Many of us are familiar with that particular mortified feeling that comes with remembering the extreme awfulness of a teenage moment or phase; some of us still have the lip-piercing scar to prove it.
Poor Ed Sheeran, then, who made a demo CD called Spinning Man when he was a 13-year-old busker, hoped all copies had disappeared, only for one to make its way to auction in 2020. Sheeran had written about Spinning Man in his 2014 autobiography, saying that he thought he owned most of the CDs in existence. “I don’t want anyone else to get hold of a copy,” he said. When it goes under the hammer, it is expected to fetch up to £10,000.
Late millennials, those of us who barely squeak into the category, often express relief that they could be teenagers without a record of it, without diaries being online or Myspace profiles exposing a deep-rooted love for quoting lines from authors whose books were too pretentious to actually read. Heaven forbid there would be video footage of some cheap, cider-fuelled afternoons in the park. Such mystery hardly exists now.
It’s easy to see the drawbacks of this, as any new celebrity who has had to apologise for an idiotic sense of humour tweeted for all to see at 15 will tell you. But I wonder if, now there’s a digital archive of every photo of us pulling a stupid face, or of youthful and earnest attempts at profound poetry, fewer people will find those monuments so mortifying. It’s sad to think of that near-obligatory sense of shame about who we were when we were younger, an almost routine exclamation of “oh my god so embarrassing” when we see a (physical) photograph of ourselves in a homemade band T-shirt with pink highlighted hair.
Sheeran might be the last big pop star to have a past that he even has a chance of trying to forget. He is the last generation to have the protection that not everything is living online, archived forever. It used to be that the only hint of a celebrity’s former life might be an old school photograph. Now it’s all there. You can watch the early acoustic singer-songwriter efforts of one Flossie Rose on YouTube, say, before she became the Oscar-nominated actress Florence Pugh. As few people have heard it, it’s impossible to know whether Sheeran’s first CD hints at the Glastonbury-headlining superstar to come, but there’s certainly no shame in the path it took to get there.
Hilary Mantel: the fine art of knowing when to stop
Hilary Mantel has told the Edinburgh international books festival that, having exhausted herself with the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, “I haven’t got another big historical novel in view”.
She felt it important to say this so that people would stop writing to her with suggestions. “It’s lovely that people have the appetite for it but considering the pace at which I proceed, I would like some life before it’s too late,” she said.
I felt similarly at the end of The Mirror and the Light: enormously impressed with the achievement, and that was just my own, for finishing it. Cheap jokes aside, I loved each book of the trilogy, with increasing ferocity. At the same time, I was glad the series was over and satisfied with the inevitable and resolute ending. Mantel has said she will focus on plays and short stories for now and one cannot blame her. Size is not everything.
Much as the shortest songs can be the sweetest, and a six-part TV series fills me with more enthusiasm than a 24-episode one, and a 90-minute film suggests a better handle on precision than a three-and-a-half-hour epic, there is much to be said in praise of brief entertainment.
Olivia Wilde: spinning her web over Hollywood
Booksmart director Olivia Wilde has tweeted news that she had signed on to direct and develop an as-yet-unspecified Marvel film, though rumours are swirling that it might be Spider-Woman-related, a conclusion reached because Wilde added a spider emoji to her tweet.
Wilde is the second woman to sign on for a Marvel film this month, after it was announced that Candyman director Nia DaCosta will take charge of the Captain Marvel sequel. Patty Jenkins did wonders with Wonder Woman, but nevertheless this feels significant and like progress.
Directing films is still a man’s game, as statistics attest: in the US, 50% of moviegoers are women, but only 12% of the top 100-grossing films in 2019 were made by women, while Kathryn Bigelow remains the only woman to win an Oscar for best director. Superhero blockbusters are big, scary projects, with budgets so massive that we couldn’t begin to “eat out to help out” our way through them. It’s thrilling that women are running these projects.
It occurred to me that, coincidentally, and probably for the first time, almost all of the best films I have seen this year have been directed by women, from Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Little Women to Make Up, the forthcoming Saint Maud and Babyteeth. I went to the cinema for the first time in months to see the latter last week and it was gorgeous, more than worth the mask.
• Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist
