the scandals when it was revealed that David had had a ‘thing’ with Rebecca Loos; the whole thing became frankly unpalatable and, although many made the decision to not castrate the ungrateful wretches with a pair of blunted nail scissors, who among us didn’t give a tiny cry of, “about time she saw the light” when the lovely Cheryl Cole finally gave that scumbag Ashley the heave-ho?
The reason for writing this entry is that I’ve just read an interview with Abbey Clancy, the impossibly tall and glamorous girlfriend of the impossibly tall and, er, not Peter Crouch. Last year, having just found out that she was pregnant with their first child, Abbey also found out that Peter was alleged to have slept with a prostitute who had sold her story to the News of the World. As you do. Naturally, the tabloid press went wild, and Abbey was plunged headlong into the media spotlight. She refuses to comment on whether he did or didn’t do it, but she has stood by her man and as far as she’s concerned, that’s that. What struck me about the interview with Abbey were the comments she made about the misconceptions Joe Public has about the WAGs: that they all set out to snare a footballer husband; that all they do is shop; that they don’t have two brain cells to rub together. As she points out, you have to be able to take care of yourself, even if you do end up living the dream and attaining WAGdom. She freely admits that the thing she’s most proud of is that her work as a model and TV presenter meant that she could afford to pay for her younger brother and sister, who were having a terrible time at school, to go to a private school; her little brother went from failing everything to taking and passing all his GCSE’s a year early.
The funny thing is, she’s right. Suppose you do end up marrying the next David Beckham and living the high life as the new Queen of the WAGs (sorry, Posh). And suppose that Lover-Boy ends up having an affair with someone else and you decide to do the sensible thing and kick him to the kerb. What are you going to do with yourself then? Even the current nation’s sweetheart, the lovely Cheryl, has had to make a go of her solo career and her work on the X Factor (although it must make Ashley sick to his stomach that his ex-wife probably earns more money than he does and is more loved by the lads who would previously have worshipped his skills on the pitch. And here I refer to a quote from my brother who, when discussing Girls Aloud and the lovely Cheryl, noted “oh, they sing as well?” Bless…) So long as the women who plough the fields of WAGdom are prepared to work for their designer togs, they’re all right by me, cos once he’s gone, girls, a woman has to pay her own way.
And you know what? Good luck to ‘em, I say. Because there is no way in hell that anything could induce me to nail my colours to the mast of WAGdom these days; not for a whole shop if Vivienne Westwood pirate boots. Although if David Beckham ever DOES come knocking, I may well be persuaded to change my mind.
Now being a rugby ‘Scrummy’ on the other hand…
