Guilty Pleasures: Hello

I worked as an au pair in Germany for an English family during a year out, which turned out to be the beginning of life as a childcarer in one form or another. I had changed a nappy before, but it was still a steep learning curve. To be honest I had no idea it would be so hard to live with people you weren’t related to. It had never occurred to me that other people would have a different way of doing everything, from cooking to ironing shirts. In many ways it was one of the best years of my life, though it certainly felt like the longest at points. With Germanic regularity, every week a copy of Hello! magazine and Country Life would arrive in the post from the UK, and I read them both from cover to cover once they were passed onto me by my benevolent employer. They filled my head with beautiful dresses, glamorous lives, fabulous houses. I don’t think I’d ever really considered these things could exist beyond Fairy Tales until then. I won’t say that the idea that I could marry someone wealthy and live in a house like that didn’t cross my mind, but it was more that the pictures of the rich and famous draped over kitchens and on stairwells, or nestled on sofas prompted independent thinking.

I have no doubt that this seems like a bizarre claim, but consider that I was a teenage girl, almost directly transported from a boarding school buried in the Yorkshire Moor. I was privileged to have such a wonderful education but I sincerely doubt that a lot of the thoughts I had on issues were not ‘created’ by those that taught me, since it is a teacher’s job to prompt and provoke thought. Outside of class I was surrounded by girls and therefore subject to the thoughts of those considered most popular: the ones who got to choose whether you were on the inside of the group looking out or the outside looking in. Frankly I wasn’t bold enough to want to rock the boat and strike out on my own…

But there I was, alone in another country. No-one knew me, no-one knew what I thought about anything. And it dawned on me that I could be anything I wanted to be. Free from the constraints of a teenage peer group I had the opportunity to find out who I was, and what I thought. And it began with the outfits I liked and disliked in Hello!(ironic, given that I am so not in touch with what is chic.) It continued with design features and decor I favoured in Country Life. From there, I started learning which food I enjoyed cooking and eating in the dozens of recipes books around the house in which I worked. I’d sit for hours drooling over the pages whilst I babysat.

I left Germany a year later. I still have a thing for shirts being ironed properly and still buy Hello! every week.  I can’t help myself it seems: even when I left on honeymoon, I gave the Mothership strict instructions about purchasing my copies whilst I was away. I have tried OK! but it’s not the same: I used to say that it was too much Posh, but she seems to have upped her game and is more likely to feature in the fashion pages of Hello! these days. She’s been replaced by Katie Price who gives me the creeps. Besides, I prefer the recipes in Hello!