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Sarra Manning’s letter to her younger self

By Katy Blott
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Letter to my sixteen year old self by Sarra Manning 

 

 

London, With Love starts in 1986 when our heroine, Jen, is sixteen. So, I thought I’d write a letter to sixteen-year-old Sarra, who bears an uncanny resemblance to my fictional creation. How odd!

 

 

Hello you

 

I’m going to start by saying that I’m really proud of you because not many people tell you that.

 

You’re passionate about the things that you love (and also the things you hate.) You’re politically engaged enough that you’ll spend a Saturday afternoon marching for a good cause but also because you really enjoy shouting “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Out! Out! Out!” into a loudhailer.

 

When you’re not being all agit-prop, you go to art exhibitions and watch French films and you buy too many magazines and rerereread the same books and you let the music devour you.

 

I’ll tell you now that the good causes and the art and the films and the dog-eared paperback fiction and the needle dropping down on the vinyl and that static hiss before the beat kicks in saves you again and again, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

 

See, if I’m writing a letter to you, the me that was, I don’t want to give too much away. What if I reveal too much and you try to alter your destiny and some awful rift opens up in the time space continuum?

 

What I will tell you is that there are good times ahead. There are also bad times. The bad times absolutely suck and you don’t always deal with them in the best way you should, but that’s why they’re called bad times.

 

But you get to do what you love. You write. You earn your living from writing and I know how much that will blow your sixteen-year-old mind. You might not ever lose that feeling that you don’t fit in; that you’re not cool enough for the cool kids and everyone else thinks you’re kind of odd but somehow you manage to build a career on connecting with people who feel the exact same way.

 

I know! Who’d have thought it?

 

So, without giving the game away, let me tell you five things that aren’t going to tear a massive hole in the fabric of time, but will give you a leg up on life.

 

  1. Stop dicking about with frosted lilac lipstick. Really, what are you thinking? Stick with the red. A bluey red. Clinique 100% Red, until MAC cosmetics are created and invent Ruby Woo. While we’re talking about make-up, wear that liquid eyeliner with pride, girl, but it will go on much easier if you draw a line in pencil liner first, then the brush will glide over it. Also, foundation is meant to even out your skin tone, not completely obscure it and give up on that green stick that’s meant to tone down your rosy cheeks. It makes you look like you’re from Mars.

 

  1. You know that rail of 50’s summer dresses for a fiver each at the Stables market in Camden market? Buy whichever ones you can get into. Buy the whole rail. In the future, you will not believe how much money a decent vintage frock will cost you.

 

  1. I know our adolescence was blighted by not living near enough to a tube station. There was a lot of leaving early to get the last bus or missing the last bus and having to walk from Edgware or worse, Hendon, but the worst places that you live in are the places you choose because they’re near to a tube station. Buses are great. Eventually they’ll run all through the night, but I can see that’s not very helpful to you right now.

 

  1. Right now, you think that smoking’s cool but secretly you don’t understand what all the fuss is about because it doesn’t really do anything for you. Let’s try and keep it this way. You might as well stop your sporadic smoking now, before you get taught to inhale by some revolting boy you went out with for a week. Twenty years later, you’ll have spent THOUSANDS of our English pounds on smokes. I’m not even going to try and tell you what damage you’re doing to our perfectly pink teenage lungs. THOUSANDS of pounds! Being cool is not worth that much.

 

  1. Be braver. Stop being so scared. Don’t listen to people telling you that you can’t and that you never will, but especially don’t listen to that voice inside your head that shouts it out the loudest.

 

So, that’s it. That’s all I’ve got. You’ll be fine and when you’re not, as ever, the music and the books and all that beautiful stuff will pull you through. I promise.

 

Live on,

 

Sarra x

 

London, With Love is coming Thursday 5th May