It’s been 10 years since my first Edinburgh Fringe, and the magic still hasn’t worn off. In that decade, I’ve attended the festival as a punter and a student performer, a reviewer for a national publication and an awards judge. I even have a (some squares might say ill-advised) Fringe tattoo: the word “SILLY” on the back of my arm, obtained for 50 quid during said sleep-deprived judging panel year. There’s no place quite like Edinburgh in August, yet my loyalty towards Hot Fringe Summer has been wavering recently. Every year, I find myself spending less and less of the season in the Scottish capital. That Fringe FOMO remains pungent, but dancing in fields at actual festivals (and sleeping in my own bed the remainder of the time) has taken precedence.

So while the Fringe is still frequented, I try to front load as much of my own coverage. July, weirdly, is the month I focus on the Fringe. For two years, I wrote the festival guides for The New York Times (thanks to an impossible to replicate chain of events I still don’t fully understand myself ) and my alma mater of The Independent, and assisted a travel company in collating itineraries for group trips, which I vaguely consider a consultancy gig without ever caring to google what consultants actually do.

This year’s Fringe pre-season was spent interviewing Sophie Duker for Broadsheet London, and diving into the comedian-critic relationship for Exeunt. Under strict direct orders from Dua Lipa herself (probably), I also put together a Discovery List of recommendations for Service95, and penned a written guide Broadsheet, featuring many of my favourite places to eat in the city too. Those lists are a mixed bag of old favourites and wildcards stumbled upon while I’m combing through individual venue websites. All of which is to say: I take my Fringe recommendation research seriously.

During this process, I uncover an awful lot of shows I’m never able to publicly shout about… until now! My extensive colour-coded spreadsheet has been sent around to enough friends, and now I share its contents with you. There’s no real rhyme or reason to this collection, but I’ve tried to garble some kind go mini-explainer as to what interested me in this show, and note anyone I can personally vouch for. I won’t lie: some I chose purely on name or poster basis alone (I really do be judging books by their covers). It’s mostly comedy, with some theatre and a few other random bits at the end.

All very self-aggrandising, I realise, but I genuinely do get asked to share my Fringe recs year on year! I swear! So here you go. This is The Isobel Lewis Edinburgh Fringe 2026 Recommendations Guide: The Director’s Cut…

Service95

Harriet Richardson: Creep

Emmanuel Sonubi: What’s Next?

Elouise Eftos: Aphrodite

Hotter Project: HAM

Wally Baram: My Snake’s Quinceañera

Marc Brew Company: Boys Don’t Dance

Jake Bhardwaj: Not Another Quiz Night

Alex Franklin: Kiss Me x

Lara Ricote: Inkling

Ayo Adenekan: Homeland Insecurity

Sadiq Ali Company: Tell Me

Trojan Women Project: Why Am I In Your Country?

Exeunt

Temi Wilkey: Lover Girl

BIRDS

And the rest…

Kemah Bob: Love Child

Interviewed Kemah back when she was in the throes of working out this show, and she spoke about the premise with such conviction I have to see it out.

Larry Dean: Hellbent

Guaranteed good time!

Rosie Jones: I Can’t Tell What She’s Saying

I’ve seen Rosie on TV (obviously) and many a mixed-bill show but never watched her do a full hour, and I’d like to change that.

Li Jin Hao: Falling From A Moon

Caught Li Jin Hao at Frida Kahlol in Stoke Newington (top comedy night for the girls and gays) mere minutes after England’s win against DR Congo. Had a hoot, and not just because the dream of it coming home was still alive… he’s a delight, and this is his best work.

The Pleasance Comedy Reserve

The stars of tomorrow: today!

Sydnee Washington: My Black Barbie Story

Loved every podcast episode Sydnee’s ever done, worth noting she’s only doing the first half of the Fringe so don’t miss out!

Zoe Brownstone: How To Be Happy All The Time

I’ve always enjoyed Zoe’s stuff, and this is part of the Free Fringe, for the frugal among ye.

Ahir Shah: Golden

Will probably make me cry, if previous years’ shows are anything to go by.

Abby Govindon: Pushing 30

I only know Abby from her comedy videos, but suspect this will be fantastic.

Susie McCabe: Coming of Rage

There’s something incredibly patronising about referring to a stalwart of the Scottish comedy scene like Susie McCabe as “underrated”, yet I’m always surprised how many people aren’t tuned into her work! One of my Fringe favourites, year on year.

Share

Sapphire McIntosh: Squeaky Bum Time

I’ll admit it: the show title got me.

Christopher Hall: Pizazz

Best known for those videos where he and his sister pretend to be pop stars’ backing dancers, Christopher’s also a surprisingly skilled stand-up, according to the many pals who’ve seen him live.

Joe Dehuai: Let’s Unionise This Comedy Club!

I know literally nothing about Joe Dehuai, so can’t vouch for his stand-up. Still, the show’s premise (it’s about how he unionised his workplace and “ruined his life”) is right up my street. Plus, Free Fringe!

WE ARE IAN

I might have missed Six: The Musical, Baby Reindeer and Eat the Rich (but maybe not me mates x) when they were all in their newborn Fringe runs, but je ne regrette rien, because I DID see the original production of In Bed With My Brother’s WE ARE IAN. An ode to Madchester I still think about to this day, it’s back for just three nights this year. You gotta go, kid.

The Subplot: A hyperfixation on the Titan submersible

My hackles tend to go up a bit at Fringe shows about recent news items, but c’mon! It’s the submersible!

You and Me (and Whoever Comes Next)

A story about the relationship between a disabled man and his personal assistant, Summerhall’s You and Me (and Whoever Comes Next) has popped up in a lot of the main Fringe guides, and I get the impression it’ll absolutely be worth the hype.

One Man Musical

Sooooo mad that I never saw SNL UK’s George Fouracres in One Man Musical. I have, however, heard that Tarot’s own Edward Easton is a worthy replacement and puts a whole new spin on the musical-theatre-composer-who-we-can’t-say-the-name-of.

HOLE!

It’s made by a company called American Sing-Song (A.S.S). Say no more.

Evita Too

Reviewed this show already, so can say it’s exactly the kind of genre-defying, tit-flashing musical comedy play (?) you want to see at the Fringe.

Border Bodies

Part of the São Paulo Showcase, this is a dance piece all about borders, boundaries, and the barriers that serve to keep us apart. Pertinent stuff!

Ham Sandwiches and Discipline

Great name, even greater premise: a comedy dance piece set in the world of Gaelic football. Second half of the Fringe only.

By A Thread

I not-so-secretly love circus performance – watching a group of hunky Aussies keep each other in the air using 30 metres of white rope and pulleys is unbelievably fun for me.

Anything past 11.30pm at Monkey Barrel

Want to feel like you’re really a part of the Fringe? This is where you gotta go, so pick a show, any show (RODEO! and Comedians Pub Games Beer Mat Flipping have always served me well, though).

Anything past 1am at Assembly George Square Studios Underground

Want to spend the night awkwardly dancing next to your favourite comedians? Underground time, baby!

On paper, this seems like a natural progression. I’m currently at the tail end of training for the Hackney Half; long sessions already being a big part of my routine, I can (perhaps naively) see how training for a marathon would fit into my life. Yet I’d be lying to say that internal goals are the only thing tempting me. Scrolling past all the influencer posts from and leading up to the marathon – the kit flat lays and video montages and speed statistic screenshots – I felt a desire to join them in the posting as much as the race itself. This mindset is representative of an aspect of modern running culture I find icky. I’ve been insisting that I have a positive relationship with running, but can that be true, if I’ve had to gamify it for social media to get there?

That social media (something society largely agrees is pretty terrible for us) plays an integral role in my running practice is something I feel nervous about. I’ve historically had a terrible relationship to exercise and my body, treating the latter as a Frankenstein’s monster mishmash parts to individually hone and tone. This mindset unsurprisingly limited my progress when I began running, and I spent years unsure why I still couldn’t jog a complete 5K without stopping. Shifting from aesthetic aims was no mean feat, but doing so completely changed my relationship with sport and my body in turn. For the first time, I was thinking about what I could do as a whole instead of what I looked like, and eating properly to fuel my runs. Restriction had always been enforced under the guise of health, but here I felt properly fit for the first time.

The tension, I guess, comes from the knowledge that for this positive change, I have to partly credit the insufferable exercise app Strava. It’s a strange bind. I began running in the first place to give myself a lunch time break on work-from-home days when I could connect with my body and, crucially, not look at a screen. Strava has complicated this simple goal. I run, and in turn provide myself another thing to do on my phone as soon as I’m finished.

There’s a phrase that’s pseudo-ironically thrown around in the running community: “Strava or it didn’t happen”, or “If it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen”. The implication? That exercise only counts when it’s logged online. These words bedeck hideous mugs and t-shirts on Etsy, and can be spotted on the homemade signs spectators make for their friends at races. Strava is such a significant part of running culture, its users are willing to do free advertising for it.

With 180 million users worldwide, Strava has become synonymous with the modern runner (along with gels, pavement-dominating run clubs, and never shutting the fuck up about running). The brand was far less integral to the experience when I first downloaded the app in 2021. Attempting Couch to 5K for a second time, I thought Strava would allow me to keep track of my progress; when it came to C25K itself, the main motivation was being able to jog for the bus without humiliating myself. So when my speed was slow, I truly didn’t care. The only yardstick was my own.

Yet as more friends took up running and joined me on the app, the goalposts moved. All of a sudden, gaining their approval was a new impetus for my exercising. Kudos were thrown out liberally and with an Oprah-esque excitement (“You get a like! You get a like!”); friends would comment on my speed, as they’d seen on the app, in real life too. Their praise, virtual or actual, was the boost I needed after five years of incremental progress. Each digital like delivered its intended dopamine hit, this Pavlovian response motivating me to run more in turn.

With its roots in real-life activity, Strava – like Goodreads for books, or Letterboxd for film buffs – escapes much of the criticism aimed at more traditional social media platforms. Online praise for setting a new PB, or simply leaving the house on a drizzly Tuesday, feels far less toxic than a mindless like on an Instagram Story. According to Strava’s 2025 Year in Sport report, more than half of Gen Z users went into 2026 wanting to use the app more compared to TikTok and Instagram, which they wanted to use the same amount or less. “We know that Gen Z is looking for real experiences, not more time staring at screens,” said CEO Michael Martin.

It doesn’t take a genius to point out that Strava is still something that gets you staring at a screen. My main resolution for the year was to get my phone screentime below three hours a day – which, depending on your own habits, is either embarrassingly easy or nigh on impossible. Deleting the Instagram app has certainly helped, but do you know what slyly crept up the ranking in its place? Bloody Strava.

I like to think I’m not a “Strava or it didn’t happen” runner, but I’m certainly an “if it’s going to happen, I should definitely Strava it” one. When my GPS messed up mid-way through Richmond Half in September and I staggered over the finish line to realise my logged distance was short, I pushed my withering legs unnecessarily to run another 300m, just so I could get my first: “Congrats! You set your PR in the Half-Marathon” notification. Having taken a drop-out spot on 12 days notice and not asked any friends to come and spectate, validation from the app was all I had. In that situation, it really did feel like if I didn’t Strava it, it didn’t happen.

Many will read this and conclude this isn’t that bad, or that they’d do the same… which is part of the issue. We’ve come to normalise obsessive tracking as part of the fitness process, telling ourselves that this is actually a healthy way of using social media. Better than Instagram, maybe. But you can’t be cynical of an app like Hinge saying it’s “designed to be deleted” and not extend that same scepticism to Strava. It is not your friend. It does want you to get outside and exercise, but it does not want to get you off your phone.

The scale of this issue is something I fluctuate on. Many will argue it’s a good thing – that anything that gets us outside and moving is a winner. But when it comes to my own relationship, I want to be cautious. Improving my running practice and healing decades of toxic behaviour towards my body have come from separating the sport from the way I look. As soon as social media, which is aesthetics-based by nature, comes into play, there’s a fear of stepping backwards. To hold firm, I focus on my personal goals: running longer, running faster. My friends might sling some kudos my way after a particularly speedy 10K, but those core goals are mine and mine alone. Only I can understand how far I’ve come mentally to get there, and how much there is to lose if I’m led off the path.

Actually, Carpenter is the one guesting for them. I’m talking, of course, about Disney+’s reboot of The Muppet Show, back on our screens from today with a one-off half-hour special. It’s been 50 years since this puppet variety show – a ventriloquist-led Saturday Night Live, if you will – was first broadcast, and the world has changed dramatically since then. Couldn’t we all do with a little levity from Kermit and company?

From the trailer alone, it seemed clear that Carpenter felt right at home with Jim Henson’s puppet platoon. This makes sense: Carpenter slots into a long tradition of gorgeous, glamorous women who have appeared on screen with the Muppets. It’s not just within the show’s universe, either. Women – specifically Gen Z and millennial women – make up a significant and vocal part of the Muppet fandom on social media. Hot girls love the Muppets. They act opposite them, talk about them online and are explicitly marketed to for it.

A note: Carpenter might be the textbook example to many, but “hot girl” isn’t used here just as shorthand for “conventionally attractive”. It’s not meant to infantilise, nor even particularly gendered. Rather, it pertains to a certain coolness: a glamour, a puppet-sais-quoi that comes from being confident in your taste. You convey it with the declaration: “Yeah, I’m an adult obsessed with a show about a singing bear called Fozzie. And what of it?” Supermodel Cindy Crawford was a hot girl who featured on a Muppet programme, sure, but so was acerbic comedian Joan Rivers.

The definition fluctuates, but you know it when you see it. When Jennifer Lawrence announced in November that she and Emma Stone were producing a Miss Piggy film, they imbued that project with their special celebrity-you’d-most-like-to-get-a-drink-with brand of charm. With cult internet comedian Cole Escola writing the film, they showed that where the Muppets go, cool girls (and non-binary people, in Escola’s case) follow.

The Untitled Miss Piggy Project, like this new Muppet Show special, aren’t ushering in a Muppet Renaissance, but responding to one that we’re already living through. Lawrence has teased the project as “a family movie for gays and women”, bringing to mind legendary music video director Joseph Kahn’s recent comments that the Avatar film franchise has had no lasting cultural impact because gay people don’t care about it. The LGBTQ+ community and women are considered the arbiters of our collective cultural taste. If these groups are successfully catered to with this Miss Piggy movie, its online footprint will be huge.

Our current Muppet moment might be amplified from a flurry of memes and viral videos, but Henson’s puppet gang have always reflected the moment in pop culture history… and the beautiful women at the forefront of it. Look back to the original Muppet Show, and you’d see Diana Ross, bedecked in jewel-encrusted shoulder pads, serenading Fozzie Bear, and a khaki-clad Debbie Harry teaching the Frog Scouts to be “real punk”. Cher even had them on her show, acting opposite Kermit and struggling to hold back her laughter like she was about to declare the late Luther Vandross a 2026 Grammy winner.

The 90s came, and the Muppets continued to court the starlets of Hollywood. Sometimes literally, in the case of Michelle Pfeiffer, who was matched up with Animal on a spoof Blind Date-style dating show on 1996’s Muppets Tonight. The films that followed post-Disney’s purchase of the Muppet franchise in 2004 felt more family-focused, yet the cameos continued: Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez, Salma Hayek, Saoirse Ronan.

Acting opposite puppets requires special skill. From a performance perspective, these actresses must treat the Muppets as they would any human scene partner (although the metatheatricality of The Muppet Show means this format requires less sincerity than that called upon by Michael Caine in The Muppet Christmas Carol). Rather than treating the Muppets like actors playing parts, they should instead regard them as superstar celebrities of a far higher status than theirs. Just look at Emma Stone’s genuine indignation at the suggestion that she would play Miss Piggy in their film, telling W magazine: “First of all, that is the biggest insult to Miss Piggy I’ve ever heard, and I will not have her dragged through the mud like that.”

Carpenter brings the same energy to The Muppet Show 2.0, where she and Miss Piggy sport matching Mackie-esque feathered ensembles and identical bouffant dos. They’re “two young ingenues at the top of their game”, as Piggy calls them, but actually, Carpenter has a lot more in common with the Muppets than one might think. It goes beyond Disney brand synergy. Both have a broad appeal that kids latch onto, providing them a stage from which they can chuck out innuendos right over younger audience members’ heads. It’s cheeky and sure to piss off conservatives, but not not family friendly.

Because that’s the thing about Carpenter. No matter how racy her lyrics or on-stage sex positions get, children are always going to hear “Espresso” and dance along. Neither side diminishes the other, and The Muppet Show courts both audiences. One minute, Carpenter’s performing a harmless radio edit of her Grammy-nominated hit “Manchild” as the waitress in a honky-tonk bar with the help of the Muppet chickens. The next, Kermit is apologising to her for the kinks in the “live” special, only for Carpenter to reply: “That’s OK, I love a kink.” Tonally, The Muppet Show reminds me of Carpenter’s own Netflix holiday special, 2024’s A Nonsense Christmas. Light and frothy – if not particularly memorable – are phrases I’d use to describe that project. Put her in frame with a Muppet, and Carpenter shines much more brightly.

The similarities between her look and Miss Piggy’s are a running gag in The Muppet Show (“It’s called copyright infringement, sweetie!”) that only bolsters Carpenter’s image. It speaks to a trend online at the moment where Miss Piggy is held up, sort of tongue-in-cheek, as the model modern woman: a “diva, fashion icon and feminist pioneer”, as one Dazed article recently branded her. There are life lessons to be learnt from the world’s most powerful pig (sorry Babe, babe). She teaches us that there’s nothing wrong with asking for – née, demanding – what you want and wearing some big ol’ eyelashes in the process. And it’s not the pig alone that women are aspiring to. The internet is littered with jokes about Miss Piggy and Kermit embodying the ultimate heterosexual relationship: a glamorous woman and a lanky man terrified to disagree with her.

Hot girls love the Muppets and the Muppets (by which I mean The Walt Disney Company) loves them right back. Gen Z and millennial women have serious purchasing power, all being marketed to in the pink-hued accessories lines (both high and low end) and cosmetic collections that have hit shelves in recent years. The Miss Piggy film is aiming at a similar audience. The merchandising opportunities, I’m sure, will be huge.

It’s easy to interpret young women being into the Muppets as a different flavour of the “girlhood” TikTok trend that cynics like me see as a tool directly trying to keep women childlike and incompetent. The Disney ownership certainly doesn’t help. And it’s probably my sense of exceptionalism, but I think the Muppets eschew the “brainrot” label in a way other IP targeting children and women in one fell swoop don’t. There’s always been a sharpness to the writing, a willingness to challenge viewers; I mean, right-wing commentators accused the 2011 Muppets movie of “brainwashing kids against capitalism”. And then there’s the history of old-school puppetry, the craft and time and tangibility of it all. You can take your Labubu. Give me a man with his hand up the ass of a puppet frog any day.

Am I saying that liking the Muppets is cool because it reflects things that I personally think are cool? A bit, yeah. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all these famous celebrity hot girls and cool online hot girls want to share their love for the Muppets. It shows a willingness to engage with the inner child without completely infantilising yourself. You convey that you don’t take yourself too seriously, and, crucially, are willing to stand by the things you like even if they are a bit weird.

You could love the Muppets and never spend a penny on merch, but there’s a weirdness to the brand that means an Animal cross body bag actually says something about the wearer in a way a TikTok microtrend never could. I’m not suggesting every woman should be getting a full Muppet Christmas Carol backpiece, but you’ve got to admire the commitment to loving something and wearing it with your chest (or in this case, spine). Ultimately, being a loud and proud fan of the Muppets shows a confidence in your own taste that will always be cooler than any trend. Hot girls love the Muppets, and loving the Muppets makes them hotter, I think.

Amid the renewed popularity of physical media (and Gen Z’s obsession with so-called “grandma hobbies”), it makes sense that film photography would make a comeback. Underscored by a blatant desire for tangibility, the laborious process exists in opposition to our fast-paced culture of instant gratification. Film photography is a tactile act at every stage: parts click, film whirs, flash, well, flashes.

There’s risk involved too. 35mm film is famously pricey these days (you’ll be lucky to find a roll of colour film, producing roughly 36 pictures, for under a tenner), and the developing process can be costly if you don’t have a cheap film lab nearby. Add in a vintage camera with any number of unknown issues, and it’s easy to invest a lot of time and money only to receive a blank set of images in return. Happens to the best of us.

Personally, I think it’s still worth it. I love the blurry imperfections of the photos; my status as the resident “bitch with a film camera” (see below) even more so. In a bid to make my film pics even more palpable, I go the whole hog, printing the images and arranging them into albums. The best shots will still end up online – everyone looks hotter on 35mm film, that’s just a fact – but I place more weight on the old school element. Peering at each print calls forward a memory life-altering or inconsequential, and fills me with unbridled joy. Nostalgia is a powerful drug, and I’m injecting it straight into my eyeballs, baby!

There are narratives woven through these albums: in what I’ve chosen to photograph, and what I’ve chosen not to. Because there’s something – something I deem notable – that has fallen through the gaps in my film photography. A friend once nicknamed me “London’s dating bellwether”, AKA the only person she knew who was consistently seeing someone in the capital. And yet you won’t find any of the people I have dated in my photo albums. No flings, no I-think-we’re-better-off-as-friends, no givers or recipients of “I love you”s.

A reticence towards taking pictures of the people I date is one many will recognise. As anyone who’s unironically used the terms “soft launch” or “hard launch” in the last few years can tell you, a picture of a romantic partner gives a lot away, particularly in a digital context. There’s a recognisable language to this step-by-step easing in; a second pair of hands at a dimly lit dinner, the back of a head posted on close friends, each not-so-subtly signalling that there is Someone Significant in your life. Many won’t even bother with an official couple post – as British Vogue declared just last week, posting your boyfriend to grid is soooo out for 2025.

Subscribe now

Integrally, these online images can be removed as easily as they are posted. There’s no bigger tell of a modern day break up than the subtle archiving of a partner from an Instagram photo dump – any gossip lover can tell you that. Still, if the tangible realness of film photography is what makes it so appealing to many, it can also be anxiety-inducing within a romantic context. Posting someone to social media feels like a big deal, but it doesn’t have to be forever. There is something so comparatively, terrifyingly… visceral about committing a person to cellulose. Taking a picture of someone you’re seeing on film prescribes a permanence many of us are uncomfortable with, either because we don’t want it or don’t think the other party would reciprocate even if we did.

If sticking my camera in the faces of my friends is a carefree act, even the thought of taking pictures of a romantic interest sets me out in hives, especially in the liminal early-mid stages of dating. The act raises too many awkward questions. Does this imply I like them more than I do? What if it’s all over by the time I reach the end? Is this really what I want to be using my film on? Have you seen how much Portra400 costs these days?!

Experiencing a break-up mid-way through a roll of film is something I, like many casual photographers, have experienced first hand. As a result, I’ve cultivated a tried-and-tested technique for dealing with the problem. You can try it next time too. Enlist a friend who has already seen you in the emotional gutter (during this specific break-up, ideally), and get them to sort the developed picture files into two folders before they’re re-forwarded to you. Uncontaminated photos go in one section, any containing the offending party or you with particularly loved-up glow in the other. Nobody has to know you got dumped between picture 27 and 28.

Going full scorched Earth is an option, but I prefer the cleaving method. It proffers a kindness towards your past and future selves: “You feel like this now, but you might not one day, and may regret getting rid of these.” The atomised state of modern dating certainly makes it easier to act like someone you dated never existed, but leaning into that often means getting rid of the pleasant with the pain, and pretending the relationship didn’t matter in the first place.

I have operated like this in the past, and don’t want to anymore. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually gone into the ex picture folder, but neither have I deleted them. To do so would feel like an attempt to erase part of my history. Even in this current state of compromise, I’m regrettably reminded of a scene from The IT Crowd where Chris O’Dowd’s Roy photoshops his ex’s face out of their photos together and Richard Ayoade’s Moss jokes that it’s “like someone broke up with Stalin”.

It’s at this point that I have to shout out Virginia, the friend who has been my unofficial archivist during multiple break-ups. Strangely, I do feel like it’s brought us closer together, as the concerted effort I’ve made to be more open about how I’m feeling when it comes to dating in recent years has generally. Who hasn’t seen a friend heartbroken and felt powerless in their ability to make things better? For me, this simple act really does help, and allows for vulnerability on both sides. Like the film photography itself, it’s the physicality of the process that makes it feel so personal.

Most of the time, however, the picture is never taken in the first place – the camera simply remains in my bag. To engage in a cheeky bit of armchair pathologising (would it be a Substack essay without it?), I’d theorise that this avoidant unwillingness to commit the people I date to film reflects a judgement towards myself and my dating life. Things will end; in fact, taking the picture could even cause the other person to freak out and turn into the catalyst for that break-up! Why bother?

Funnily enough, I never extend this same scrutiny to myself in the pictures I do take. I’m not flipping through my albums, looking at the random people I met at festivals or friends I’ve lost contact with, and punishing myself because they haven’t stuck around. Each tableau represents a moment in time. I can appreciate it whether it’s reflective of a current relationship or not.

For some reason, however, I cannot imagine placing a picture of someone I’m no longer in a relationship with or seeing into these pages, even when the end was ostensibly amicable. The judgement doesn’t go both ways. A lot of the people I date are also into film photography (quelle bloody surprise), meaning I’ve been the subject of pre-break-up pictures too. Have I ever seen them taking the photo of me as the deeply exposing act that led to the downfall of our relationship? Have I fuck.

Because in a conclusion that probably won’t shock anyone – it’s not really about the pictures. Photographing someone on a film camera isn’t going to cause the dissolution of a relationship any more than a pre-emptive soft launch would. If it ends, the problem clearly runs deeper than the act of documentation. But it’s also about a perspective shift. Sure, I could look in these photo albums and note that my busy romantic life is missing, or I could focus on what I have in abundance. Romance hasn’t defined my adult years so far. Not even close to it! I say it all the time; friendship, both old and new, is the greatest joy of my life.

The pictures track this narrative, as soon as I stop fixating on what is “missing”. Friends beam on dance floors and laugh on country walks and embrace in cosy pubs, the warmth felt in the subjects’ eyes and the care the photographer is putting into snapping them. It’s a reminder of the fullness of my life before a prospective partner even enters the 4x6in frame, and how the adoration (romance, really) I feel towards my friends is exactly what I’m looking for in dating. Shift the focus, and there’s no lack. Nobody would look at these pictures and see anything but love.

Topshop’s big “relaunch”, with their first catwalk show in seven years in Trafalgar Square, prompted this line of questioning. Given the central London location and the starry attendees, with Cara Delevingne and Adwoa Aboah sitting front row, the coverage wasn’t all that surprising. Yet all this corresponding enthusiasm about Topshop’s so-called return made me feel like my brain had turned into some kind of syrup and was about to gloopily trickle out of my ear. I couldn’t believe – still can’t – how quickly we’d accepted the narrative that this is something worth reminiscing over. Most style publications these days are pretty outspoken about the damaging impact fast fashion is having on the planet. But the thirst for Topshop 2.0 felt like they were celebrating the return of something that never really went away, and, in turn, shorter and shorter trend cycles. Yes, Topshop went into administration in November 2020… but it was bought by ASOS just two months later. Yet all this marketing around the new version worked on me! Seeing these posts, I couldn’t help musing over my own former Topshop loves too, just like they wanted me too.

It’s not exactly headline news to comment on society’s state constant nostalgia, from Gen Z’s obsession with Friends and The Office to the comeback of capri pants (a trend I took one look at and immediately vetoed for myself – I was traumatised by pedal pushers enough the first time around, thank you). She’s a powerful marketing tool, nostalgia, and clothes are a really easy way to evoke those misty-eyed memories. Topshop was undoubtedly a big part of my childhood, as it was for many teens. Saving up to shop there felt like a first foray into adult life, and was experienced initially through deals on socks and vest tops (mostly for the Topshop shopping bag, a status symbol in its own right), before graduating to bigger, “investment” purchases.

But when I think about Topshop, I don’t see it as a long-lost part of my past. It is something that has existed, even in physical form, recently. Should I have wanted to access it online, I could have. I know “old Topshop” is having a moment on sites like Vinted and Depop, with Effy Stonem-obsessed teens seeking out our hand-me-downs. But let’s remind ourselves of something: Topshop closed their flagship Oxford Circus store in 2021. That’s 2-1. We’re not talking about some Y2K brand that faded out in the mid-2000s. I reiterate: you could visit the Big Topshop four years ago. When we buy into the narrative that we’ve all been sat around pining, longingly waiting for its return like Rapunzel in her tower, we are giving the brand permission to try and sell us more shit in the name of nostalgia.

I realise this might sound like the trailing off cry of a desperate woman yelling: “No, wait! I’m still young! I swear, I sweeeeeeeear!” Given the sinking feeling I experienced on a recent in-and-out trip to Westfield Stratford when I realised that I hadn’t heard of half of the shops there, it’s a fair assumption. But I find the idea of being nostalgic about Topshop so strange because I still own and regularly wear clothes from Topshop – ones I purchased, in person, from their shops. I’m not hanging onto them because they’re collectors’ items or I have some nostalgic connection to them. I just wear them regularly enough to warrant keeping them, and know I will likely want to wear them in the future.

That isn’t some holier-than-thou statement. Historically, that’s how people have always treated clothes, even if it’s not how we’re encouraged to in 2025. True, the items I hung onto, where others were passed on, are more staples than trendy pieces: a boxy striped t-shirt, a burnt orange boilersuit, a vibrant zig-zag suit I have worn for both job interviews and theatre press night parties, and will likely crack out at weddings in the future. Some of the trends have gone, then come back around again. When aviator jackets made their return last winter, I still had the faux-shearling Topshop version I’d hoarded my Christmas and birthday money to buy (I reckon circa 2012/3??), and celebrated, the item allowing me to try the trend without buying anything new. Most things were far less timeless, but the clothes I’ve kept hold of are in fairly good nick. They’re not vintage, as Depop sellers would market them, but simply clothes I wore then and still wear now.

Of course, it’s important not to be revisionist here. Topshop might have had that cool girl edge, but it was always fast fashion, and often fairly badly made. It was never size inclusive, and as Felicity Hayward pointed out in the British Vogue Instagram comment section, the new range still only caters up to a UK 16/18. Don’t let the slightly-higher-than-H&M-or-Primark price point fool you; Topshop was consistently called out for poor transparency around the pay and working conditions in its factories back in the day. But in comparison to the ultra-fast fashion clothes on sale now (seemingly designed with the express intention of being worn once and going straight to landfill), Topshop feels like expertly crafted haute couture.

When I sift through the shoddily made clothes from Shein, Boohoo, and even Zara that clog up charity shops now, I can’t help but wish they were closer to Topshop’s quality. That’s part of the reason why Vinted users seek it out; it’s better made than the fast fashion currently on the market. Shein adds approximately 2,000 items to its website every day, making it an obvious and easy villain for fashion influencers and publications to rightfully criticise: for the way it is damaging the environment, treating workers and encouraging of hyper-hyper-capitalism. But the fervorous chatter about Topshop’s big return forgets that it, too, has always been a fast fashion brand with shady ethics.

The cynic in me has to hand it to Topshop; this “relaunch” is an incredible feat of marketing. What I’m (perhaps naïvely) surprised by is how quickly this narrative has taken hold. Magazines and social media accounts I follow covered the London show last week with feverish excitement, despite their usual scepticism of fast fashion. After hearing all these wistful memories about Topshop’s Joni jeans (despite the prevailing narrative that skinny jeans have been, and remain, out), I had a look at ASOS. There are 3,945 Topshop pieces on the site right now, 14 of which are different Joni jean styles. This brand is being spoken of like a school friend you lost contact with after you both left home, but it’s still here. I’m not sure it ever went away.

There is so much to say about fast fashion and trends and overconsumption and poisonous, unregulated clothing and the idea that we “deserve to have nice things” more than workers deserve to be paid for them that I cannot even begin to touch on here. This is more a selection of quickfire thoughts about a random, widely covered fashion show that I can’t stop uneasily thinking about. Reading about Topshop’s grand return, I reiterate to myself that nostalgia is a powerful marketing tool, and that it’s being directly tapped here to sell me stuff. I don’t have to sigh as I think about my old Topshop pieces, seeing them as portals to the past and a sign I should consider purchasing from this new collection too. I don’t have to buy it, and I don’t have to buy into it.

June 2025: One year later, Charli XCX is headlining the Other Stage at Glastonbury, and I am there to watch her for the second time that month. In the week leading up to the festival, I consider digging the brat shirt back out and adding a “2.0” to the top, but run out of time. The Saturday on Worthy Farm, green brat t-shirts are everywhere, yet five minutes into the set, I begin to feel like something’s off. The songs, I’ll always love, but the performance itself doesn’t wow me. Back home on the Tuesday, I read back the reviews of the set and, for the first time in my little lefty life, find myself agreeing with The Telegraph’s review (three stars) more than The Guardian’s (five).

When it was announced that Charli would be playing the Saturday night slot on the Other Stage, I never even considered that this might not be one of the most exhilarating live music experiences of my life. I can even understand why The Guardian’s Shaad D’Souza (a favourite music critic of mine) was so reverential of Charli’s set. Atmosphere is hard to ignore when you’re reviewing live music – especially at Glastonbury, where critics, including myself in the past, hand out five star reviews like lukewarm beers back at camp. Just weeks before, reviewing Primavera Sound festival for Billboard, I’d singled out Charli as a highlight. Had I been writing at Glastonbury myself this year, I’m sure I’d have gotten sucked into the excitement and given it four stars (albeit a more critical one).

Yet throughout the performance, I struggled to shake this odd feeling of a year’s worth of expectations that had coagulated and built up, only to not be met. As we filed out of the field post-show – after finally accepting that there wasn’t going to be an encore – my friend Billie and I shared a look that conveyed an uncertainty in how we felt about the last hour of music. Yet we were clearly in the minority. The crowd around us were gushing about Charli’s performance, and even among our own group, those watching her live for the first time before sung her praises. In that moment, it hit me: I’m not sure brat summer is for me the second time around – and maybe that’s OK.

Subscribe now

“I’m also interested in the tension of staying too long – I find that quite fascinating –  and what that does,” Charli pondered a few months ago, while discussing the possibility of brat summer 2.0 on TikTok. Her unwillingness to let go of this era, her commitment to pushing boundaries and continuing to perform an album I truly cherish, I naturally was here for. Why should she comply with the pressure to disappear at the point she finally made it to the big time after years of grinding? On stage at Worthy Farm, I saw brat distilled down to its most pure form. It was a perfect primer for fans watching her live for the first time, yet left me cold.

Charli talks a lot in interviews about over-saturation, which given her ubiquity over the last year – she’s so Julia, etc – makes sense. Personally, I don’t think that’s exactly what made me feel so uneasy during her Glastonbury set. Rather, Charli’s new level of fame had attracted a festival audience interested in her as a novelty, a crowd going to see her, in part, to say that they had. Upon reflection, this shouldn’t have been surprising. In the year since brat (the album) was released, brat (the concept) has taken on a life of its own.

A million words have already been written about Charli’s ascension from her “niche legend” status (as categorised by the stellar podcast Pop Pantheon prior to brat’s release) as an artist with a loyal fan base of gay people and PC Music heads stretching back more than a decade, into a main pop girl. Far more interesting to me is the way that, a year on, the culture has flattened the incredibly nuanced album that gave brat summer its name into something more easily digestible.

On the album, Charli ricochets between – and reckons with – her love of partying and the complex feelings it evokes. But when you think of brat summer, the image conjured isn’t Charli singing about being “famous but not quite” on “I Might Say Something Stupid” or debating whether she should stop taking her birth control on “I Think About It All The Time”. No, brat summer has become shorthand for ripped fishnets and microshorts, dark sunnies and white powder around the nose. That’s all there in the music, of course. But it’s not all of brat.

Talking and writing about Charli, my gatekeeping tendencies threaten to bubble up. There’s an itchy desire to roll my eyes and declare that new fans “don’t get it”. I try and resist – after all, I’ve followed Charli long enough to know that she’s always wanted this. “I never used to think about Billboard/ But suddenly I’m wondering if I deserve commercial success,” Charli talk-sings on “Rewind”. Through brat, she’s undeniably achieved it, leaping to a level of fame in the last year that would have felt unimaginable even 18 months ago. Seeing her get her flowers has been a joy. It makes sense that her Glastonbury set would be rammed, and that an awful lot of the people watching wouldn’t be all that aware of her wider catalogue.

Yet as someone well versed in Charli as an artist and live performer, I found the experience to be strange. For such a hyped up set (footage on TikTok shows the area closed off and people watching from behind fences), the crowd’s excitement seemed to evaporate once she actually started performing. Everyone pushed in for a good spot, then stood still. I might have been in a quieter section of the middle, yet the decibels didn’t lie. This was not an event where people were audibly engaging with the music at all, really. For the first time in my experience of watching Charli among buzzing crowds of women and gay guys, there were an awful lot of straight-seeming men standing around in silence.

And who am I to say that this isn’t the right way to enjoy a festival set? But given Charli’s proclivity to being hyper-reactive to a crowd vibe – and calling out quieter ones – it was a less than perfect pairing. Never one to shy away from demanding more from her audience, the pop star of the moment called for louder screams throughout the set, at one point shouting: “Glastonbury, don’t fucking play with me.” Her energy remained high, but the performance felt somewhat deflated. Maybe I’m projecting. You could chalk this down to this two-dimensional, I-don’t-care-what-you-think-anyway idea of brat. But having seen Charli having the time of her life on stage at Primavera Sound in Barcelona a few weeks before, the difference was palpable.

With the set being broadcast by the BBC, criticism of Charli’s performance emerged online. For what it’s worth, I disagree with the most popular complaints. I admired Charli’s ability to command the stage so single-handedly, and thought the songs themselves were performed well. Those moaning about her using autotune (like that’s not the whole brand?) only further prove that people are engaging with her work for the first time without realising what the Charli XCX project is. And sure, Gracie Abrams is an underwhelming “Apple” girl when you’ve had Chappell Roan a few weeks before, but the burning of the brat flag made for an exciting visual. It seemingly symbolised the end of the brat era, yet with shows booked across Europe all summer, I suspect Charli won’t be letting go anytime soon.

Far more disappointing was the lack of guests. Of course, nothing is promised in a festival set, and as with Elton John in 2023 (rumoured to be bringing out Britney Spears, and we got… Stephen Sanchez), the speculation took on a life of its own. But with Charli playing the remix versions of both “Guess” and “Girl, So Confusing”, the realisation that neither Billie Eilish or Lorde were coming out was undeniably disappointing – especially knowing that Lorde was on site at Glastonbury.

The decision to perform solo, however, is an active decision that can be justified; as D’Souza argues: “The Brat tour is at its most effective when the viewer has to submit to Charli’s world, and this show, loud and bawdy and sometimes very unnerving in its intensity, was practically Charli-led hostile takeover.” Harder to argue for was the timing. Charli arrived five minutes late and ended 10 minutes early, performing for only an hour of her 75 minute slot, while hits like “Talk Talk” and “B2B” didn’t make the cut. I’d been aware of fans making these same criticisms of her recent performance at Lido Festival in Victoria Park, but with my self-important feelings of Glastonbury exceptionalism, I hadn’t imagined this would be the case here.

My expectations for Charli are not only forged from years of following her work, but also experiencing brat summer the first time around in 2024. Billie and I were lucky attendees of the Great Party Girl DJ Set of Glastonbury 2024 (meaning we were also survivors of the Great Levels Queue Crush to get in). It’s an evening seared into my memory and heart as the night we heard Charli play her then fledgling album for the first time, with Robyn, Jamie XX, and Romy in the DJ booth beside her. Charli didn’t even perform live, but she set a high standard that was well met in the months that followed.

I caught her again in September, when I paused my morals for one night to attend an H&M launch party held in the middle of the Olympic Village in London that she was performing at. The event was huge in both scale and wastefulness; taking to the stage for a sharp 30-minute set, even Charli joked about how much money had been thrown at the party. But despite the corporate setting, her energy was undeniable. brat felt fresh; her US co-headline tour with Troye Sivan began in the US began the next day (air miles, who?), and we were given a pre-remix album glimpse of the “365” remix with Shygirl. In a move that delighted me in particular, she even played her own pulsing remix of Caroline Polachek’s “Welcome to my Island”. It felt special.

I pretended not to be jealous when Billie made it to the arena tour and watched Robyn being brought out to lead the crowd in a karaoke performance of “Dancing on My Own”. But I was saving my pennies for Primavera Sound seven months later. For one night in June only, Charli and Troye revived the Sweat Tour, bringing it to Europe for the first time on Troye’s 30th birthday. It was an expertly crafted tour between two unexpectedly complementary artists. Having another party to play off on stage naturally changes the dynamic, but even when performing solo, Charli and Troye were clearly having so much fun on stage. It was a reminder of the playful side of brat, rather than simply the cunty one.

The crowd also made the Primavera Set so special. At Glastonbury, I couldn’t hear anybody else within a 10-metre radius singing along, yet in Spain, we were surrounded by girls, gays and theys who knew every lyric and shouted them out with vigour. It was an hour and a half of non-stop celebration. Looking back, I see Primavera as a last hurrah for the first brat summer, taking place one day before the album’s one-year anniversary. Unlike Glastonbury, which releases its line-up after tickets are sold, people had bought tickets to see Charli, and were treated to an amazing performance. I’m intrigued to see how the rest of her summer shows play out – especially if she sticks with this shorter run time and no guests.

But thinking about Glastonbury 2025, I can’t be too mad. This was a victory lap performance, and should be treated as such. We were lucky enough to get it the first time around, when brat was unruly, being worked out often in real time in front of an audience. That rawness cannot be recreated. Now, it is a well-oiled machine, trimmed of all fat (I’d argue skipping “Talk Talk” is an oversight, but whatever) and condensed into an idea, a shade of green. Those experiencing Charli live for the first time will revel in it, because they don’t need to compare it to previous goes around the sun. I’ve had my brat summer. Now, go enjoy yours.

There are few experiences in life more thrilling to me than arriving in a country you’ve never visited before, throwing down your bags and heading out to the local grocery store. Beneath those lurid strip nights, you can begin to get your bearings of a place: which favoured flavours keep cropping up, the cost of ingredients, what you’ll see on restaurant menus. Personally, it’s the crisp aisle I make a beeline for. This is the fuel people grab when their energy is waning, when they need something salty (and not particularly healthy) to get them through the day. You can learn a lot here.

On the first of many visits to the supermarket snack sections of Mexico, where I spent all of February backpacking, I made a few early observations. Each packet bore the same octagonal stop sign health warnings, attempting to halt us with health with alerts of exceso calorías and exceso sodio (like we expected anything else?). Chilli and lime, I noted, were the flavours du jour; soon, I’d learn that most crisps had an obligatory aftershock of citrus and spice even when their labelled flavours were completely unrelated.

Before this trip, I’d been briefly introduced to the heady world of Mexican crisps one day last autumn when hundreds of miniature bags of a flute-shaped tortilla chip called Takis appeared in the communal kitchen at my former workplace. The flavour was the mysteriously titled Blue Heat; I assumed they were made of dark blue corn, until my fingers were stained a shade of blue so vibrant it looked like I’d been clumsily attempting to change the cyan cartridge on the office printer. This was my first taste of that lime-chilli combo, and originally, I wasn’t sure of it. But by the time the mid-morning, then mid-afternoon slumps hit, my colleagues and I were back for more. Free food is free food.

I’m not saying those tiny bags of Takis were the sole catalyst of my decision to quit that job and travel to Mexico. But maybe, subconsciously, they played a role. I did book my trip soon after, where, inspired by my friend Anya and the wildly entertaining crisp-tasting Instagram Stories of her own travels, I documented my personal reflections and ratings of the crunchy snacks I tried. My thoughts are below. If this top-tier content doesn’t persuade you to subscribe, I don’t know what will.

Ruffles (Queso)

When I initially arrived in Mexico, part of me imagined (or hoped, I guess) that I would rock up at my first hostel, instantly form lasting friendships with the other guests and travel with them for the next two months. That was not the case. The layout of location hostel numero uno rendered it particularly antisocial (a judgement echoed to me by other travellers I met later on), and I spent most of this first stop alone. Previous stints of solo travel had prepared me for these ups and downs, so fortunately, I didn’t freak out. I knew this was just one place on a lengthy tour – a pitstop, really – and I would make friends going forward. All good.

Needing to fill the time in the tourist-heavy Playa del Carmen, I decided this was as good an opportunity to visit the historical site of Chichen Itza through an all-day group tour. Once again, this proved to be a solitary affair. The other participants were travelling with partners and groups, and all attempts at conversation swiftly fizzled out. The wonder of the world was still predictably wondrous, but I wasn’t feeling great, and in a panicked attempt to regain some stability, turned to a food that had often given me comfort: crinkle-cut crisps.

When it comes to crisps in Mexico, I soon learnt that you want loudly punchy flavours or plain salt (preferably on a plantain chip), but rarely in between. These queso Ruffles were neither, and only added to my fleeting feeling of disappointment. The proclaimed cheese flavour was hyper-synthetic and reminiscent of the cheapest, dustiest cheese balls. Then came the limey after tasty: it wasn’t bad, per se, but it hadn’t been mentioned on the bag and, in my humble opinion, didn’t work with the cheese. The Mayan ruins deserved a tastier accompaniment.

Rating: 3/10

Fritos (Chorizo and Chipotle)

The trip continued. After a bus and ferry to Isla Holbox (during which I met more friends than my entire first location combined), my confidence grew. And among the picturesque white sands and bumpy, unpaved roads of this thin island, I started to get the hang of Mexican crisps too. Upon picking up these intriguing, meaty Fritos, I scoured the ingredients list with my rudimentary Spanish. They didn’t appear to have any actual meat in them, but the first crunch caused me to check again using Google Translate’s camera feature. I was used to the generic smokiness of meat-flavoured crisps back home; in comparison, these were properly meaty (although free of any actual animal flesh) with MSG likely accounting for the strong, sour chipotle taste. They were bold, and a little strange, but certainly not bad. Not bad at all.

Rating: 7/10

Tostitos (Salsa Verde)

The crisps I’d tried so far had been thinkers, with first bites that prompted furrowed brows and internal “huh”s. They took a proper decoding; whether or not I actually liked what I was eating was an afterthought. Not the Tostitos, though. These circular tortillas had all the dustiness of a standard Dorito, yet the magical crisp scientists had somehow infused them with the exact taste of pico de gallo. I didn’t understand it. How could a tortilla chip taste so fresh? My head knew these were just man-made flavours, but close my eyes and ignore the crunch, and they tasted exactly like luminous tomatoes ripened in the sun, sharp onion, juicy lime. Two hours into a five-hour bus journey from Chiquilá to Mérida, these crisps revived me. Five weeks have passed, and I’m still lightly resentful of my past self for not trying them with sour cream or stashing a few bags away for the rest of my trip.

Rating: 9/10

Chip’s (Jalapeño)

Wham, bam, thank you ma’am! Now this was a crisp with a kick. Purchased on a day trip to Celestun (and returned to multiple times in Guatemala), these thick-cut crisps had the rigidity of an even sturdier Kettle Chip, while somehow pouring the punchy pickle flavour of a jar of jalapeños straight into a crisp. No wishy-washy, generic spice here; if anything, the crisp isn’t that chilli-y at all. Zing is the primary vibe, with a salty, briney after-taste reminiscent of the best dirty, spicy margarita. I dream of one day eating the two together, and can even forgive the rogue apostrophe in the title (unless, of course, they were Chip’s chips, in which I apologise).

Rating: 8/10

Runners

Mexico, here boldly asking the question: what if a crisp was in the shape of a car? Obviously, that novelty was always going to get my attention. Otherwise, Runners are a pretty standard pretzel snack in that chilli and lime flavour, as ubiquitous in Mexico as salt and vinegar back in Blighty. I personally prefer this taste paired with a less weighty vessel, like a Walkers/Lays-style of potato chip. After a lengthy travel day, having derailed my vague and under-researched route to visit Oaxaca, their filling nature was a pro. I followed these with a chocolate shake (a balanced dinner), and slept like a baby.

Rating: 6/10

Ruffles (Salsa Negra)

The bag said “mega crunch” and the bag did not lie. The textural experience was mega, and so were the flavours – but is mega always good? Here, I wasn’t so sure. Admittedly, I have never tried salsa negra proper, so had no reference point for the taste the Ruffles were claiming to ape, but from a light googling, the original appears to be a strong salsa with a fermented black garlic base that’s often served with fish. I have to say, the crisps didn’t particularly convey that. This was basically the same classic flavour profile as the Runners in a crinkle-cut crisp. Lime is king, and nothing else stands a chance.

Rating: 6/10

Crujitos (Queso y chile)

Look, I know I said no more queso crisps, but these caught me on a very hungover day when, frankly, I needed some soothing. I’d ended up back in Oaxaca City after failed public transport meant I missed my flight back to Cancun, and had already paid for this all-day excursion to the Hierve el Agua nature preserve when I woke up with a pounding headache and hazy memories of the night before. The canyons and petrified waterfalls were stunning, of course, but I was hanging out of my arse and trying not to topple over due to dehydration and fatigue on my hike. The Crujitos seemed like a simple enough flavour for my delicate body to handle, but with a limey kick to prevent them from being too tame. Thankfully, the flavour was far less fake than the other queso offerings I’d tried, and the lime nicely offset the taste rather than threatening to overpower it. Even the fusilli shape and lightly polystyrene-y, melt-in-your-mouth texture appealed. A comforting crisp – albeit one not without edge – for a sensitive day.

Rating: 7/10

Whenever a season of The Traitors comes to an end, I find myself staring at the screen in a daze, struggling to digest what I’ve just seen and the contradictory thoughts racing through my head. As a British viewer, season three has been my first time watching the US version of the show; after a season of superlative chaos, last week’s finale gave me that same experience on steroids. The first three-quarters of the show had been compelling and unpredictable, with the format pushed to (or perhaps beyond) its very boundaries. But things reached a head too early with nowhere to go. For a season so consistently explosive, its ending felt oddly subdued.

Despite an unconvincing semi-final cliffhanger suggesting this outcome was in any way up for debate, the final began with the inevitable kicking off of sole remaining original Traitor, the constantly exasperated-looking Danielle Reyes, followed later by the banishment of her Big Brother co-star and late recruit Britney Haynes. From that point, it was easy enough for the four remaining Faithfuls (Gabby Windey, Dylan Efron, Dolores Catania, Lord Ivar Mountbatten) to split the $204,300 prize pot. Yet despite having actively rooted for two of these players throughout the season (how Ivar or Dolores got to the end, I’ll never know), my reaction was less elation, more: meh, fine. Actually, what I primarily felt was an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Just a couple of months ago, I’d watched The Traitors UK follow a remarkably similar path, and felt once again that a Faithful win wasn’t all that deserved.

Subscribe now

That the UK and US shows would in some way mirror each other makes sense. Both are made by production company Studio Lambert, and film in quick succession each year during the fleeting bit of Scottish summer when it shouldn’t be raining 24 hours a day. They share many of the same challenges and twists – yet it’s the tonal similarities, rather than the formal ones, between the recent UK and US seasons that interest me. In my opinion, both versions of the show faced the same pitfalls this time around. These point to a shift in the way people are playing The Traitors that producers will need to adapt to going forward.

The Traitors is dealing with a crisis of expectation: the show’s expectations of how the contestants will act versus the contestants’ expectations of how this programme will serve them. Season three of both international versions were the first to film in a world where The Traitors is no longer just another fledgling reality competition show, but a surefire hit. Nobody is going in blind anymore. The players have a sense of how the game play will unfold, but also what they can gain from the experience in the long term. The Traitors does not exist in a bubble.

With a cast consisting primarily of former reality contestants, The Traitors US comes with more of an expected awareness of the opportunities it can provide its stars. After all, isn’t this why they’re here in the first place, having already leveraged success on reality TV into a wider public-facing career? This is where, at least on paper, the British show differs. The players are normal people with a more authentic desire to win the money, right? The US show had historically interested me less because I perceived it to lack that same authenticity. But the season three line-up coloured me intrigued. Between Drag Race champ Bob the Drag Queen, perennial Selling Sunset sweetheart Chrishell Stause, and tabloid dirtbag Tom Sandoval (never thought I’d say this, but a highlight of the season), I couldn’t resist. After the limp ending to UK season three, I wanted reminding what a really great game of Traitors looked like.

Tuning into The Traitors US for the first time, the differences between the shows were minimal. Mostly, it came down to editing: the mid-episode cliffhangers, the lengthy stretches of silence at the beginning of each roundtable. The players certainly knew how to give good sound bite in their talking heads; they were openly strategic about their game play too, something I’d come to expect that after UK season three. There wasn’t much camaraderie between the three initial Traitors (Bob the Drag Queen, Big Brother’s Danielle, and Survivor’s Caroline Wiger), but you can’t really expect that from a show with allusions to treachery in its title.

When “Boston Rob” Mariano joined the competition as a latecomer Traitor, something shifted. You saw all three original Traitors’ hackles go up around this self-styled alpha male. And they had every right to be on edge. The Survivor great was a wrecking ball of a Traitor, causing pandemonium with his unashamed willingness to throw his so-called teammates under the bus. The panic that set in once Rob led the charge against Bob (the pernicious way he would retrospectively refer to Bob as “the drag queen” felt particularly pernicious) spawned a domino effect of “Traitor-on-Traitor” crime and repeated betrayals. The main issue? It was kind of obvious. Meanwhile, the Traitors turret was no longer a place of refuge. The trio would publicly accuse one another at the roundtable, retreat upstairs at night to either begrudgingly apologise or beef further, then performatively call a truce and claim they wouldn’t do it again with their fingers all but crossed behind their backs.

By the time final came around, it was basically impossible for any Traitor to win – even a late recruit like Britney, who had been long presumed Faithful. The other team didn’t have to do much but sit back and watch them implode. That all four Faithful managed to trust each other enough to end the game, reveal their identities and split the money spoke less to their success as a team and more the impossible position Britney was put in.

The latter portion of The Traitors UK season three followed similar beats. In both shows, the finale began with one Traitor, a late recruit who had betrayed the player who brought them on with the hope of winning together, and four Faithfuls in play. After the eleventh hour introduction of a new power called the Seer (a questionable twist allowing one player to find out another’s true identity; given the backlash it received from UK viewers, I suspect it will be deployed differently if not quietly removed next year), said Traitor was banished. Four players stood at the fire pit in their finery, all of them Faithful. We knew that, but did they? The celebrity players had it figured out, and revealed their identities with beaming, confident grins. A nice enough ending, albeit one that lacked any real tension.

On the British show, things got messier. The Faithful voted to continue the game and banish again, leading to the last minute eviction of fan favourites Alexander Dragonetti and Francesca Roman-Plowden, while Leanne Quigley and Jake Brown took the money. It was an oddly empty conclusion. I’m self-aware to question whether I would have ever been satisfied by this season after the demise of Liverpool call centre manager and ultimate Traitor Minah Shannon, but there was something about a Faithful win in this game that felt particularly undeserved. The Faithful had been wrong about a lot of stuff, yet the editing had made it hard to root for the eventual winners along the way. Season two UK champion Harry Clark had this problem despite technically playing a brilliant game, and Leanne and Jake’s win left me similarly cold.

What united both versions of the show, I think, is the core issue of trust – or a lack thereof. The US Traitors had no faith in each other enough to work as a team. On the other side of the pond, the Faithful were too terrified of being screwed over to think logically and split the money between four, or even three, of them. In the wake of the UK final, there was a lot of speculation that Jake and Leanne’s moves were a calculated attempt to keep the prize pot to themselves. It’s not an impossible explanation. Gabby even referenced this way of playing the game in the US final. Asked by Alan Cumming why she voted to end the game at the fire pit, she said: “I think banishing at this point wouldn’t be because I thought they were a Traitor – I think it would be to get more money.”

Personally, I’m less convinced by this argument in the case of UK season three. From the fear visible Leanne’s eyes, I think it was clear that she didn’t even trust Jake fully in the seconds before the big reveal, and expected him to swoop in and steal the prize pot from her at the last moment. During the final episode of UK companion show Uncloaked, Frankie was asked how it felt knowing that there had been four Faithful at the fire pit and that they could have all won the money. “We just didn’t trust each other enough,” she simply responded. And they didn’t. With faith in each other so greatly eroded, a British win for all the Faithful was never going to happen, just as a Traitors loss was written in the stars on the American series.

On a show called The Traitors, distrust is par for the course. However, now that the players know the show and think they know how to succeed at it, I think there is an expectation of selfishness that is preventing them from working together. Faithfuls and Traitors alike on both versions of the show spent this season openly, proudly even, prioritising shields that would prevent them from being murdered that night over adding to the prize pot. It makes sense that the cash prize would mean less to the celebrity Traitors players; the British contestants, less so. But the show has changed for them too, and become closer to the American show. The players will always want to go far, but the producers must get wise to the fact that increased airtime has become as desirable to players as their crack at the prize, especially if they think their days in the competition are numbered. You know what could be more valuable than your share of up to £120,000 or $250,000? Becoming a gay icon, of course! Just ask Gabby Windey, or Diane Carson from UK season two. Win over the internet, and you can go far.

The Traitors is yet to catch up to this way of playing. Winning money is still the proposed aim of the tasks. But with this outwardly individualistic mindset instilled in so many of the players, few are willing to put their neck on the line for the game if it meant slightly damaging their personal prospects. This attitude towards game play is unlikely to go away, but I think The Traitors team have time, and an opportunity, to strategise and work with it. The show has kind of shot itself in the foot in the past by making it obvious that any money lost in the early stages will be made back up by the end, so the stakes are fairly low in the challenges. Could they be upped by having a set amount of money up for grabs in each game, one where when it’s gone, it’s gone? What if losing a challenge led to the players being reprimanded and money actually taken away from the pot? That could be spicy.

On the topic of shields, I think it’s a case of favouring scarcity over abundance. There were clearly too many up for grabs in too many challenges this season. This is what hampered the infamous episode one rowing challenge, where both the US and UK casts reached a stalemate as, at a certain point, the players just refused to work with the game. With a technically unlimited number of shields in play, there was little motivation for the players to self-sacrifice for the sake of the team and make themselves vulnerable. If only one or two shields are around, the contestants have to be sneakier with their intentions.

The last point is the hardest to manage. Back in the first UK season, the fate of the game was essentially sealed for Traitor Wilf Webster in the final when pissed off late recruit Kieran Tompsett heavily implicated Will with his parting words. The Faithful put two and two together and realised Wilf was a Traitor; they banished him at the fire pit and won. After this moment, players of the UK show clearly got a talking to: if you are a Traitor, you cannot explicitly or implicitly reference the identity of your fellow Traitor just because you’re backed into a corner.

I suspect this is a rule on the US show too, but this batch of Traitors were all so blatant in their Traitor-on-Traitor killings that it sort of spoiled the game. When Britney voted for her co-star Danielle and a devastated Danielle said that Britney “did it to me again” (a reference to her previous betrayal on Big Brother, from what I can gather), it was an obvious sign to everyone in the room – even Dolores – that they were both Traitors. Whether you can ever fully prevent passionate spur-of-the-moment outbursts like these, I don’t know. But what originally started as Rob turning on Bob in a truly shocking roundtable twist, was by the end of the season a stale and predictable trend. Whatever rules can be introduced to prevent the Traitors from solely throwing each other under the bus, I think should be.

Of course, I am not a TV producer – merely a woman who has spent an awful lot of 2025 so far thinking about this damn reality TV show. The Traitors’ malleability is its greatest strength, but the people making this programme need to understand and accept that there is a meta element to the programme now. Players think they know The Traitors, and maybe they do. It is up to the producers to huddle together in the turret (a well-lit boardroom could work too) and come up with a game plan to show them that nothing can be predicted. After all, you can’t game a gamer.

That I should be the one to do this deep dive felt obvious – after all, articles like this were kind of my thing. I’ve had middling viral success throughout my career with other reported, nostalgia-heavy features about British pop culture of the mid-late noughties, such as Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s chaotic BBC talent shows and ITV’s take on Glee, Britannia High. It was the response from people my own age that motivated me to write these pieces, just to see them shared online with words to the effect of: “I’d totally forgotten this existed but loved this!!” Angus, Thongs existed at an intersection of my interests. Personally and professionally, I’d passionately argued that art aimed at teenage girls should be taken just as seriously as the stuff men watched. Usually, only works in the canon and cult classics were given the as-told-to oral history treatment, where a journalist speaks to the cast and creative team behind an iconic creative project and tells its story through chunky verbatim quotes. But Angus, Thongs was a cult classic too – just specifically for a group of women who were between the ages 10 and 17 in 2008…

The film’s stars had mostly been teenagers themselves when they shot the movie, and it had been a long time since any of them had publicly reminisced in depth about this project. As lead actor Georgia Groome (Georgia), along with Eleanor Tomlinson (Jas), Georgia Henshall (Rosie) and Kimberly Nixon (Slaggy Lindsay), individually spoke to me, their surrounding soundscapes betrayed that these women were momentarily pausing their very grown-up lives to talk about the experience that gave them their first glimpse of adulthood. Over the phone, I could hear babies crying in the background, or the wind whipping as they went hiking. They were worlds away from the time of teenage crushes that cause you to dye your legs orange with fake tan or shave off one of your eyebrows, but were kind enough to pause reality, just for a moment, and look back with me.

Subscribe now

Strangely, it wasn’t the beautiful words of director Gurinder Chadha about our societal devaluing of the female teenage experience (as good as they were) that ended up sticking with me. No, I recently realised that there is a quote I have been saying out loud in moments of stress that can be traced back to Groome in this very feature. She was telling me about returning to teenage reality after shooting the film, and the reactions she received from her peers when she became a celebrity in secondary school.

Going back to school was a good thing. I was ripped quite heavily and the catchphrases from the film followed me, and have for most of my life after. I mean, they weren’t words we would have used, but it worked and [author Louise Rennison] would still talk in that way years later. That was her personality, which is fun, I guess, but I was only ever possibly slightly bullied about them. It was humbling, which was good. It’s good to be humbled.

I loved putting together this piece. There was little editorialising involved bar the condensing of quotes; I have no shame in admitting that I still re-read it often. What I didn’t do was put two and two together that in doing so, I’d adopted Groome’s words as a low-level life mantra. She wasn’t being sarcastic when she said them, and neither was I. Whenever I was metaphorically knocked for six, I’d remember that message: sure, this is humbling, but that’s good. It is good to be humbled.

Sometimes, I think a slight L, like being ribbed at school for saying “nunga-nungas”, after a period of Ws, like landing the lead role in a soon-to-be-seminal teen classic, can do the ego wonders. Groome had learnt this important lesson while filming Angus, Thongs, and that same wisdom was bestowed upon me as I transcribed her words. Life is all about the light and shade, and whilst we’d all love to have more good experiences than bad, those moments of darkness are integral in allowing us to take stock and reflect. It’s important to not just remain humble (adjective, infamously used by Shakira to describe her breasts) in the face of success, but actively get humbled (verb) and taken down a peg or two every now and again.

But while Groome’s message might come out whenever the universe does deal me a clunker, I think most of us will do basically anything in our power to prevent that sweet, scary humbling from occurring. As I’ve got older, it’s become pretty rare for me to do something I’m bad at; not because I’m preternaturally, universally talented, but because, like a lot of people, I lack a motivation to stick at stuff I don’t immediately have a knack for. I’ll give things a go… up to a level. But I’m pretty sure of my strengths and failings; what I’m willing to invest time into and what I’m never going to be good at. At my core, I’m happy to slink away and cut my losses when I can tell something falls into the latter category.

As you might have gathered if you’ve seen my your-unemployed-friend-all-February-style posting on social media recently, I have spent the last month in Mexico, where I’m a little less than halfway through my first substantial solo backpacking trip. It has been a beautiful, chaotic experience, and one I’ve found a lot of peace in, even though I’ve never been to this part of the world before or spent such a long time away from the UK, my family and friends, and work.

With this trip implicitly and deliberately being full of unknowns – both in the travelling itself and my inability to imagine what life will look like when I return – it makes sense that I’d seek out stability. I wanted to push myself, but decided along the way that I’d stick to things I thought I could do well, or at least be OK at. Lots of people surf in the buzzing beach town of Puerto Escondido, but I didn’t consider it. One week of pre-teen surf school was enough evidence for me that that activity falls into the “can’t do, will never improve at” category for me, thank you very much. Stand-up paddle boarding on Lake Bacalar? The same. I put it down to practicality. You can’t do everything, and at least I wouldn’t be wasting my money on something I think I knew I would never be good at.

That’s not to say I’ve been unadventurous. Being in an entirely new culture with total strangers is obviously a challenge in itself, but there have been plenty of comfort zone-expanding experiences along the way: cooking courses and hikes and spiritual ceremonies in 90 degree sweat lodges. It’s important that I say yes to many things (after careful consideration that they’re probably not going to end in my humiliation), and the times I have declined an activity, I don’t end up pining over the decision. Sometimes I think, oh, that’d be cool to do; or rather, it’d be cool to be the kind of person who would do that. But I’m not. Never mind.

So how on Earth did I find myself, last week, taking part in a salsa class? The obvious response is: um, you’re in Mexico and that’s a fairly standard touristic activity? Maybe for you, but not for me. If there’s one statement I’ve adopted as fact in recent years, it’s that I cannot dance – at least not well. Enthusiastically? With gusto? For sure. But like I have any internal rhythm? There’s no way. It doesn’t stop me from racking up steps on the dance floor, but I like to dance in that British way where we move as individuals within a group, standing close to our friends but grooving alone together, unjudged.

It’s not for want of trying, or want of wanting, to be a good dancer. Growing up, it was jazz and modern lessons after school on a Thursday; now, I’m regularly haunted by that one recurring anxiety dream where you’ve not revised for an exam at school, except in my case it’s the first Strictly Come Dancing live show and I’ve not gone to any rehearsals. If I could gain any talent overnight, it would be to be able to dance well. But I have stiff hips and an awkwardness to my moves, so have accepted, or perhaps decided, that it’ll never happen. There was a point (quite a lengthy one, if I think about it), where I was seriously planning to get the words “rhythmless queen” tattooed on the backs of my knees inspired by a meme about Dua Lipa’s one-time lack of dance ability. If I claim to be bad at dancing before someone can say that of me, then I’m the one with the power, right?

Despite identifying as a bad dancer, I love doing it anyway. But salsa is another matter. It’s not just you moving alone – another person is there with you, and you’re both supposed to be intently in tune with each other’s actions. The woman follows, sure, but the man is always paying attention to her. To be seen like that and be totally vulnerable? Sickening! Casual salsa dancers in the clubs out here make it look so easy, yet I knew for me it would be anything but.

It was about 20 minutes into the 90-minute lesson at my hostel in Oaxaca that I realised my decision to take part in this “fun” class had spawned from a sincere lapse of judgement. The basic move, I could do. Uno, dos, tres, beat. Cinco, seis, siete, beat. Step back, then step forward, and repeat. So far, so good on my own, and still simple enough with a partner. But as soon as special steps and flourishes were introduced, I felt an intense queasiness rapidly creep in. I just couldn’t get the moves right, and what we’d learnt earlier had fluttered out of my head.

As it went on, my chest grew tighter and tighter. Other members of the group had joked at the beginning about being bad dancers too (albeit not as loudly as me), but I could see them out of the corner of my eye, picking up the moves and smiling and laughing while doing so. Smiling! It felt like a betrayal. I did not want to laugh. I wanted to go and lie down on my hostel bunk bed with the curtain drawn until it was over. With every new move, I found myself thinking: this is when I could quit, I would definitely dip out here, again and again and again. But we’d been partnered up, so my leaving would throw off the numbers for the whole group. And it would have felt pretty pathetic too; my reaction might have suggested otherwise, but this was meant to be a light-hearted intro to salsa class. I’m not sure whether it would have been worse if the other participants had thought I’d stropped off because I couldn’t do it, or if they’d have known that I was on the brink of an anxiety spiral because I was out of my comfort zone.

So I kept dancing, and you know? It was fucking humbling. Everything in my body wanted to revolt and run away, but doing so would have ruined the vibe for myself as much as everyone else. So I pushed through, and was forced to sit (or spin) in that specific kind of self-inflicted, personality-moulding discomfort. The only experience I can really compare it to is my worst ever celebrity interview. It’s easy to look back on this strange, uncomfortable encounter and laugh with hindsight and experience under my belt; when I interview stars now, they’re mostly like Groome was for the Angus, Thongs piece, and are pretty warm and open with their stories. But in the moment, that interview was awful. I remember being sat across from this star who was being so unpleasant, and thinking: everything in my body wants to get out of this situation, but I can’t. I have to get through it.

That’s kind of what it felt like, dancing salsa and realising I had to stick at it until the end of the session. Bit of a dramatic overreaction to not being able to pick up a dance routine? In many ways, it was that knowledge that made it worse. You stress, and then you stress about your inability to keep cool at something that should be enjoyable. I think part of me, secretly, had hoped that a miracle would occur. My caveats and pre-emptive apologies would have proven to be self-effacing – it turns out I could dance after all! But that wasn’t the case. If I’d never have tried it, I’d never have had to face that truth, which I’d previously have found preferable.

But actually, forcing myself to dance salsa for even just an hour and a half gave me a healthy dose of humbling I’d been missing. Sure, it was fairly excruciating, but did I die? If anything, I left with my emotions healthily recalibrated. Groome’s words took on fresh meaning: it’s good to be humbled, and not just when it happens to you organically. You’ll get a different kind of humbling when you try something knowing you might not be good at it, even if that turns out to be true. And who knows – you might even get a Substack out of it.

In all honesty, I was surprised the guy held this sentiment at all. I felt the exact opposite. Fuelled partly by a post-lockdown desire to make up for lost time and sew my dating oats, partly by a tendency to immediately shut down any man who comes near me on a night out (still working on that one), I had almost exclusively dated from the apps since my previous relationship had come to an end. It felt inevitable that the only way I would meet a partner was through the apps. Consequently, I had been dating in good faith that every interaction had the potential to become a real relationship. That others might not share this sentiment had never really occurred to me.

That was the summer of 2022. Since then, I’ve heard words to that effect repeated time and time again: by friends and dates, sure, but just as consistently by articles declaring that everyone is “over” online dating. Last year, Ofcom reported that the top 10 dating apps had seen a significant yearly decline (16%) in users, while the Match Group – which owns Hinge and Tinder – admitted in a letter to shareholders that young people seemed to want a “lower pressure, more authentic way to find connections”. In-person events once deemed dated, like singles nights and speed-dating, are now popular amongst my mates, and taken friends have even been racking their brains for single mates to set us singles up with. The popular consensus? Everybody – everybody interested in monogamy, at least – hates dating apps.

Ask people why they’ve had enough of app dating, and the same reasons float to the surface. People don’t want to spend any more time than they have to on their phones, and perceive the apps to have stripped the romance out of dating. There’s also the horror stories about love-bombing, dates disappearing into the ether, and people who claim to be ethically non-monogamous only for it to rapidly become clear that they’re just cheating on their partner. The overwhelming narrative is that dating apps encourage this bad behaviour. People are unwilling to commit because they can’t shake the feeling that someone hotter and better matched could be just a few swipes away; that theory is well documented.

Let’s make one thing clear: nobody is saying that you have to like dating apps. But I can’t help wondering whether our overwhelming negativity about the modern online dating experience is becoming something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. We hear about all these people leaving dating apps deflated and defeated, but the truth is a lot of us still use them because it’s the easiest way – sometimes the only way – we know how to date. This accepted hatred of the apps, I’d argue, is leading to a further dehumanisation of the people on them. In reiterating that the apps are useless because everyone treats each other terribly, I think we’ve come to accept this bad behaviour as part of the experience: in the way we are treated, and the way we treat others back.

The loathing of big tech’s involvement in our personal lives, I get. A million think pieces have already been written about how these apps aren’t really “designed to be deleted”, and have turned dating into just another thing you mindlessly do on your phone so that the companies can keep us using them. If the romantic stories we were raised on from the pre-internet age were all about the meet-cute, apps have fostered in a “meet-practical” that, in theory, has removed the risk from dating. Yet despite this, the prevailing narrative is that dating app romances fizzle out, and will always end with ghosting or cheating or a vague refusal to commit. When all those dates told me they were never going to form a meaningful relationship through the apps, I think this is what they were trying to pre-emptively protect themselves from.

Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with having had it with the apps, and coming off to try and give dating IRL a go. Actually, I think it should be encouraged. The problem, I’ve found, is that there are a lot of people festering away on the apps with an inability to leave that’s turning them into the kind of bad daters they feared being matched with in the first place. Our society romanticises the idea of meeting the old-fashioned way, but is unprepared for the fact that dating more quote-unquote organically can also be time-intensive, nerve-inducing and simply uncertain. So people continue on Hinge, and resentment stews: first towards the algorithm they feel forced to use, then the other people using it too.

It’s no secret that our individualistic society makes it harder to foster connections in person, but there have always been risks to consider when it comes to dating out there in the real world. One guy I dated told me he didn’t try to pull on nights out unless it was super clear that the girl was interested, because he assumed the focus of the evening for women – as it was for him – was spending time with their friends. And what if you do get set up by a pal, but the relationship doesn’t work out and the two of you are forced to awkwardly oscillate around each other at parties forever? These outcomes have always been a possibility, but we tend to gloss over them. When people say that they “want to meet someone off dating apps”, it’s fair to assume that the sentence would continue: “Because that will be easy, unlike this.”

Over the last few years, I’ve found that dating apps are populated with people of all genders and sexualities who would do anything not to be there, but aren’t prepared for the alternative. On paper, I don’t think it’s an inherently bad thing, until this hatred of the apps leads to the users dehumanising the people on it. From personal experience, there are many people in my recent dating past who have resented that we met online, and turned up to our first drinks convinced that it wasn’t going to work out precisely because of that reason. With the outcome deemed to be predetermined, I think bad behaviour was seen as excusable because the relationship was never going anywhere anyway.

Of course, the stereotypes of poor dating etiquette – ghosting, bread-crumbing, [insert name of latest TikTok dating trend here] – are well documented. It is undeniably easier to get away with mistreating people you date when you don’t share the same world or mutual friends to hold you accountable. Bad behaviour is an easy cycle to get into, especially when we reiterate that everyone does it. I’ve ghosted too; rarely after we’ve actually met, and definitely less frequently than I’ve been on the receiving end of it, but I have. And for what it’s worth, I’ve experienced similar behaviour from the few people I’ve dated after meeting in-person, too. Are these app-based attitudes leaking into the real world, or is it simply that meeting people organically was never as easy as we romanticised it to be?

The other aspect of this phenomenon is harder to quantify. It tends to come from the people who are quieter about their feelings about dating apps, rather than those who make their feelings known with the sadly popular Hinge prompt: “Together we could: lie about how we met.” All I know is: I have dated many men from dating apps and felt like they spent the whole time metaphorically watching over my shoulder for something, quote-unquote, real. This slippery feeling, based on the assumption that any relationship sparked up in person will always outweigh an online connection, has left me with a pervasive anxiety that the people I’m dating will drop me in a heartbeat – and it ain’t fun.

I think part of the reason this unashamed negativity towards the apps rubs me the wrong way is because, while nobody has asked me to, at some point I unofficially pledged to be a rare positive voice about the app experience. There is a well-known bodily response you’re expected to give when someone asks how dating is going: an eye roll and groan from you, a slow, knowing nod and grimace from them. I try to resist repeating it. I might not have found a long-term partner, but I look back on my time on the scene pretty positively; I’ve met interesting people and friends through the apps, and can count the number of bad dates on one hand. This deliberately optimistic perspective has partly been for my own motivation, but I also hated the thought of people hearing me complain about the apps and validating that they should stay in bad relationships because they could “never do app dating”.

Crucial to my net-positive attitude towards online dating, I think, is that I’ve never blamed the apps as the reason my relationships in recent years haven’t stuck. Others, I can tell, have been more cynical. When I’d recount the you-have-to-laugh-or-you’ll-cry story of the boyfriend of summer of 2023 – he who broke up with me one month after making it official – they’d respond with the appropriate “oof”s and “no way”s. But when I’d add the context that we’d met on hook-up app Feeld, I’d see a shift. One response would flash in their eye, and they’d sometimes put it into actual words too: girl, what did you expect?

What did I expect? Hard one to answer, that. For much of my time on the apps, I wanted to make up for the lost lockdown years. At other points, I thought I was ready for a relationship, but was willing to park that idea for the first hot-but-not-committal man who gave me any attention. The relationship with the Feeld boyfriend was short-lived and ended messily, but we were serious about each other pretty much from the jump despite the app we met on. The first few months we dated were the kind of easy that makes you remember past relationships and go, “Ohhhh, it should always be like this.” Even now, I don’t think it was the app that contributed to the relationship’s rough and rapid demise. We’d swiftly integrated into each other’s lives; it would have ended just as horribly if we’d met IRL. Maybe even worse.

It’s hard writing this without sounding like an app evangelist, or that I’m about to reveal that this post is coming to you in partnership with Bumble at any moment. Obviously, I do think there’s truth in the well-trodden argument that apps facilitate bad behaviour. Simultaneously, I worry that when we only reiterate this about dating apps, we make it true. It’s rare to hear people talk about the couples they know who did find their partners on dating apps – once they’re together, how they met is unimportant. No, we tell the horror stories and these tales all stack up, forming an inescapable narrative that dating apps are bad news for everyone.

If “ideally, I’d prefer to meet my partner in real life” is the positive version, then it’s “everyone treats each other on apps horribly, I’ll never meet a partner on there” that immediately sets off my alarm bells. It’s that rhetoric that can lead to the people you’ve met online never being seen as whole, actualised people, as opposed to ones who can be tossed aside at any moment for a real-world connection. Even the way I’ve written about dating online versus in “real life” betrays this attitude. The people we meet on dating apps are real just because they’ve been introduced to us online.

It was while ruminating on this subject that I came to the realisation that, despite my supposed optimism about dating apps, part of me too had believed that it wasn’t going to happen for me. Virtually none of my closest friends in relationships met their partners online. I could tell myself I was positive all I wanted, but as long as I didn’t have those examples, it was hard to imagine. I was only dating online, but while my dates were assuming their app dates would go nowhere, I was bringing my own preconception that the people I was dating were going to treat me worse because we met online. So in the end, I followed my own advice. For the first time I didn’t feel positive about dating apps, and knew I wasn’t going to be bringing positive energy to the dates I would, inevitably, still be going on. I’d been on the other side and hated it – it wasn’t fair.

When I initially deleted my account, my break from the apps was just for the summer, but the desire to return soon faded. And you know what? After years of saying I only knew how to meet people through apps, I did still date: friends of friends, a guy who slid into my Instagram DMs which we joked was now the “old-fashioned way” of meeting. It was good to remind myself that I can date outside of the apps, but I think I’d assumed that these relationships had legs because we hadn’t met on the apps, when the outcome turned out to be the same had we met through a swipe. What I have taken away from the break is that I don’t feel so reliant on apps. If and when I return, I’m hopeful I won’t be so resentful towards the people who don’t respect the process, because I now know it’s not my only option.

As to the underlying cause of bad behaviour on dating apps? I think the messy tangled strings have become so knotty that it’s hard to tell which problem is at the centre. I do think that when we repeat that the apps make us all behave worse to each other, we come to accept and amplify unpleasant behaviour that, yes, would have been there in the first place. But let’s be honest: people have been cheating and lying and disappearing on each other long before the internet, and probably always will.

I’ll say it again – I’m not going to tell anyone they have to love dating apps. But if you really hate them and are still using them, I do think it’s worth evaluating whether that dislike is leading to you accepting, or even performing back, bad behaviour to the people you are dating. A break can do you the world of good. After eight months off the apps, I feel positive about dating again – not pretend positive for myself and others, but truly optimistic. Imagine!

Before I’d watched as much live comedy as I have now, however, I did used to think about doing comedy; more accurately, I spent my summers in student plays at the Edinburgh Fringe, daydreaming about my critically acclaimed debut comedy hour. There was no weight to this dream, no material penned for my imaginary set. This was an abstract concept: a title, perhaps an amorphous poster design that would be posted at great expense (and subsequently vandalised) on Cowgate.

The show name was important. It should be short, sharp and memorable, an eyebrow-raiser to introduce me to the world and from which I could unspool pithy, sometimes tender anecdotes. I settled on “Platescraper”. In the years since, I’ve joked it would be the title of my memoir, my sitcom; called with the correct confidence, I think it could even be a good name for a dog. In my mind, it evokes the image of a young girl dragging her finger across a plate to squeegee up every last remnant of whatever she’s eating: congealed cheese and butter on a pasta bowl, chocolate sauce from a Gü ramekin. I have been, and remain, that girl. Decency dictates I fall short from licking the plate most of the time, but given the absentminded scraping my fingers often give it, I might as well have.

Food is a core aspect of platescraping, and – as everything around food can be – it has complex underlying meanings. Growing up, I was raised with a hyper-awareness of waste for both financial and environmental reasons. You used things up, cutting open the products to squeeze every last drop out (something I still do), with that attitude permeating into my approach to money. I was frugal and thrifty; as a teenager, I developed an unattractive reputation for being a bit tightfisted. As soon as I was aware there were negative connotations to this stinginess – and as soon as I could afford to – I made a conscious effort not to be the extremely middle class person who pores over bills to calculate the exact percentage of the chips they ate. With this newly adopted “I’ll get this, you can get me one back in the future” mindset, control was traded for a more laissez-faire attitude towards spending.

At the core of this desire to use up every last dreg lies a scarcity mindset I find myself frequently fighting against. It’s unwarranted, but instinctual. My complex relationship with food has all the classic societal influences, but I’ve often felt it spirals from a fear of something that is there not being there any more. Whether it’s a male family member taking a bigger portion at dinner or a waiter zipping away the plate before I can mop up the layer of jus, I feel this pathetic urgency to devour every last drop when I eat. Right now, my relationship with food feels the healthiest it’s been in years, but the obsession has splintered, or perhaps simply shapeshifted. The platescraper mindset has swapped counting calories for saving money and reducing food waste, but the outcome is often similar. A hell of a lot of brain power is wasted on thinking about food, and thinking about thinking about food.

All of this is to say: a great stand-up set this material would not make for. I knew it then, and I know it even more now I’ve spent hours upon hours (during the Fringe of 2022, up to eight a day) watching live comedy. But there’s something about “Platescraper” that sticks, and has morphed as I’ve grown. That vital platescrapery-ness is hard to shake, but I like to think that today it comes from a place of appreciation more than fear. I’m infinitely more open to life and opportunity than I was as a student or when I first moved to London. If I was a kitchen utensil (something my friends and I frequently discuss), I would still be one of those colourful silicone spatulas, but I feel like when I’m scraping it’s because I’m trying to get every last opportunity out of life, depositing only the odd microplastic in the process.

We got there in the end: a very long, slightly self-important introduction to my Substack and explanation of its title. This site’s contents? Those are to be determined. You can expect musings on the topics mentioned above: identity, food, the arts. These are the subjects my friends and I return to in conversation time and time again, and I’m still drawing conclusions on.

I imagine it to be, in part, a place to put features and articles I’ve struggled to place professionally. I’m not saving the meatiest, most personal content for Substack (trust me, I’m no stranger to milking my personal life for a quick pay cheque and byline). That being said, there are essays to come here that I’ve spent months in back-and-forths with editors over that ultimately, frustratingly, have turned out fruitless. One, likely the first to follow, has been nearly happening for six months and I simply think I’ll go mad if I don’t write it down. Others ideas I want to give room to breathe, and am unwilling to whittle down to the 600-word column I’d be asked to turn them into. Some are incomplete, messy thoughts I want to prod and begin to unparcel. Some, I suspect, will be interesting to me and me only.

Mostly, this is being created right now as a place to put my thoughts while I step away from writing full-time for the first time in five years. For the rest of February and who-knows-how-much of March, I will be travelling around Central America, solo. It is a trip that the young platescraper in me, with her desperate need to scrimp and save, would never do; not least because with just hours to go, I have no return flight, no plans (bar the first two nights’ hostels, which I reluctantly secured on Sunday), nothing.

So yes, the next few weeks are going to be about taking in the world, while trying to read and write as much as I can. Recently, I feel like I’ve been really working through my thoughts, and as they’ve loosened they’re bouncing between the edges of my brain like the flashing “DVD” logo screensaver. Now, it’s time to scrape them out.