I'll Be Home For Christmas. Abbey Clancy
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his bouncy chair like a benign Jabba the Hutt. He’s one of those fat babies with rolls of flesh everywhere, and his eyes completely disappear every time he laughs. Which is a lot.
So, Mum is a family woman. Her life isn’t glamorous, or that interesting. She spends every spare minute looking after us lot, and still works on the tills at the local Tesco, even though she doesn’t really need to any more. She’s extraordinary, but ordinary, if you know what I mean – one of those salt-of-the-earth-women you could build an empire on the back of.
All of which begs the question: why is she trending on Twitter? When did she even join Twitter? Why did she join Twitter?
I scroll down the pages – literally endless pages – and see that every pic on there has the hashtag #jessikasmum. It looks like the whole of Liverpool has popped into the supermarket to pick up a packet of crumpets, a bottle of Prosecco, and a selfie with my mother. There are hundreds of them – all featuring complete strangers, gurning like idiots, and my mum, happily posing alongside them.
My mum has described herself as ‘daughter, wife, mother, grandmother, and lover of all things Michael Bublé’. I suppose I should be grateful that the great crooner himself hasn’t also called in with a selfie stick in his hand.
‘Fab time at Tesco with mummy diva’, says one tweet. ‘Jessika’s mum is awesome’, says another. ‘Forget Jessika – her mum needs her own reality show!’ on one more. ‘Why’s she still working?’ asks a random girl who, according to her profile, loves knitting, cats and visiting S&M clubs. Hopefully not all at the same time.
Mum’s still working, of course, because she wants to. Not because she’s skint, or because I haven’t offered to give her anything she needs – but because she is who she is. She’s my mum, and she’ll probably be going into Tesco when she’s eighty, popping her false teeth back in for photo calls.
I close down the screen, and take a breath. Tell myself there’s no harm done. That it could be worse – my dad could be on Twitter, and then the world as we know it would collapse in on itself.
My life is insane. Nobody warned me being a pop star would be quite this crazy.
#passmetheproseccoplease
*
I used to think my life was complicated when I was younger. I was sharing a scummy flat with my old school friend, Ruby, running our marginally successful Disney princess party business, feeding my body with a steady diet of cheap packet noodles and feeding my soul with a vision of becoming a singer.
I suppose I was a typically star-struck girl from Liverpool who was a chasing a dream – a dream of becoming a pop star, of making it big, of hanging framed platinum discs on my toilet wall and playing to sell-out crowds in stadiums across the globe.
In some ways, all of that has come true. Sort of by accident, if I’m honest. I was singing at a birthday party in Cheshire, soaked to the skin and ‘Letting It Go’, when I was ‘spotted’ by a music mogul called Jack Duncan.
When you read that in newspapers and magazines – ‘spotted’ – it always sounds like stardom happened magically overnight. Like the tall skinny geeky girl was shopping for a new pencil case in Paperchase one minute, and strutting her stuff on the Paris catwalks the next. And maybe, in some cases, that’s what happens, I don’t know.
With me, it was different. After I was ‘spotted’, Jack whisked me away to a new life in London – but it was a new life that didn’t exactly start out brilliantly. I was working long hours as the office intern at Starmaker Records, slaving for the PR team by day and perfecting my craft by night.
Well, that’s not quite accurate. Some of those nights, I’d spend with Jack Duncan – who’d spotted my talent in more ways than one. I still cringe a little inside when I think about Jack. I can’t say he exploited me, but he didn’t exactly behave like a knight in shining armour either – because while I was gullibly falling in love with him, he was part-time shacked up with my friend Vogue as well.
It all came out in the wash, and we got our revenge – revenge that involved handcuffing him to a bed, taking obscene pictures of him in embarrassing positions and, more importantly, walking out on Starmaker to form our own record label – In Vogue.
Still. Cringing inside, even as I speak. I have a trusting soul, and that isn’t always a good thing in show business – because the Jack Duncans of that world are literally swimming through its waters like seductive sharks, guzzling up tiddlers like me for breakfast.
I went from being me to being a new and not-so-improved version of me – featuring on a number one single with Vogue, on the pages of all the bikini-body celeb-style magazines, even on the telly for a live Christmas Day broadcast.
Between the glamour and the parties and Jack and the sheer wondrous hard work of it all, I lost my bearings a bit though. I forgot who I was. I left behind Jessy, the nice girl from Liverpool who loved her family and kept her feet on the ground, and embraced Jessika, who, possibly as a result of some kind of toxic poisoning from all the fake eyelashes and fake tan she used, could be a bit of a bitch.
I’m not proud of some of the things I did back then, but I am proud that I pulled it back. It’s not easy to get any kind of balance when your entire life is a crazy carousel of lunacy, but I did.
I didn’t do it alone, though. I did it with the help of my family, bonkers as they are. I did it with the help of Vogue, who might be a diva but has a heart the size of a planet. I did it with the help of Neale, my stylist and the most fabulous and best of friends.
Mainly, though, I did it with the help of Daniel Wells – the love of my life.
*
Daniel Wells is my real hero. He’s Han Solo and Jack Bauer and Barack Obama all rolled up into one. He doesn’t look or act like any of those people – I’m just trying to convey how brilliant he is. To me at least.
Daniel and I have known each other since we were toddlers. He used to live next door to us on our quiet terraced street in Liverpool, and there are, I believe, photos still in existence of us playing with rubber ducks in the bath together when we were two. We still sometimes take a bath together, but things tend to end differently these days.
Daniel was a geek before it was remotely cool to be one. Overweight, over-haired, over-pimpled and over-shy, he spent his teenage years locked away, writing songs, fiddling with tech, and, it turns out, pining over me.
We lost touch for years when his family moved down South, but he miraculously appeared back in my life just when I needed him most. I had recreated myself as Jessika, and he had recreated himself as Wellsy – the coolest record producer of his generation. But while I embraced the madness of public life – I was always a much bigger show-off than him – he’d become a hermit, setting up his studio in the wilds of the countryside, his anonymity and lack of showbiz neediness somehow making him even more desirable within the industry.
He’d not changed a bit – he still knew me inside out, upside down, and standing on my head. He still understood me, warts and all, and loved me anyway. In fact, the only thing that had changed about Daniel was the way he looked – time had been kind to him, good genetics allowing him to blossom into a taller version of Leonardo DiCaprio. Cute Leo – like Catch Me If You Can Leo, not the Leo covered in blood and drool like in The Revenant.
I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say he saved me. Or, at the very least, he made room for me on his life raft as the Titanic was sinking – unlike that cow Rose.
And now, we’re together. So together it’s unreal. In public, we might be Wellsy and Jessika, but, in private, we’re just Jessy and Daniel. Loved-up in a way I’ve never known before. He has his career, I have mine, and we both have each other. My time with him is precious and perfect and utterly satisfying in every possible way. He’s the kind of man you can watch a box set of Happy Valley with one minute, and have Olympic-level sex with the next. He doesn’t care if I look like crap, or accidentally leave my hair extensions hanging on the back of