Oh poor Kate Adamson.
The 33-year-old mother must have thought that relocating to the opposite side of the planet meant that she could put her past behind her. Then someone invented the internet and now she is a front page sensation, all over again.
Back in the nineties, a 17-year-old Kate was coaxed into posing for a toe-curling picture with Alex Salmond, who awkwardly fed her a Solero ice-lolly at a photo call at Stirling University.
A year ago the picture resurfaced and a global online search ensued. Yesterday, the lady in question was revealed to be living quietly with her young family in Melbourne, Australia, and disclosed that her lolly of choice was in fact a Zoom.
Which begs the question; is there now no escape from the mishaps of youth? When is the grace period where we get to adopt suspect fashion choices, behave badly, try out different world views and generally mess up, without fear of our faux pas coming back to haunt us for the rest of our natural lives.
I try to avoid thinking about my teenage years too much, but I know that a large portion of them were spent sporting the then de-rigueur "spiral" perm, with was always twinned with a poker straight fringe and occasionally a "Fergie" bow.
I know that I had a penchant for wearing bottle-tops on my shoe-laces and jaunty red neckerchiefs of the type you see sported by today's more Bohemian dogs. There is also, in a cupboard somewhere, photographic evidence of me boldly sporting a series of pastel-coloured shell-suits.
My passions veered wildly from Alice Cooper to New Kids on the Block and I was absolutely certain of the fact that one day Jason Donovan would be my husband. Embarrassing, eh?
I am eternally thankful that the most horrifyingly embarrassing moments of my youth exist only in the memories of my cohorts at the time. There were a few cameras kicking around but for the most part our hijinks were undocumented.
Looking back, how wonderfully liberating that seems. Nowadays, your exploits can have reached home before you have and can continue to flare up like a bad back when we least expect it.
Online, there seems to be no natural moving on, no shedding of old selves, no slipping away of old acquaintances.
Everything time you switch on, there is everything you've ever said or done online, every person you've ever met (or not), every photo you've ever featured in is staring right back at you. Stop the virtual world, I want to get off.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article