My mantra became, “What would Geri do?”, inspiring me to streak my hair with my sister’s Sun In and speak with a hint of a Watford accent. But while boys on the school bus threw keys at me, I cultivated a rich interior life, disappearing into Spiceworld for hours at a time. In the Spice Girls universe, girls were better than boys (something I’d long suspected), and friendship was better than romance.Īs a heroically effeminate kid growing up in a West Midlands village, friends were an entirely abstract concept. I loved their unruliness, their fearlessness and, obviously, their massive shoes.
They had arrived from nowhere in a riot of big hair and bigger attitudes, high-kicking their way into my consciousness, where they commandeered 80% of my waking thoughts. W hen I was nine years old, all I could talk about was the Spice Girls.
