David Beckham has recently admitted that he embarrasses his sons. The oldest, Brooklyn, apparently makes him leave him around the corner from school, while 12-year-old, Romeo, has (quite understandably, we reckon) been evading hugs and kisses in front of his friends at drop-off time. Beckham has said that he loves having so much more time with his family since retiring two years ago from a 22-year career in football. The kids, however, may be longing for a time when he wasn’t so readily available for routine embarrassments.
Having David and Victoria Beckham for parents must be tough.
Sure everyone has come across embarrassing old photographs of their parents from their youth. Luckily they run more along the lines of pink corduroy flares and platform shoes (dad) or gold lame jumpsuits (dad again) or bad haircuts with echoes of Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust incarnation (mum, this time) than this type of thing…
Or indeed this…
The Beckham kids have to contend, not only with an enormous, and embarrassing back catalogue of pictorial evidence of their parents profoundly uncool past, but also with frequent embarrassing admissions from the parentals. For the rest of us, the main opportunity our parents get for large-scale embarrassment is a few digs during a speech at the wedding or at a landmark birthday party. They might get to tell the story of how you soiled yourself when you were eight(teen) but it is not to a large audience, and it won’t live on forever on the Internet.
The Beckham’s equivalent of this is to tell these anecdotes to Graham Norton and his four million viewers, which is just what David did last night. “Romeo is the most emotional out of all the kids”, said David, going on to describe how while refereeing one of Romeo’s football matches, he awarded a penalty to the other team, causing Romeo’s eyes to “well up” and bottom lip to tremble. Does any 12-year old need this grief? Being twelve is hard enough without essentially being described as “totes emosh” on national television.
Hopefully, the cheque from his recent Burberry campaign goes some way towards easing the pain of these routine embarrassments.
