I’m trying not to mourn summer, too soon. Rumours of a September heat wave persist, it IS still August, and I went too early on jeans yesterday, got very clammy indeed.

Also, I don’t hate September. It’s the month of bare legs n boots; Earliest Intimations Of Autumn Dressing has its own charm.

EG I will perhaps get this cobalt blue funnel neck jacket from Nobody’s Child, £139, which I could wear with shorts.

And maybe this perfect grey jumper from Aligne, £159 (bearing in mind, I HATE knitwear; so it takes a really good piece, to turn my head, which this is)

AND this Victoria Beckham Kajal Eyeliner in Bordeaux, £33 (It’s a deep purply red, so, autumnal - ok? My eyes are blue/ green and it’s the best shade on them.)

And OMG YES PLEASE to this, from Monica Vinader (£179, it would be divine over the grey jumper).

Affiliate links on them beauties.

I went to the lido for a late summer swim with my friend E on Wednesday. We like to chat about everything; at some point, Substack came up.

“How much do you know about your subscribers?” E asked. “About their lives and stuff?”

Which is a really good question. It made me think about how, over the last two and a bit years, you have given me just gorgeous glimmers of insight, into who you are, what you do, what you know. The incredible, unexpected seams of knowledge, you let me tap. The complex and surprising back stories. The throwaway hints at, difficult relationships with mothers, or, hilarious, ill-advised teenage starter marriages.

The insane expertise, casually referenced.

The brilliant humour, casually released.

Then, there are those of you who’ve told me your bigger stories, in detail. It is one of the most unexpected and incredibly welcome functions of this SubStack, without a shadow of a doubt. I feel really connected to everyone who’s done this, (I hope there will be many more of you).

L’s story, from about six weeks ago, is a case in point. It touched a lot of you; mainly, I think, because L was still so very in the thick of things.

The full post is here…

But I’ll also recap it, like I’m Netflix.

L met her husband in 2008, when she was in her mid 20s. It was: “Online… It was actually still a bit embarrassing to have met online, then.” They clicked immediately, fell in love; married, in 2012.

By the time they married, L had realised her husband had a problem with booze. This understanding, she told me, came in the form of a gradual accumulation of knowledge; bottles of hard liquor were drained inexplicably fast, and without her seeing - that sort of thing.

But she also told me that, because she, he, and everyone around them, were in their twenties, it was difficult to understand the extent of it. “Everyone was drinking too much.”

I thought about this recently. I’m currently very entrenched with an early season of the reality show Vanderpump Rules; one filmed around 2013, 2014. The young people in it are all drinking an insane amount - they work in hospitality, late nights, no early starts, no reason not to have a hangover, free shots which flow perpetually - but you can sort of see, now, through 2026 goggles, who among the cast is in danger of developing a problem with alcohol, and who is just a young drunk muppet who doesn’t know when to stop. You can also see how impossible it would have been for them, to notice the difference.

So.

L and her bloke got married, and were happy - initially.

“Things were good!”

Her weight was… actually not an issue for her, I don’t think. “I’d been big since my university years,” she explained. “I think I was probably about 16 stone when [he and I] met.” She initially assumed her husband didn't care. “We were having lots of sex, so I assumed he was attracted to me,” she said, but, as time went on, she began to think, that wasn’t the case.

“He isn’t going to come off well, here, but… He has always let it be known he’d like it if I were thinner.”

L lost weight, in the all the ways that were normal, in the pre GLP-1s era, with Weight Watchers, and with stress, and with incredibly restrictive eating which couldn't possibly be sustained longterm…

And she put it all on again, afterwards - inevitably.

But things were OK in her marriage… Until Covid, and lockdown, when her husband’s alcoholism couldn’t be ignored any longer.

The nature of both their jobs meant, they were effectively, at home and unemployed (“Furloughed, without anyone paying us… There was a lot of free time.”) which was OK - until, pretty quickly, within a couple of weeks, at most - it wasn’t.

“The bit of him that had kept his drinking to, alone, to a thing he did when I wasn’t there - that broke through.’

Things got “worse and worse and worse and worse.”

He started drinking more and more. “He switched, from white wine to vodka… There’d be days off [drinking], some days on, and: a day on, leads to another day on.”

The idea of being stuck in this situation, through Covid and lockdown, when the world was in unknowable turmoil, when everyone was scared and lost and isolated, then: having this level of awfulness and worry in the mix too, in your own home, a place you’re not really supposed to leave, a place where you should feel safe…

“I just didn't know what to do,” L told me. He was, she says: “Never violent, never abusive” (although I slightly question that, I think his behaviour verged on the controlling, from L’s descriptions), regardless, what a hell, in which to be caught.

Worrying terribly for the person you love - and L did still love him - yet stuck, in this horrific experience his addiction is dictating.

By the summer of 2022, things had spiralled, “He’s crying and out of control…”, and L managed to convince her husband to go to residential rehab for a fortnight.

After the paywall:

Things get better… then much, much worse. L starts taking Mounjaro, which has a most unexpected side effect… then lets me interview her for this Substack, which also changes things dramatically.

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To Dolly, whom we will always love.

But now: to facelifts - and good bodies.

Ever since Kris Jenner turned up looking more like Kim Kardashian, than Kim Kardashian does, following a frankly miraculous deep plane facelift, the discourse around both aesthetics and feminism has been dominated by the idea of the Forever 35 Face - women with faces surgically adjusted to look 35, even if they, themselves, are twice that (which Jenner is) - or more.

Nicole Kidman (59) and her brand new Vogue cover have given the conversation second wind.

I mean, LOOK AT HER.

It’s all very potent and divisive, of course.

People are either furious that women in the public eye are, apparently, no longer allowed to age (cos where does that leave the rest of us? What messages does it send?) OR desperate to have a Forever 35 Face themselves, only, they can’t afford it/ are too scared OR, most confusingly of all:

They feel both these things at once, with equal passion'; currently have no clue which will win out.

Me? Ah. I’m afraid that, despite absolutely understanding and respecting all the ideological objections, I rather do want a lift… But only a really good one, and I’m not going to pay the £40k they seem to cost in London RN (mostly because I haven’t got it). I’d sort of love to be able to go to Brazil and do it there, where the surgeons and techniques are incredible, (as good, if not - better), yet somehow cost a tenth of London prices; meaning a flight to Rio, facelift, and 10 days or so in a nice hotel to recuperate before coming back, would probably leave me with change from £10k… BUT I think I’d go crazy with anxiety, all on my own, so far from home. All that thinking time! Nothing to do but stare at my swollen mush and wonder if it’ll ever settle, and have I made a horrific mistake, and is that ache in my knee actually DVT?

Et cetera.

The good news, is don’t have to worry about my body. Because it doesn’t look like it did when I was 35.

It looks better than that.

I appreciate this is one of the most annoying things a woman my age can say
”OMG I’VE GOT THE BEST BODY OF MY LIFE! 35 YEAR OLD ME WISHES SHE HAD THIS BODY! LOOK AT MY GUNS! FEEL MY ROCK HARD ABS! I COULD CRUSH A MAN’S SKULL BETWEEN THESE QUADS!” et cetera

But - that doesn’t seem to stop me.

Also?

Here’s another bikini selfie.

But look, beneath the bragging and the boring-on, I hope I’m making a couple of important points. One of them is, I thought I hated physical activity for most of my adult life. Felt useless at it at school, never thought I’d lose that ick. Discovering - aged what? 41, 42? - that I, in fact, totally loved it, was passably OK at (some of) it, was definitely capable of getting (much much) better, the more I did, was extraordinary. This is not just because I GOT THE BEST BODY OF MY LIFE, but also because it made me understand that the world is just f**king filled with things, with which, I could fall hopelessly in love at any minute - I just don’t know it yet. Coming to love exercise has left me in this permanent giddy state of: What else, what else, what next, what else?

My other point is, I so badly want other women to feel this, too. I do not care about being a good role model or a good influence in almost all other respects. Babe! Do you! Be happy! But where exercise is concerned… I just would really really like other women to feel the same joy in moving, the same love for their own bodies; the same giddiness of endorphin hit, the confidence high of doing something you thought you couldn’t, the power of a body which just keeps getting stronger all the time…

Lately, I’ve become pretty convinced that one body part, rules them all. Serves as a kind of foundation on the rest. Dictates how good the whole of your body looks, and how well it moves. If you focus on it, the rest will fall into place around it, almost, because that is how fundamental it is, and how much power it has.

What is it?

It’s your

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How are we to feel about the really rather incredibly imminent return of Harry and Meghan?

Thrilled?

Relieved?

Emosh?

Just giddy about her return to acting via a prospective role in Guy Ritchie’s (saucy, violent and VERY sweary) The Gentlemen?

Tenterhooks re the nature of gainful employ he’ll be seeking, when back in the ‘hood? Anxious to know how they’ll slot back in to the Royal universe, given all the water, under the bridge?

Or… you know… not?

More: faintly exhausted by the endless chaotic machinations, the comings and the goings and swearing they can’t possible return because of the security sitch only they did anyway, because… Well. Theories abound.

It all slightly reminded me of those scenes in Barbie, when everyone keeps running back and forth between the real world and Barbie’s world, with no clear motive, and you lose the will to care quite quickly.

Because the thing with them is, the overriding sense for me, anyway:
I DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY WANT FROM US!

Do you?

Does anyone?

I mean, it’s definitely something. And it does seem to change pretty regularly. But WHAT IS IT?

Initially, I’m (pretty) sure it was: to leave them alone. Wasn’t it? Let them flourish and grow and LOVE and raise a family and be private and happy and… fine!

Could not have supported that more! Brilliant idea, and smart! DO IT!

But then, pretty soon afterwards, it seemed like, they wanted that - but also to be financially viable, though only in the nice ways, and also to be, like, a bit famous? Because being famous deffo helps with the financial viability (*nice variant only), though also?
With that whole other thing - about being widely adored.

It is quite hard to be very private, and very widely adored, I find.

So, OK: we were to leave them alone but also, adore them. Love and admire them and so forth, treat them like they’re royal. Even though technically - they’re not, not entirely, not by the standard definitions - and DEFINITELY not Working.

But we should use their titles and think they’re great, and not be dragging up any former surnames, and generally ADORE ADORE ADORE though definitely, you know: from afar.

But then, after that… We were suddenly supposed to find them “relatable”?

I think still “from afar”?

So: relatable - but from afar?

Admire them, for their modern outlook! Feel connected to them, via their Instagram-perfect eternal sun- shining Soho House-y lifestyle which wasn’t at all stuffed shirts and satin sashes and overheated pomp and regalia and smelly palaces, no! It was high end and glossy but wholesome and chill. It was chickens and dresses and bare foot steps on expensive earth.

But from afar.

Ah - but hang on, because we were to pity them, too! Yes, they had a lovely expensive Put THAT On The Main Grid, H! sort of a life, which was better than ours (*a lot), but also: they had suffered.

And we were to be sad for them. We had to Think About Our Own Part in their sadness, how culpable we were in it.

While also, envying them, for the Instagram perfect eternal sun-shining.

Oh - and admiring them, for overcoming. For rising up.

And making jam.

Which we were supposed to buy.

Along with all the products they shilled. The podcasts, the affiliate-linked clothing, the earth-scorching autobiographies, all of it!

BUY BUY BUY!

And then, feel angry, on their behalf, because they were STILL denied security rights in the UK; and angrier yet, on Harry’s behalf, when he lost his fight, the last stand of his lifelong crusade against the tabloid press, in the courts. (Maybe we should crowdfund his costs?) But then? Excited because they went to see the King; then awwwww! Impressed (and a little jelly) about how beautiful and blissful they loomed (*that was meant to read “looked” but I’m wondering if my typo makes it better?) on their hols in Portugal.

And no! It’s not “Duchess” any more, it’s plain old (relatable) “Oh, call me Meghan!” (as of Australian Masterchef), and Harry seems to be resuming his ol’ rogue fun prince charmer role on the Joe Marler podcast, and…

It is quite a lot, isn’t it? Relentless, one might say. Yet I am still none the wiser re WHAT THEY WANT FROM US, truly; and they’re IR (Imminent Return) is beginning to take on the flavour of a drop-in from an extremely difficult relative and William and Kate have still to comment and is it just me, or, sometimes, does it feel a bit like they’re using us?

Somehow?

For something?

I dunno.

Anyway.

Good luck with that, everyone!

To arguably more important things:

Our necks, and what the hell we’re to do about them.

Actually, I’ve recently done something to mine AND IT’S RATHER GOOD.

I would say, before I go any further, that it’s important to remember, no other f**ker on this planet is as harsh about your neck, as you are, about your own. YEAH it’s one of the first parts of us to show a little age, it being literally thinner skinned than our faces, and it being put through its paces in the course of a life, with all the moving around, supporting of an entire head and so forth. But no one else notices or cares, in the way we ourselves do.

Also? The mechanism of selfies often means we think it’s much worse than it is, anyway. Holding your phone and extending your arm smushes your neck up and catches it at the worst of all possible angles… Get someone else to take your selfies, or get a selfie stick (so 2016!) and you will see what I mean.

But:

I did have some new work done on mine quite recently, and I am really happy with how it’s turned out.

I’ve said it a gazillion times before but… It is so important, when embarking upon the tweakment process, to find a doctor you trust and respect. Dr Kersh at 23MD is mine; she is as subtle and careful as anyone could be, she’ll always do a little less, wait, then correct with just the tiniest but more, if necessary - and I trust her implicitly. I’ve been seeing her - for everything from Botox to EmFace via fillers, which she does extremely well - for about seven years now, I have never been anything other than delighted with her work, never not offered up my face to her needles, with complete confidence.

So, when Dr Kersh proposed injecting the skin on my neck with

Coming up: exactly what I did to get a fresher looking neck

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It’s my birthday, soon. Friday.

I don’t like to make a fuss about it, BUT…

No - genuinely.

I really don’t like to make a fuss about it.

I find birthdays cringe. Not sure why. I like attention (you may not be surprised to learn), but I think, I only like it for things I’ve done, as opposed to, me just not dying in the course of the last year.

Though I guess, as I get older, that probably does become a bit more impressive.

Like, I went for an eye test the other day, had a moment in the midst of the measuring and puffing and “Just keep your eye on the red dot…” when I realised the stakes are higher now. One anomaly here, could lead to a loaded pause from the optician, then, another test, which could lead to a referral, which…

But, it didn't.

Instead, I’m getting some FIRE new specs. More on them once I pick ‘em up.

Plus I’m bang on track with my Sexy Vicious Old Lady Plan. Having realised my two great drivers in life are 1) vanity, and 2) not getting Alzheimer's, I decided a while ago to work towards being a really good looking hench 80-something: full glam, preposterously strong, sharp as a tack, til the day she dies. Can bar hang for a minute, will cut you down with a vicious retort soon as look at you.

Some people do call this “Longevity” - yes!

I call it “The Sexy Vicious Old Lady Plan™”.

Subscribe for more tips.

I was telling some friends about the SVOLP, when the issue of skinny privilege was raised. We were having a drink. There are four of them, all of whom have lost significant weight on GLP-1s in the course of the last two years. An average of three stone each, I reckon. None of them had been able to come off the pen, and sustain the weight loss, they were all either micro dosing for maintenance, or full dosing for more loss. One of them was worried about Mounjaro’s impact on her face (which I talked about here), she said she’d really noticed O Face kick in, over the last three months (it can happen like that) ; another conceded she’d overdone it at one point, gone a bit “Corpse Bride”, but she’d pulled it back.

Overall they were all very happy indeed, with how they look, now; much happier than they had been before. The boost in everything from their confidence to their energy to there mood was, they thought, entirely worth the price tag. They’re all on Mounjaro - which I keep wanting to call “Mary-Jane” but that’s something else - so that’s substantial.

“I love the Skinny Privilege most of all!” one of them said.

“OH MY GOD! Skinny privilege is THE BEST!” another one said.

Now, this got my hackles up, because the idea of my ignorant reality-insulated idiotic Skinny Privilege has been thrown in my face for years, and I’ve always thought HOW THE HELL DO ANY OF YOU KNOW IF IT’S EASIER TO BE ME, THAN IT IS TO BE YOU? YOU’VE GOT NO BASIS FOR COMPARISON, HAVING NEVER BEEN ME.

But irritatingly, here was a focus group entirely capable of making the comparison, because they’d been fatter, and now, they were thinner.

“It’s real, then?” I say.

“Oh you have no idea how real, Polly!” they say. “No idea at all.”

“It’s that much better, being thin?” I ask.

“YES!”

“Alright. Tell me exactly how,” I say.

And then, they blew my mind.

“Well, first of all, now I’m thinner, everyone

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Extracts from ‘s new book on the Beckhams, Brand Beckham, could not be more mesmerising. The details, the sourcing, the colour! I am obsessed by her reading on eldest son Brooklyn’s estrangement from the rest of ‘em.

His Palm Beach wedding to actress and billionaire’s daughter Nicola Peltz (the woman who would, apparently, help draft Brooklyn’s earth scorching, family-rejecting, wedding-dance exposing Instagram statement of Jan 2026) sounds particularly intense.

According to the book, Victoria and David had stopped speaking to Brooklyn and Nicola months before the wedding, which may or may not explain why Nicola’s mother, model Claudia, had the Valentino Atelier sew an evil eye into the inside of her daughter’s couture wedding dress (the one Nicola wore instead of a VB design, more on this shortly) “for protection”.

Ahem.

Multiple wedding planners were hired and fired, for crimes as varied as, flowers not being “white enough”, and inadequate management of the RSVPs. One of the fired teams would describe it as, “less a wedding plan, more a crime scene.” The night before the wedding, “‘members of my family told me that Nicola was ‘not blood’ and ‘not family’,” Brooklyn would say (so mafia!). The Day Of: David’s speech was just weird, according to a guest, too long, quite obsessive about his eldest son. “It was as if David was getting married to Brooklyn,” the guest said; peculiar in itself - though, even more so, if you consider this was apparently the first time David had spoken to his eldest son at all, in yonks.

THEN came the mother- groom dance which has been characterised as anything from full on lap dance grade twerking, to, absolutely fine, depending on who you ask, and to which camp they subscribe. Brooklyn himself would describe it, in that Instagram statement, as a all-out “hijacking” of the wedding, saying it made him feel “humiliated” and that his mother danced “inappropriately on me.”

On me.

The atmos at the morning-after brunch was described by another guest as: “Honestly? It was like someone had died.”

Congrats, guys!

I met Nicola P-B, six-ish months later, for an interview. I really liked her - she was not at all the spoiled minx I’d anticipated, but rather a dog-loving courteous sweetheart who spilled way more beans on the Beckhams-in-law than expected. EG, on the wedding dress situation:

“I didn’t end up wearing Victoria’s wedding dress,” she told me. “But the real truth is, I really, really wanted to wear it and I thought it was so beautiful that Brooklyn’s mom got to make that for me! And I was really excited to wear it! And I didn’t end up wearing it.”
Why not?

“I was so excited to start the design process. Um, and then, Victoria, um, was like… And then she, Victoria, uh, was very busy, and then we started this text chain, and a few days went by, and I didn’t hear anything, then I think Victoria… called my mom and said that she couldn’t make the dress. She said that her, um, atelier couldn’t make the dress in time. So, um, then my mom told me, and then we regrouped and came up with something else. But I, truthfully was really excited to wear her dress.”

Yet as F**KING AWFUL as all this sounds, it has all, somehow, got much, more worse over the intervening years, so now? We’re living through the public undoing of the Beckhams (emotionally, if not financially, apparently they doubled their wealth in the course of the last year) and, the thing is:

We’ve been waiting for it. Haven’t we?

A bit? For years?

For SOMETHING to go wrong?

Not terribly nice of us, but also… I dunno: True?

I know that, for decades, every time I told a mate I had some hot celeb divorce gossip, they’d always go: “IS IT THE BECKHAMS?” - then get disappointed, when it wasn’t.

Maybe it's schadenfreude? Up to this point, they have just seemed better than us- in every respect. More glamours, richer, more stylish; but more of a pack, too. A chummier, happier, shinier sort of a family. Like The Kardashians, but less vapid; The Waltons, but richer.

So to see it - them - unravel rather, from the inside out (because it was always going to be that, if the Rebecca Loos allegations proved anything, it was that)… Of course we’re fixated.

And anyway, celebrity family estrangements are the scandal of our times. We’re living through a golden age of them.

The unraveling of the Beckhams came hard on the heels, of course, of that other great family unravelling - Harry V the Royals - and has been followed up, by that of Adam Ramsay-Peaty, the Olympic swimmer who seems to have forsaken his own family, for that of his new bride, Holly, daughter of Gordon, Ramsay…

It’s a bold new conceit on famous person undoings, for sure! Very modern, in its blurring of the private and the public spheres, in its shattering of ostensibly gilded lives, before our eyes! In how it weaponises social media, delivers us neatly coded mysteries of suddenly scrubbed posts, and of Likes, pointedly withheld - equipped with which, we may play armchair detective, with our phones as an incident room.

I mean, if we think about it too much, it is also terribly sad. , who is estranged from three of her children, described it as a “living grief”. The estranged… they’re alive, but as lost to you, as if they were dead.

Plus there’s stigma and shame mixed in - for everyone. The kids are thankless ungrateful arseholes, and the parents definitely did something wrong.

Everyone looks like awful in an estrangement. Everyone loses.

It is sad.

But also AMAZING.

But sad.

But why? What’s happened to families, to ancient ideas like loyalty and familial duty, to the old old principle of not washing your dirty laundry in public, that’s brought these three - along with so many non famous families - to this point? The point of LC (Low Contact) and, NC (No Contact) and shots fired on the ‘Gram?

Actually - I think I might know.

So much of what’s happening is, I think, a consequence of just one thing. One idea, one convention, one narrative which has become increasingly current. I think Harry is a whiny brat and Brooklyn is young and sad and lost and Ramsay-Peaty beguiled by a sparkling new world of middle classiness but I also think they’re all subject to the same, singular, new, dubious phenomenon. The same instruction, the same vibe, the same flex, the same oppressive, all-encompassing urge, this brand new

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Ah, BUT first things first:

I am number one on Netflix!

OK. OK.

Not me, exactly, but a show with which I was involved!

OK. OK. Not involved exactly - I had no idea about any of it, until it was pointed out to me by assorted other parties…

BUT

I’m definitely in it.

LOOK!

It’s the new Netflix Jose Mourinho doc, which I was going to watch, but now can’t, because…

Yeah.

I’m in it.

They used some 20 year old footage which I barely remember even shooting, in which, I burble on about how fit he is.

First I knew something might be up, I got an influx of random new male followers on Instagram. Not my usual demographic, so I sort of thought something must have happened to pique their interest, but - couldn’t for the life of me think what.

Then, about 8.30pm last night, while I am watching Vanderpump Rules, I get a DM from a mate. It’s a screenshot, not unlike the one above, no further explanation.

“Eh?” I respond. “What’s that?”
”YOU, ON THE MOURINHO DOC!” he replies. “Going on about how handsome he is, and now you want to look at the back pages of the newspapers as well.”

I mean, even if it hadn't been my face, I’d have known, from that quote alone, that it was definitely me.

(I suppose I could get cross about Netflix reducing me to some woman who fancies men but it’s so very on-brand… I can’t.)

Then - everyone else starts messaging.

Mainly, they want to congratulate me on my hair, (EG “LOVE the wolf cut!”) which is weird because I didn’t like it at the time.

If I can’t remember being interviewed on camera about Mourinho - it’s dim, to put it mildly - I can remember getting that hair cut. By accident.

I’d been invited round to the home of a big name hairdresser (I can’t acutely remember that big name, though as you’ll see, that’s good) who was doing one-on-one bespoke sessions with notables (ahem) to launch a new product. When I got to his central London abode, I noted he was in a state of… erm, how to express this? Unusual intensity? Highly talkative-ness? Heightened being? The sort of thing I more generally associated with decadent VIP areas after hours…

But this was like, midday on a Tuesday, in a flat.

ANYWAY, I didn't want to be rude, so let him cut my hair regardless… And that was how it turned out. It had just been long before.

My usual hairdresser was mortified when I returned to him. Told me it’d take 18 months to grow out. Hey ho. I wore it scraped back in a pony tail and didn't sweat it.

But now I can see it does look rather cool.

So here’s my Netflix legacy!

Lechery, and a hair cut with a back story!

Back to the shopping list.

I love this weather. I know, I know, it’s A LOT, not to mention, the not-even-early intimations of incoming disaster.

It’s not just a season, is it? It’s an existential threat.

But I’m just such a summer person, and this is such a summer.

It soothes me. Sun on my skin takes me out of the churn of my head, into the calm bliss of my body. It strips layers of anxiety and worry off me, like I'm shedding skin.

My legs have gone the best shade of brown (light toast), and so have my feet, which I also love for the way a flip flop V is tanned into the top of them.
I love the sound my feet make in flip flops. That soothes me too, it’s like a heartbeat, like: everything’s chill! No need for shoes!

And I love that I don’t have to blow-dry my hair, it’ll air dry itself into a state of gorgeous artless summer-ish dishevelment.

I have that thing where, you know when it feels like you’ve got nothing to wear? A wardrobe full of clothes, and none of them are quite right? In summer, for me, it’s the opposite. I have everything to wear! Because the sun makes me feel better in my skin, I can be a hundred times more inventive and free. I know myself better in summer, I am myself, more fully - so, I am better at getting dressed.

I am also better at shopping. Inspired, almost. Zero buyers remorse, guaranteed! As with my general degree of self knowledge, it’s like I have a higher understanding on Stuff, when the sun’s out. What I need, but also, what’ll be fun!

And largely, because summer clothes, certainly, are cheaper than winter - less fabric, innit, which also means they take up less space - all this Great Stuff, is relatively inexpensive. It certainly packs a joy punch, far beyond its ticket price. (Aplogies for stopping the audio at this point. It doesn’t really work with a list, you see.)

(Some of my links have affiliates.)

EG

This swimsuit from M&S, official name: sheen cami scoop neck, currently on offer for £12 (I KNOW!)

They’re calling the colour “Moss Green”, I’m calling it “Chartreuse”, whatever, point is, it’s an excellent fit - exactly what you want from something that simple - flattering with some compression, and it also really works as a top with jeans (I did it with no bra because of the compression and the small-ish boobs). GREAT with gold jewellery. AND TWELVE QUID!

I went to my friend’s house in Cornwall and got obsessed by her Gluggle Jug (from £19). It’s the noise! They gluggle as you pour! Plus, I am fully on board with the water saving initiative, and keeping a jug of water in your fridge, as opposed to letting the tap run to cold every time you want another glass, is good practise.

This Rixo dress is certainly not £20 (it’s actually £285), but it’s the thing I’ve worn most, bar one, this summer. It’s much more SHEER* (*IYKYK) than it seems in the pic, so much less Pilgrim’s Wife, and generally gorge.

The one thing I’ve worn more than this IS in the twenty quid bracket. It’s

After the pay wall, more glorious things which will ramp up your expereince of life/ your look, without bankrupting you. Including the one ‘fit I’m wearing more than the Rixo dress, the make up which makes you look truly lit from within, a Skims dupe which is arguably better, and certianly cheapar, than the original and an extraordianry and easy styling hack.

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I am constantly amazed, by you lot, and your incredible stories. The ones you DM me about, tentatively, because maybe I’d want to hear more? Because you feel like you’d like to share them, though you don’t quite know why, but - maybe it’ll help someone else?

Staggered, moved, stunned, so grateful you’d share them with me, and allow me to share them again, here, with everyone else.

The things you tell me.

The experiences and traumas and pain; the resilience and humour, the second chances!

I’m also constantly, and repeatedly staggered (amazed, moved, stunned) by the compassion and kindness, with which the rest of you respond.

It is quite gorgeous. It really is.

This latest is as breathtaking, as any of the others.

C contacted me a couple of weeks ago, around the time I published L’s story about her marriage, her body, her GLP-1 use.

C’s message read:

“Hi Polly - I have read all of your accounts of GLP use with interest . I have BPD - bipolar 1, actually. I started to use Mounjaro over a year ago. I hated everything about myself- but particularly my weight - which was the cause of obsessive and derogatory thoughts since - well - I actually cannot remember a time when it wasn’t the background noise of my life. I had your classic eating disorders throughout my teens and twenties - but after having my children in my early 30s, I could never, ever get to a weight I felt happy in - despite my best efforts (trainers, diets - you name it).
Mounjaro freed me from having to think about my weight all day, every day, every bloody minute. But as I kept taking it, I noticed something else…”

C went on to describe an extraordinary… Oh. To call it a “side effect” of her experience of the drug seems a bit silly, really. Because it’s more like an “utterly unprecedented, unexpected main event”. A change so life altering, so transformative, so important:
“I cannot tell you how much easier my life is, now,” C wrote.

Would you like to talk to me about it in depth, I ask. C agrees, not least because she wants to know if anyone else, has experienced anything like it.

She’s a Brit, who relocated to Australia several decades ago; we arrange a Zoom call which works around both our time zones.

Tell me why you messaged me at all? I ask, when she pops up on my lap top screen, smiley, quick witted, charming, pulled together.

“I think you’re presenting interesting and nuanced perspectives from people who are on GLP-1s. I think it’s so easy to see them as… Not demonised exactly, but certainly, used as a very lazy punchline. Someone who doesn’t want to make the effort, ‘she’s on the jab, oh, look at her, vain and silly,’ et cetera. And because people are so focused on the weight loss - they’re not looking at the bigger picture. The bigger picture is, I think, going to be quite profound. I think the losing weight part of it - which is really powerful. Don’t get me wrong; that’s why I began taking one - but it’s almost become, like, the least impressive part of it - if that makes sense?”

It absolutely does, I say. And I absolutely agree. We’re watching a drug transform us, in multiple ways, all at once.

Right.

Your story, please, C.

“OK. So. I had a really good upbringing. I’m adopted, but that was never a feature of my self-loathing, which I’ll get to. It’s more that [the adoption] makes it harder to trace my medical history. I was sexually assaulted when I was seven, and that is obviously very traumatic…”
I would say so. I’m so sorry.

“And I think there is an element of that which changes your relationship with yourself, and which changes your relationship with the outside world. You are constantly projecting, I think, what you think people want from you.”

C didn’t report the sexual assault. “Didn’t even kind of come clean about it, til I was much older. It was the usual abuser’s pattern of: told me there was something wrong with me. That the ‘game’ that we played, if it hurt me, that meant that I was evil. And if anyone found out, they wouldn’t be able to love me. So, you know, you internalise that hugely. I mean, I think bipolar is a genetic condition. I do. But I think the trauma [of the assault], and, holding on to that, compartmentalizing, what I believed at that moment, and how I thought other people should envisage me… That probably didn’t help. It probably hastened things.”

The abuse occurred over what C describes as a “short “period of time.
“Completely fucking awful, but you just kind of have to move on, don’t you?”

Her bipolar kicked in, when she reached teenage. She recognised the: “periods of depression,” she was experiencing, but not: “my periods of mania. Just thought, that was either me coping, or my anxiety.” This meant she wasn’t diagnosed with bipolar “until I was 24. I’m 55 now.” And the diagnosis only happened then, because a doctor happened to see her, while she was manic. “Normally, I’d present when I was depressed, and they’d go, ‘oh, depressed, da-da-da…’ but this time, they were like: ‘OH!’”

What does her mania look like?

“I become hugely anxious. Like, at first, it’s almost like you’ve had a few drinks and you’re the life and soul of the party. You are more energetic. You don’t need much sleep. You feel like you’re tackling lots of things. You’re juggling!”
So competent? So on top of it all?
“Yes! You are absolutely not. So incompetent, actually. Then it becomes a sort of a spiral. For me, my mania is often a feeling of being hunted. It’s hugely anxious.” She’d described it as “acute” in her initial message, as a sort of multi-faceted, and completely overwhelming sense of self-loathing.

“I’m hugely afraid,” she tells me. “And I hallucinate smells, which is quite unusual.”
Wow. Like what? Fire?

“Fire is one of them. You smell things burning, because you’re constantly on alert. ‘Wait, I have to go check everything. Something’s burning’, - and the other smell is decay.”
Decay?

“Yes. So my ex husband died, a little over a year ago, and I found him. Oh, this is all going to sound like awful trauma…”

C smiles as she says all this. She’s incredibly good humoured. She reminds me of every one of the women I’ve spoken to so far for these pieces, all so entirely without self-pity, all rolling-with-the-punches, all “it was a long time ago…” or “sh*t happens…” as they describe crappy, awful, hope-sapping, exhausting, traumatic experiences. There was a point where I wondered why the women who take GLP-1s often seem to also go through so much unrelated trauma. Did them hating their bodies, equate to them enduring more foul behaviours in others, somehow? But ultimately, I think, we do just all go through a lot of trauma, don’t we – especially by the time we reach our forties, fifties, sixties, AKA GLP-1s key demographic.

Anyway.

“It was just one of those things,” C tells me, of finding the body of her ex. “He had been an alcoholic, very unwell, for a few years. We were constantly checking on him, trying to make sure he was okay, and - we couldn’t get hold of him. And walking into his flat, there is this awful moment of recognition. ‘I know what this smell is!’”

It was the same smell C had been hallucinating for years while manic. “Basically - dead flesh. ‘That’s what it is! That’s why it makes me so agitated.’”

When she was hallucinating these smells, C had always needed someone else: “someone external, like one of my children, to say: ‘This smell isn’t real’. Because it is so vivid, the smell. It’s visceral.”

Is it the worst part of the bipolar?

“No. That’s the anxiety, the fear everything is going to come crashing down. That you’re going to be uncovered. That you’re the worst person in the world and everyone’s going to find out.”

Now, I know. We all dance with our self-loathing, from time to time. Maybe more frequently than that. We all get a little fixated on how unacceptable one or other part of us is. Physically, emotionally, personality wise…

But what C describes, is of another order entirely. I have a dear friend with bipolar. Watching her go through those same periods of self-loathing and self-doubt is truly horrendous. She becomes imprisoned by them, immobilised by them. Nothing I say helps. I want to shake her and scream WHY CAN’T YOU SEE HOW WONDERFUL YOU ARE?, but I know it wouldn’t help. It’s devastating to watch - and I can’t imagine what it’s like, to live through.

C likens it to the experience of extreme food noise, the deafening, unending, clamour of that, only… It’s for everything. Every part of her.“You are too loud, not funny, no one likes you, people pity you, they tolerate you. All day, every day - along with the fat/ugly/disgusting thoughts.”

“And you can’t grip onto… Like, if I could grip onto why it is I think I’m such a bad person, I could perhaps resolve it, talk myself through it. But it’s like trying to catch things that are constantly one step away from you. It becomes a whirlwind.”

Before her diagnosis, C experienced these episodes every six to eight months. She developed eating disorders, as a response. “I just wouldn’t eat. It was a way of controlling some of this emotion and some of this anxiety, this self-loathing. Also, when you don’t eat very much, your body and brain don’t put up much of a fight.”
Sounds like you didn’t have much fun as a kid?
“Of course I had fun! My life has not always been miserable. Obviously these periods, they’re significant, and they have an impact - but they haven’t been my whole life at all. I’ve always had really good female friends, always had people that I felt I can be quite honest with, about what’s happening to me. I’ve never felt I’ve had to keep it a secret, or that I should be ashamed of it. I feel like, you know: better to be open because there will be periods, where I’m going to be maybe a bit incomprehensible, and knowing why, is important. So, you flag that up.”

What was C’s relationship with her body like, through this time?

“I was very slim - until I was, 26, 27.”
And how did you feel about that slimness? Given it was all tied in with eating disorders, which were tied in with the bipolar…

“Oh, I coveted slimness! Yeah, I mean, I’m not going to go down the body positivity route, much as I admire younger women for doing that. Oh, I loved it. Loved being thin - that was one of the good things. I didn’t think I was attractive. I don’t know if I ever will really sit with that, think: ‘Yeah - I look okay.’ But being thin was one of the things that made that acceptable for me. ‘At least I was thin!’”

Then, came the bipolar diagnosis. Did that make things easier? Harder?

“I went through the usual path of people who are newly diagnosed, which is, you try something [medication], it either doesn’t immediately work, or when it does work, you’re like, ‘Well, that’s fine! I don’t need to take this anymore. I think we’ve solved everything… Oh, hang on, wait. I haven’t solved it. Let’s go back. Let’s start again’ There were lots of periods of that.”

This was, C says, complicated by her being a twenty something party animal. “I didn’t really take the medication side of it seriously, not til after my children. I was young, a bit of a div. Partying, doing all the things young people do. I probably had enough drugs in my system, quite frankly. I don’t know that I needed to add ones from a doctor to the mix. So they weren’t being given the fair shot.”

In her late 20s, C moved from the UK to Australia. She met the man who would be her husband, the father of her children - and eventually, the ex whose body she found - in her very first month in the country.

This, then, was when she started putting weight on. “Giving up the habits of my 20s, the parties and the party drugs. Kind of settling down. Life was calm. And anybody who’s had eating disorders, or problems with food knows, when you eventually try and be normal, become healthy, your body’s kind of like: ‘brilliant! Bring those calories on. I’m going to protect you, like you’re a mid-European peasant on the run from the snow! ‘And I just kept putting on weight.”

If life was calmer, C’s bipolar was: “all over the place. Still very much a feature of my life, but I think it’s something that …I’m not saying I leaned into it, but maybe, I just felt it more? I didn’t run from it as much? I wasn’t using alcohol as much to mask it. I wasn’t using [recreational] drugs to hide from its impact.”

C and her husband “had two children, relatively quickly.” C’s first child was born a year and a half after she met her husband, after which: “we got married, then we had the second baby. Just before the wedding, I lost a lot of weight, but through severe denial and just horrible, uncomfortable exercise routines, obsessive, again. And I thought, ‘I don’t want to go down this obsessive path again.’”
If motherhood made her take her medication more seriously for the first time, it also made her experience of bipolar more intense. “You’re so exhausted in those first years, you don’t have much defence against normal stresses and strains. You’re just surviving really, and not because you’re unhappy, not because it’s awful, but because your body and mind go into survival mode.”

It was at this point that C, by now, in her early thirties, started managing her condition with Xanax, in addition to: “an antipsychotic, and sodium valproate [a mood stabiliser.]” She thinks she became over reliant on the sedative, over time; she’d give it up entirely, eventually.

If those drugs helped manage the bipolar - they also: “Put a lot of weight on a woman’s body. A lot. That’s one of the side effects. An enormous amount of weight.”
Which left C, she said: “With that choice of staying sane – ish – and losing weight.”

I’m guessing that was not as easy a choice as we’d all like to think it is?

“No, no, no, no. Sometimes – really hard.”
C was, she says, desperate to lose the weight, “seriously trying, veering into that eating disorder realm again.” But even then, “I never went back down to a weight I was comfortable with.”

65 kilos is where she longed to be, she said – a little over 10 stone – “but I got to my heaviest, 97kg, and I stopped weighing myself.”

The weight made her miserable. It was the first thing she thought about in the morning, and the last thing at night.

“You really hate looking at yourself. Someone with a camera, it’s like: ‘oh no, where can I hide? What can I hide?’ Just full self-hatred. And, you know, I have friends of all shapes and sizes who I consider beautiful. This wasn’t about not thinking a bigger body is beautiful. It’s just that - I cannot live in one, and be happy. I could not do it. I could say I was okay with it, but… you become either the funny one, or the smart one. You do things to compensate for what you think is just existing in your larger body. It was a source of huge distress to me, and unhappiness.”

The bipolar, cruelly, would still flare up from time to time, even as the drugs that somewhat controlled it made C’s body unacceptable to her.

Despite all this pretty unimaginable load - C was - is - very successful, professionally, ambitious, and driven.

“I’ve always had high functioning jobs,” she tells me.

How does that work with the bipolar, I ask. Can she still work through the mania?

“Yes. I wouldn’t sleep for two or three days. I would be hugely anxious. Just performing, really. I was lecturing and tutoring at a university, and it would be: from the minute I was in public, to the minute I could get to my car… It was a sheer act of will to perform what was required.”
Her employers, at this time, didn’t know what was happening.

“No.”

How about everyone else? Friends and family?

“Yeah. Or, they could definitely tell.”

“There’d be times,” C goes on “when I would use alcohol, because you just need to contain yourselves, for those periods. If I was home for 14 hours before I had to see other people again, and perform [work] again, I needed to be asleep as quickly and as efficiently as I could. Okay. Deal with yourself. Yeah. Deal with the children. Be back at work, able to function and perform for another day.”
So - you’d drink yourself to sleep?

“Yes. “

What would you drink?

“Wine.”
How much? A bottle?

“Yeah. Take whatever; take the Xanax, have a bottle of wine. That’s it. I could get to sleep. Yeah.”

After the paywall, C’s bipolar continues, she breaks up with her husband… Then, she stumbles entirely by accident, over a pure miracle, and everything changes.

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This is a paid for article BUT the top section sits before the paywall, and amounts to one complete article which you can read for free. OBVS I’d love you to upgrade to paid, but appreciate these are expensive times.

I am staunchly opposed to the online discussion of Ariana Grande’s body; the one which, most recently, has reduced her (no pun intended) to pulling out of a West End revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday In The Park.

Grande has asked, explicitly, several times over, once in the form of song, that people not comment on her body; still, they did, they have, they do. The clamour only grew louder this week, in response to the release of the video for her new single Petal. After which, on Monday, a representative for the actress and singer told People magazine that Grande “will be taking a step back from visibility” when her current Eternal Sunshine tour ends, next month, and that she’ll be doing this because of “endless, ongoing public scrutiny”.

I totally accept that some of the commentary on her looks is grounded in desperate concern. For her, for the culture she influences. I just don’t think that makes it any more useful, than the commentary grounded in bitching and bad feeling and careless, broader intentions.

To Grande, it’ll all amount to the same thing, endless, unasked for dissecting of her physical self by strangers. The reduction, of everything she is, and everything she’s ever done, and might do, to that.

How she looks. How unacceptable it is.

To the young girls and women observing it: it’ll amount to the same thing too. Just more talk about what women look like, at the expense of who they are.

It really doesn’t matter how noble you believe your motivation. When you’re subject to this kind of internet intervention, believe me: you do not feel loved, or cared for, or supported, or as if all these strangers only want the best for you.

You feel only attacked, degraded, reduced.

I know this for a fact, because it has happened to me. To an infinitely lesser degree, of course; me being a person of truly minuscule profile, compared to - well anyone - but certainly Grande’s international stardom.

But, if in a much, much smaller way, nonetheless - it happened. A lot of strangers discussed my body - my weight, my size - critically, online, to my absolute detriment, personal, and professional, and for a very long time.

Arguably, I asked for it.

I’m the one who mentioned it first – in a column about how I liked being very slim, published 23 years ago, my God!, in The Observer… And all hell broke lose when it ran.

I was knocked sideways by the extent of the response, which was, in flavour, overwhelmingly incensed.

How dare I? How dare I be so outrageous as to even acknowledge I have a body, let alone, a thin one? How dare I rejoice in it? How dare I be such a bad role model, to younger women? How dare I “monetise my eating disorder” (actual quote)? How dare I be so vacuous and superficial and stupid in a broadsheet newspaper?

How dare I? HOW DARE I?

And so forth.

I took the initial onslaught on the chin. Ish. It was weird, don’t get me wrong. It all happened around about the dawn of online newspaper comment sections, none of us newly online journalists knew what we were in for, where all this was concerned. If the culture of things like trolling and internet pile-ons and cancellation had yet to fully emerge - it was still quite the unpleasant, foul leap, for those of us on the receiving end. You go pretty much overnight, from getting the very occasional hand written green ink through-the-mail expression of some random reader’s madness (my fave ever, came in rhyming couplets), to: being barraged by hundreds, thousands, of anonymous statements of casual, throwaway online condemnation.

It was a lot.

But yeah, I survived that.

What I didn’t expect, was that it would be all anyone talked about, with respect to me, for a decade afterwards. If I’d raised the subject of my body that one time, I didn’t return to it again - not until I started this SubStack. I absolutely didn’t dare poke that vipers’ nest! Never mind that I was also thoroughly intrigued by how incredibly potent it seemed to be. Never mind that if left me with this question: Was it all about me being thin - or was it just about me committing the ultimate crime, as a woman, of actually (GASP) liking my body?

Inconclusive.

But even though I didn’t write about my body again, for years and years and years and years - that was all I was, according to strangers on the internet. That stupid, scrawny, skinny bitch, who was also mean and dangerous and probably ill.

In that time, I wrote about hundreds, probably thousands, of other things, interviewed hundreds of other people… Yet still, I was simply not allowed to be anything other than that woman with the too-skinny body. Any words I wrote were ignored, in favour of dissecting the byline picture that appeared next to it. Or if they were read: they’d be instantly discredited, I would be instantly discredited, because I was thin, so what the f**k did I know about it? About anything at all?

My perspectives were all meaningless. My ideas. My experience. All of ‘em. Totally irrelevant, because I was just some stupid, THIN, woman.

Nothing I wrote changed this, for years. Even if readers agreed with me on something, they’d get really angry about that - as if I’d poisoned the purity of their ideology, by briefly aligning with it. They were incapable of believing I was ever intentionally funny about anything – ME! I’ve won bloody awards for being funny! – because: how could a thin woman, also be a funny one?

This feels like sh*t. Like you should apologise for yourself, or explain yourself, constantly. Like you have to work overtime to prove to people, the first time you meet them, and several times after that, that you’re not a completely awful person. Or a completely stupid one.

As if every article I wrote, had to be couched in a similar vibe. As if I was one of those dogs who instantly rolls over on its back, so you know it’s not a threat.

So that was exhausting.

Fighting with constant assumptions of / assertions of my stupidity, was also exhausting. Having thinness thrown in my face, over and over, as the defining idea of me, personally and professionally; having it make everything else I was, thought, did or wrote, immaterial.

Having people document following me round my local Sainsbury’s to see what I put in my basket, or, observe me - “skinny, but in an ugly, old way” – in the big Urban Outfitters on Oxford Circus, where they then tweeted fantasising about pushing me down the stairs.

For quite a long time, I was allowed to be nothing, NOTHING AT ALL, but thin.

Imagine what that does to your sense of your self? Imagine what that does, to the women looking on, watching, seeing how you’re treated?

It makes you feel smaller than your dress size, I’ll tell you that.

It’s pretty humiliating.

Had I had an eating disorder, which I didn’t, but… Had I: that chatter would have helped me in no way at all. That faintly obsessive focus: I mean, how could it, possibly?

I watched the latest season of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives (judge me, I don’t care); within it, one of the regular cast members, Layla, talked about the recurrence of her eating disorder, and how she had been abusing GLP-1s because of it. It was pretty heartbreaking, but one of the things which really struck me, was her talking about the hit of validation she felt, every time an online commenter said something like:

“You’re too thin!

Or
“Eat something!”

Her behaviour was, she said, hugely reinforced by it. Because imagine being her, with that mindset, if commenters starting saying things like:

“Good to see you putting on weight!”

Seriously?

So, while I’m absolutely convinced some of the commentary around my body, was posted from a sense of concern – just as some of the commentary around Ariana Grande’s body, is – it would have been highly detrimental to me, had it been accurate in its assessment of my mental health.

Which it wasn’t.

On which, and to return to Ariana Grande: we have no idea what is going on with her, her health and her body. We really don’t.

I know we think we do. I know we’re quite sure of it, but…

OK, remember when we were equally sure we knew what was going on with the Princess of Wales, that time? When we’d watched her body avidly, and monitored her schedule, and come up with all kinds of very specific diagnoses, about her overall health, and her mental health? Then it turned out we were wrong; she’d got cancer, actually, which we found out because all that conjecture forced her to make a statement she might otherwise, not have done. Not then, or in that way, at least.

And then we were all really embarrassed and chastened and sorrowful and swore we’d do better, next time?

Guys!

I think this is next time.

As I said, it was only on starting this SubStack that I got the nerve to talk about my body again, for the first time in over 20 years.

I was so tentative and scared at first, but… as it turns out, it’s been bloody brilliant to do that.

You have been bloody brilliant.

Far from making it the Only Thing About Me, you’ve allowed this to become a space where I can be truly honest about it, more, than I ever have, without ever feeling reduced to it.

It’s also become a space where some of you, at least, have felt able to be honest about yours.

This has felt like, and continues to feel, like a massive privilege.

Honest discussion of your own body, is infinitely more helpful, useful and powerful, than loaded discussion of other women’s bodies, I’m sure of that.

And I can be honest about how proud I am of mine. I took these pics today cos I liked my outfit (the shorts are new season Aligne- (affiliate link - I love how they’re half Bermuda, half boxer going into the ring) and because I encourage all those who wish to get their damn abs out in public, to get their damn abs out in public.

My bod is certainly no longer the kind of skinny which makes strangers tell me I’m probably sick (and definitely not funny) online. Instead, it’s the kind of body which makes strangers on Instagram say things like OH MY GOD YOU LOVE YOURSELF SO MUCH IT’S QUITE BORING ACTUALLY then, unfollow me - which, is infinitely preferable.

Because guess what?
I DO QUITE LOVE MYSELF!

Shocking, I know.

Here’s what I’m currently doing, to maintain and further develop the kind of body which makes people think (accurately) that I love myself, then unfollow me on Instagram.

After the paywall, my exact training schedule, my diet, the apps that are REALLY helping me, the supplements I wouldn’t go without, and the things I don’t rate at all.

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This is a paid for post BUT the main chunk of it - the opinion bit - is free to read and sits on top of the paywall YOU’RE WELCOME

I have a theory about the poor response to Marie-France van Heel, wife of Andy Burnham, ref her arrival at Downing Street, which, mainly came from women, and was not terribly nice about her choice of dress, body, or general appearance.

First of all, of course, it’s nothing to do with her specifically - everything to do with women in general. I believe it’s a thing which happens every time a brand-new woman is suddenly, dramatically introduced to proceedings, one of whom we haven’t previously been aware.

When they just kinda land on us, almost as if from outer space.

Same as it is, when a new one suddenly turns up at the school gates in the midst of a term, or, starts working on reception at the exact point we thought we’d finally got our head round all the women in the company, or, becomes a regular in Pilates and has the good lycra and also seems to be semi pro at the practise and keeps taking our mat space, even though, technically, no one has mat spaces.

It’s as if we all go “F**KING GREAT! Just what we need. ANOTHER F**KING WOMAN! As if we haven’t got enough on our plates already, trying to feel ok about all the ones we already knew about.”

This, then, is what I think of as But I’m The Fourth Prettiest Girl In The Playground! syndrome. Sudden consciousness to Another F**king Woman necessitates a shake up in the existing Greater Hierarchy Or Women; you know - the one which obviously doesn’t really exist anywhere but in the darkest, least admirable, least feminist reaches of our collective imaginations, but which is, all the same, unfortunately, undeniably, definitely THERE.

Another F**king Woman can be terribly confronting, can’t she? Can send us all into frantic paroxysms of questioning our own really-very-shakeable sense of status – AKA our prettiness in the playground rating – because: has she, by dint of just, you know, arriving, displaced us? Has she knocked us down to Fifth Prettiest?

Is she better than us? Cleverer, more charismatic, hotter, funnier? Richer, better dressed, younger, or (arguably worse) older, but looks younger? Do men fancy her more than they fancy us? Is her house nicer? The whole system is f**ked in the time it takes her to walk up Downing Street for the first time in her new capacity as wife to the PM, so NOW WHAT?

Oh: I know, now what! We go straight into attack mode, of course! Attempt to dismantle the threat she poses our deepest sense of ourselves! And we do that by identifying and then trumpeting what we believe to be her physical flaws.

OMG she’s so X or Y! She really fancies herself even though she definitely shouldn’t! What’s she wearing? Why does she laugh like that? A bit of Botox wouldn’t go amiss, luv! OMG have you SEEN how much work she’s had done?

Et cetera.

We do this, even though Fourth Prettiest Girl In The Playground Syndrome isn’t even really about looks. Or: it isn’t only about looks. It’s about power and status. It’s just that, were women are concerned, looks is shorthand for all that.

We’ll rattle on like this for a bit, until we get used to her being around, until we realise she probably isn’t about to steal our husband, boyfriend, wife or whatever, until we realise, maybe she IS better at pilates than us, or, has a nicer house, or, now occupies the coveted position of Fourth Prettiest In The Playground, thus knocking us down to the ignominy of Fifth, but, it’s actually sort of OK. It doesn’t mean anything seismic. The hierarchy settles…

Until Another F**king Women shows up.

I know it well, because it kind of happened to me, when I first got a bit of writer profile, aged about 30. My byline pic started appearing pretty regularly in The Observer, and I could pretty much feel it – almost hear it, certainly read it, in the comments, and on the blogs – all those women readers, going: “F**k’s sake! Another f**king woman!”. And oh! How they focussed on what I looked like (*the failings of it) while ignoring the words I wrote. I called it: “Being seen, but not read.” And it always perplexed me because I thought I was so much better at writing, than I was, being looked at. That was the point of me, right? Professionally at least? The writing?

Apparently not.

It subsided over time, because , I think, there was kind of a general resigning to the idea I really wasn’t going to stop and go away (this being the only way I knew, know, have EVER known, to make money) plus, I didn’t steal any of the readers husbands or wives off them, so FINE.

Nonetheless, it was quite the shock.

Which it shouldn’t have been, because, while I’d LOVE to tell you, I’ve only ever been on the righteous receiving end of Fourth Prettiest Girl syndrome – so nice to be the poor, sad, brave victim, not the evil perp – of course, that wouldn’t be true. I’ve felt it! When some new writer chick suddenly gets the full force of the spotlight, the burgeoning profile (which always seems like it’s out of nowhere, and thus somehow, unfair; yet of course, it never is. It’s only ever foreshadowed by a lot of graft). When some staggeringly lovely new ingenue stumbles into the foreground, all eyes and legs and borrowed couture. When it turns out the new PM’s wife is platinum blonde (but like: breezily, carelessly so? See how she scrapes it back into a ponytail?) with a fondness for red lips and big hoops and a Victoria Beckham dress some people didn’t get, but only because they’re not as Fashion as she is (and deep down, they know that, know she wins out there).

It’s like a great disturbance in the force. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out: BUT I’M THE FOURTH PRETTIEST GIRL IN THE PLAYGROUND!

ME!

NOT HER!

Yeah.

We probs need to get a lid on that, eh?

Now. Fancy a little light shopping to cheer you up?

I had not heard of this brand,

After the pay wall, an insanely good pair of trousers, a perfect necklace, the trainers you will either obsess over or totally hate, a serum without which, I can no longer live (on discount) and the first great jacket of the new season.

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I’m unsure, honestly BUT nor am I happy leaving it, as it was originally published. I do not want to throw aspersions unfairly, and I apologise to Ashley James if that’s what I did.

Instead, I’ll skip straight to a skirmish with a troll who also happened to be my neighbour.

Because that definitely did happen like I think it did.

I became very involved in the 2018 Irish referendum on giving women access to abortion rights. I feel very passionately about abortion rights; I don’t believe society operates well unless it allows women access to that critical intervention, that point of power over their own biology AND I give you the United States, post-Roe, in evidence.

Abortion has always been one of the things for which I have gone into bat.

Being part of the movement to change things for Irish women, to get them this thing they’d been denied to that point, to rectify a situation which meant they’d been forced to either acquire the medical abortion pills in secret, and illegally, then take them, again in secret and illegally, without being able to seek medical back up should anything go wrong, for fear of prosecution OR they’d had to get to the mainland UK to do it, instead; a thing that would have, for example, saved the life of Savita Halappanavar who died after being admitted to hospital in Galway while miscarrying a baby she wanted, because that hospital would not intervene to save her life … That felt incredible. When the referendum passed, solidly in favour of granting abortion rights, on May 25, 2018, I cried. It was properly wonderful.

In the build-up to the vote, I wrote a lot about abortion rights. I wrote about my own experience of abortion - because it felt really important to do that. I had three, when I was young; and I had not a jot of pain or regret about them. No shame, either. Certainly no guilt. All I felt, all I have ever felt, about those abortions, was purest relief.

And that, then, is what I wrote.

This was controversial. Or actually – no, it wasn’t. It’s more just an account, a perspective, that’s pretty rarely heard. The vast majority of women, according to statistics, do not regret their abortions. They feel as I do: perfectly fine about them. But we don’t talk about that much. We tend to focus on the trauma, guilt, shame and pain of those who do regret theirs – which, of course, some do. Those stories will always trump mine in the broader narrative, because they are so much harsher, and stronger, so much more awful.

Which could make my version of events seem shocking, or aggressive somehow, or disrespectful, or offensive, relatively. I can see that. I don’t think it should. That was certainly not what I intended. I didn’t offer those stories up as arguments, or, The Only Way To Feel. I certainly never wanted them to diminish anyone else’s pain.

They were just true.

Also? I have since been told, by abortion rights advocates, that my writing genuinely helped. Reframing the conversation, or, at the very least, offering alternative, truthful perspectives… I ended up on a panel in Dublin, in advance of the referendum, and I joked and laughed about my abortions. Afterwards, Ailbhe Smyth, the academic and activist, told me it was really important that I kept that tone up. She said, it’d be the first time many Irish women had ever heard it, and it would help them.

And then, one young Irish woman who had had an abortion, and who had felt really conflicted about it, came up to me and told me, I was the first person who’d ever made her feel better about it.

So that’ll do.

That’ll really do.

I also heard, somewhat inevitably, from another woman - who told me I was not right in the head.

She – an anonymous account with a flower for a profile pic and a name which called her “Mother” something or other - found me on Twitter (it was still called Twitter at that point), and yeah. That, then, was how she greeted me. That was how she went in.

“You’re not right in the head @pollyvernon.”

Now, I will hear arguments against abortion rights, any damn day. I respect them, when truthfully held, and courteously expressed; when they’re offered without personal attack, and judgement. (I like hearing them. I always like testing out my own beliefs - especially the strongest and longest held ones. That’s the only way to make sure I still believe them.)

HOWEVER

“You’re not right in the head” is not a courteously expressed unpersonal unjudgemental expression of a truthfully held view, is it now?

We engaged a bit, she @’d Grazia, who had run many of my articles, presumably in the hope of getting me fired, neither of us got anywhere, and I eventually got bored, and muted her.

I’d have thought no more about it – what she’d said wasn’t awful, after all, just a bit rude. I’ve had far worse – EXCEPT THAT a neighbour told me that Internet troll woman, was also a neighbour.

A neighbour who had, furthermore, held forth about my vileness at great, judgemental, righteous length, on her (public) Instagram feed, a feed which I could check out (on account of its public nature), which was how I realised it was also speckled with Selfies.

And so I came to know two facts: fact one, this particular troll lived, not in America, as you generally assume with trolls, but barely two streets away from me, was almost certainly cognisant of that fact, which is part of what had stoked her fury, that warped sense of some ownership of me, this chick she’d spotted in the queue for Sainsbury’s and so forth, and fact two: I now knew exactly what she looked like, so, would recognise her, when our paths crossed, which, given the geographical proximity of our homes, they were likely to.

All I had to do, was wait.

It took about six months.

But, oh! It happened.

There I was, one day, sitting in my local café, writing away on my laptop, when, in shewalked - with a man I knew to be her husband, from her Instagram gushing re, him.

Oh, goodie.

They sat at a table, a little apart from me, and whispered. She didn’t know I knew who she was, of course. She thought she still wore that coward’s cloak of anonymity.

She did not.

I kept pretending to write. Allowed her to think I was oblivious. But HOLY F**K I was consumed with fury. Proper red misting it.

I do that. I am a mild mannered janitor in most scenarios, but cross me? The Hulk rises up within me. And that woman? Sitting so smug and righteous in her illusion of anonymity? That woman who’d observed me and judged me and watched me silently as I moved around my neighbourhood, my HOME?

The urge to have it out with her was like a tide sweeping over me. My fingers itched and blood pounded in my ears.

I decided to go to the loo and think about what to do. Only problem was, The Woman and her husband were seated on a table past which, I had to walk, to get to there.

I stand up. I am actually shaking with rage. I walk towards them. They go quiet as I approach, so I know… I F**KING KNOW… they’ve been talking about me, still so very sure I had no idea.

I draw level with them.

I cannot stop myself.

I turn, and I look right at her.

“Do you know who I am?” I say.

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So FIRST - you lot know I am in no sense anti GLP-1s.

I have seen the difference they’re making to people, to their relationships with their bodies, and with the rest of the world, with my own bloody eyes, and I have heard (often, from YOU) many other stories, similar, or incredibly different, all of which - the vast majority, anyway - serve as testament to a drug which has vastly improved people’s health, mental health, confidence and so on.

I was super wary - two or so years ago, when people I knew first started taking them - but now?

I’m mainly just impressed.

But this is not to suggest there are no issues with them. There are. When a drug is taken up with the passion and alacrity of this one (8.25 million UK adults have taken, are taking, or are considering taking them; globally the market is projected at being worth over $190 bn by 2035), those issues are going to come at us, thick and fast.

And it wouldn’t be fair or right of me, to write about them as much as I do, without also acknowledging and investigating the issues.

GLP-1 related hair loss came up (a great deal) when I interviewed leading trichologist Anabel Kingsley about how to help and prevent hair loss more generally; and while plastic surgeon Dr Apul Parikh was working his age-reversal magic on my hands a few months back (I really didn’t think you could do what he’s done to my mitts! Bloody brilliant) the conversation turned to the havoc these drugs can wreak on your face.

It is an area in which Dr Apul has become increasingly involved, as he’s been inundated with clients who - having FINALLY got the bodies they’d longed for, for years and years - find their faces have crumpled, dropped, creped and dulled terribly, in that process.

I arrange to swing by his airy offices in Victoria, and talk to him about it, at length.

He is a gentle, smiling man, with an excellent way with a needle, and immense compassion for his clients.

Right, I say; I’d sort of thought perhaps “O Face” (we seem to still be calling it this - its named after the OG skinny jab, Ozempic - even though everyone I know is on Mounjaro these days, but fine) was apocryphal, another way to make people feel shame about taking GLP-1s, because it’s “cheating” and they’re “vain”, or some such morality tale-ish nonsense… But it’s not?

“No.”

And it’s not just about a sudden, general drop in fat, making you look more gaunt?

“No.”

So what is going on?

“There’s a systemic thing, right, where these drugs cause a thinning of the bones, and a reduction in muscle mass.”
All over the body?

“Yes.”

According to all available research, these are both consequences of dramatic, rapid weight loss. The drugs themselves don’t target your bones or muscle mass, but the escalated process of weight loss just does diminish both. A dramatically reduced appetite means that, unless you are ferocious about your diet, the nutrients you require to support both your bones and muscles, are almost certainly not going to be there in necessary abundance any more (my mind turns, at this point, to the friend who recently told me that while she was on GLP-1s, her appetite was so reduced she could subsist on one KitKat Chunky a day, and so: that’s what she ate). As you lose weight, your body is by definition putting less mechanical stress on your skeleton because there’s less of it to do so; so, unless you correct this with strength training, your bones can thin and your muscles, melt away. Weight loss can also diminish oestrogen levels which are responsible for bone density, as well as so much else. This is because fat tissue – adipose tissue – produces its own supply of oestrogen.

So – I say to Dr Apul – if all that’s happening everywhere in the body, it’s going to be happening in the face, too? Loss of muscle mass, and loss of bone?

“Yes. On top of which, a lot of GLP-1 patients – this is a generalisation, BUT… A lot of them, fit into the 40s, 50s, 60s age demographic, so they’re going into perimenopause or menopause, and losing oestrogen which is going to further impact bone density.”
And muscle mass?
“AND muscle mass.”

Double whammy.

“So if we look at the different layers of the skin: first, it [GLP-1 use] causes a real decrease in collagen. Which again ties in with, menopause, perimenopause. Unfortunately. You look at how it’s all trending along, in your 20s…” he raises a palm high, to indicate MUCHO COLLAGEN!, “then, it starts coming down slowly…” that palm gently inclines downwards, “slowly, slowly, then, 40s, 50s, it really falls off.” His palm dives suddenly downwards.

“So you’ve got collagen issues anyway. This stuff, makes the collagen decrease even more pronounced. So that means skin quality decreases instantly, as soon as you start taking the jab.”

This means you might notice a dulling in your skin, an enlarging of pores, that sort of thing.

This is the impact GLP-1s have on the most superficial layer of your face.

“Then, going to the next layer, that’s where you have your fat pads.”
Right. So this is what I assumed we meant, when we talk about “O face”.

“Of course! It’s reducing fat all over the body and the face. But now, when you have a lack of skin collagen, and the quality decreases, and then you lose facial fat, which is supportive, so it becomes saggy. And you’re looking more saggy.”
Yeesh.

“Then, you go a step deeper again - and it’s muscle.”
Which you’re losing in your face, as everywhere… Although presumably, you can’t remedy faces with strength training, as you can the muscles in your body?

“No. And when you lose muscle density in your face, you lose the support of the muscle…”
Which keeps it UP.

“Right. And then beneath that, you’re losing bone density in the cheekbones, the jawline, and the chin, which is the scaffolding of the face.”

So you’re losing scaffolding - which also keeps it UP?
“Exactly.”
That seems really cruel.

“It is. Obesity is a very emotive thing, for a lot of patients, they’ve often struggled their whole lives with it, right? And I get a lot of people, coming in and saying: ‘Apul, I’m really happy for the first time - from here” below their necks “down. I can fit into the clothes I really wanted to! But from here” neck up “I’ve aged at least 10 years.’ It’s devastating. One of the ladies, she came in and said, ‘Apul - no one has said: You look really good. I was just hoping someone would say that to me.’ She’d lost about 15kg.”

But no one had?
“No one!”

I should perhaps say, at this point, that not everyone is facially ravaged by GLP-1 use. And some people just don’t care, even if they are. Losing weight is the point. Dr Apul, by definition, is going to see those people who are both very affected by it, whose faces do show the impact badly - and who are concerned enough to seek aesthetic intervention.

But if you are also one of those people - there are things that can be done, to fix it. Dr Apul has been working up protocols for the last year or so, ever since he realised this was a Thing - one which was only going to get bigger, as time went on and GLP-1 uptake intensified.

So: what do we do?

After the paywall: everything Dr Apul does to fix his patients’ O faces.

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About 15 years ago, I wrote a piece for Vogue about the stirrings of a new, commercial enterprise, one which tapped into the concerns and lifestyles of a demographic my editor named “the worried well”.

I got a blood test for it, at a newly opened, private, non-specific health-type centre; I got an all-over body-scan, somewhere else. I can’t remember any of the results, which leads me to believe they weren’t that special either way, but I can remember feeling there was something definitely a smidge exploitative at play here. I could see how a cycle of concern might be established when you start making the ostensibly healthy, or at the very least: the not-yet-obviously-ill, think about constantly monitoring their health.

You dig a little, it all seems ok - but what if you dig a little deeper?

And what if it was all ok six months ago, but, who knows what’s going on now?

Et cetera.

Fast forward a decade and a half and BAM! The entire world is at it. The slightly undermining uncool tone of “the worried well” has been substituted, lexicon-wise, for the infinitely more flattering concept of “wellness”, and more recently “longevity”; and we’re now in a space where not going in for That Kind of Thing, is tantamount to asking for Alzheimer’s.

Wellness is basically a particularly money-hungry and exploitative religious sect. It promises you, if not eternal life, then certainly: a massively enhanced, longer life, during which you will look hotter and feel better and if you don’t, you’ll feel awful and look worse and by the way? The parameters on what it involves are morphing and changing on a panic-inducing day-by-day basis and:

Are we still supposed to be doing HIIT and taking electrolytes and how am I physically supposed to fit this much protein into my body every day cos I only have the one, and why is my little finger twitching like that, is that too much magnesium - or not enough, and are we still eating clean, and wiping snail mucin on our chops and what’s my biological age tho and OH MY GOD WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU AREN’T LIFTING HEAVY TO THE POINT OF FAILURE you are definitely going to die soon…!

Has anything been so incredibly good at heightening our fear, and combining it with our competitive smugness, constantly moving the goal posts, and then charging us for it?

EVER?

I’m not sure.

Stories of wellness’ darker reaches multiply. This post from Robin Levine Shobin about a host of beautiful, accomplished, WELL (though actually non existent) 57 year old women, built with AI, and designed to bother your algorithm into obsessing over an allegedly miraculous but basically unproven substance called Amazon NMN (gotta be honest, I’m not sure I personally would have been drawn to an allegedly miracle product if it were Amazon branded…) went viral just this week.

Two months ago, Hannah Murray, former actress, star of Skins and Game Of Thrones, published an extraordinary memoir about how, nine years earlier, aged 27, she’d been sectioned on a mental health unit, after having been sucked into a wellness and spiritual cult, by a “healer” called Grace. This cult had taken thousands of pounds from Murray, and convince her that she was “the saviour of the planet”.

(Interestingly, Murray has said she thought her being part of “the Harry Potter generation” had somewhat primed her for indoctrination by cult. “That can’t be overstated,” Murray said. “This book that was so popular for so many people my age, and the most appealing thing was the idea that you might discover this whole magical world, just under the surface of our world.”)

Slightly more cheerfully, a mate of mine told me about having a stand-up fight with a self-styled expert at a longevity event, a woman who claimed she’d reversed her own menopause. "She met us at the door with a fake smile and a QR code,”my mate said, via which, she attempted to take £135 from all attendees, on the promise she could teach them, too, to reverse their menopause.

“I was not having it,” explained my mate - and indeed, she didn’t.

AT THE SAME TIME…

Some of it does works

It does!

Some of what we bundle up in that overarching umbrella of “Wellness”, is actually decent medicine. It’s a development in understanding – particularly of women’s bodies – which genuinely does the stuff it is supposed to do.

Which makes us feel better, function better; which improves our chances of living well, and looking well, for longer.

But: HOW THE HELL TO KNOW BETWEEN THE EXPLOITATIVE BULLSH*T, and the legit?

There are some things by which, I swear. Things I wouldn’t do without. Some of them are expensive. Most of them are not. Some of them are free. None of them are a rip-off and they all build to make me feel generally more alright than I would do, otherwise.

Call it “wellness” if you like.

I call it “feeling nice”.

First,

1. swear to me, right now, that you will never again

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First, I want to ask you all to be incredibly gentle in response to this piece. I know you will be, but like: extra gentle? L is in a heartbreaking, painful and intensely difficult position - and she’s still very much in it.

She’s trusted me with her story, and now, I’m trusting you lot with it. I asked her if she wanted me to turn the comments off, but she said no.

And I know you are historically very compassionate in your comments. It’s one of the things I love most about you, and this dynamic we’ve created between us. But… just a reminder, go as easy as you have ever gone. This is a strong story, and it’s an as-yet unfinished one. L needs all our support.

THANK YOU.

Though actually - I already know you’ve got her back.

OK.

So.

L got in touch with me after I published this piece, asking if GLP1s are turning women into “cool girls”. IE not merely women who eat less, but women who are, in general, less chaotic and hot messy, more contained, more measured; less at the mercy of their stronger, and not-entirely-helpful, whims.

Some of them - us - are reporting that we are.

There’s some decent science on why this might be happening, science which also suggests these effects are more pronounced again, when people take the freshly approved Wegovy pill, as opposed to traditional jabs.

“I think this might apply to me,” L messaged. “Wow.”

She went on to explain that, she’d felt stuck in a truly difficult situation for years – decades – one which overwhelmed her, broke her heart, gave her hope, then took it away again, in turns.

Previously, she’d sort of muddled on, hoping things might improve, but not feeling able to do anything herself about it…

UNTIL she started taking Mounjaro.

And now?

“I’ve suddenly got this ability to see things at a remove, and - try and make myself the main character in my own life, something I’d not had before,” she explained. “I’d never associated this with GLP1s…” L’s been on Mounjaro for the last eight months, she’s lost around two stone. “…I thought it was an accumulation of last straws. And yet - it kind of makes sense [that it IS Mounjaro].”

Would you want to tell me about it, I asked her.

She agreed.

L and I meet, a few days later, in a quiet caff - where she tells me everything.

L is mid -forties, very chic, very clever, contained. Quizzical. Really not at all ordinary. You’d like her immediately. I did. And she looks like a naturally slim woman to me, long-term slender.

OK, I say to L, once we’ve settled. Why did you contact me? I mean, I’m delighted that you did… But why?

“It was a bit of a whim, really. I’d read your Cool Girl thing. And it spoke to me. How weight loss drugs are changing people’s brains. And the women you talked about… Their situations are very different to mine, but that sense that they had a sort of… hold on themselves? That story about your friend who was having an affair, but the drugs gave her a certain amount of detachment? How she’d always needed him to want her, but then…”

She took the jab, and didn’t, any more… Six years of infidelity, suddenly ended.

“Yeah. That really spoke to me. That feeling of suddenly being detached from it. Because I’ve reached this point where… It’s as if something coalesced in me, so I knew something needed to change - rather than wishing it would.”

L, you see, is married to an alcoholic.

“We met in 2008, married in 2012. We’ve been together for 18 years.”

How did they meet?
“Online, but this was pre-app. My Single Friend. It was actually still a bit embarrassing to have met online, then.”

She liked him, immediately. “It was easy and nice. There was no game playing.”

It took her around six months to realise he had a problem with booze.

She understood this, through a sort of gentle accumulation of awareness. Gifted bottles of booze were drained, without explanation, in mere days - that kind of thing. But:

“I was in my mid- to late- twenties; everyone was drinking too much. I don’t think I fully understood what it really was - what it was going to mean. He didn't drink all the time. He was never abusive or violent. The times he and I drank together, we had a nice time. The times we didn’t drink together, we had a nice time. Things were good.”

And anyway, L was in love.

Can we talk about your body, your weight? It’s part of the story, after all.

“Yeah. I’d been big since my university years. I think I was probably about 16 stone when we met.”

Considerably bigger than she is now.

I’d assumed her partner must have either not cared, or actively liked her shape, when they met, but:

“And… oh, he isn’t going to come off well, here, but… He has always let it be known he’d like it if I were thinner.”

Ah.

“Yeah. I think, when we first met, he really liked me, but I don’t think he thought WOW. But we were having lots of sex, so I assumed he was attracted to me. Now, I think that was the excitement of wanting to have sex, rather than the sense of, he actually really found me attractive.”

Based on this understanding, L struck a deal with her then-boyfriend, now-husband: his drinking, for her losing weight.

L had realised he’d acquired the habit of drinking on his lunch break from work; “going to the pub, doing a crossword, drinking a glass of wine…”

So, she said:

“‘If you stop drinking a glass of wine at lunchtime, I’ll go to Weight Watchers.’”

Right so: you could raise the issue of him drinking, with him?

“Oh, yes.”

She lost a lot of weight, first on Weight Watchers, then on a super restrictive, ultimately unsustainable low carb diet. By the time they got married, in 2012, L was a size 12.

And things were good.

“We enjoyed each other’s company. We’ve got the same sense of humour, we play board games, we go to exhibitions, the theatre, day trips. We have a really good time, when times are good… “

Do you have kids?

“No. We tried. It didn’t happen. I was OK with that.”

For years, L’s husband just about seemed to have a lid on his drinking. “He was always very functional. If I was out for the evening, he would drink on his own, at home, and be in bed by the time I got back. There were walls, between what he did in front of me [and what he did on his own].”

Does L think she was ignoring the problem, a bit?

“Oh, I’m sure. And I’m sure I was enabling it, as well. I like to have a drink. Yeah, we had fun together. That’s part of what our relationship was. I’m not blameless in this situation.”

But they got by – more than got by – for some years.

Then, in 2020, Covid struck, lockdown was enforced, and everything suddenly got much, much worse.

After the paywall, L’s husband’s drinking spirals out of control. She gets him to rehab, Alcoholics Anonymous, she gets him on experimental ketamine therapy trials, anything that’ll help… Nothing does. Until she starts taking the weight loss jab.

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Or just - couldn't be a**ed. Didn't want it.

For the last 10 days or so, I’ve been down to two meals a day, max, eggs at about 11, something salad-y plus protein at about six, coffee, water, nothing more.

Which means I’ve dropped about (wild guess, I do not own scales) five pounds, two kilos, in that time, which, because I’m slight, looks like more. It tips me into the realm of a bit skinny again.

And, AARGH! Cos it’s SO HARD not to be pleased! Just a little. Which is insane. I’m not lying when I tell you I love being bigger, stronger, more muscular and more hench. I DO. I’m not lying when I tell you, skinny DOES NOT taste as good as being strong feels. IT DOESN’T. Nowhere near.

Or: how I love catching sight of my reflection in a shop window and seeing how chunky my biceps are, now that I strength train two or three times a week, take creatine, eat protein. How springy and potent my thighs look (in ye olde days, when I was jolly thin indeed, I always puzzled over why I didn’t entirely love my v v stem-like skinny legs in shorts and short skirts. They were thin, right? That was all that mattered! Now, I understand: no. It isn’t. They look infinitely better, and hemlines look much better against them, with a little heft and definition). How jutty-outty my formerly tiny and insignificant bum is.

I walked behind a woman in the street just now (shortly after observing one of my neighbours being arrested. My endz - never knowingly dull) and she was really slim. My kind of slim, from ye olden days probably, though she was taller, and more willowy. And she looked great. No shade on her at all. BUT I found I did not wish for one moment that I was still that skinny too. This body - the one I work on, for gleefully, joyfully, in a studio or boxing gym, for six or seven hours every week (plus 10,000 incidental steps a day), the one, for which I sweat, the one for which I eat chicken and eggs and salmon and veg and seeds and whole fats and whole grains and berries - it suits me better.

AND YET, when I was stepping out of MY AMAZING NEW SHOWER this morning, caught sight of my naked self in the (Space Station de-misting) new mirror, and clocked the sudden, heat-induced diminishment of my abdomen and waist… It was hard not to be thrilled.

Actually, it wasn’t “hard”.

It was impossible.

I was.

Just like I have always been - from my teens onwards - when, in the deepest darkest midst of a vomiting bug, some small part of me has always chipped into the interior monologue of OH GOD OH GOD THIS IS SO AWFUL WHEN WILL IT STOP? with: yeah, but - when it does, you’ll be SO SKINNY.

That’s how deep-rooted the desire to just be a bit thinner is, eh?

Ah well.

Mine is also countermanded now by some very grown up, informed, and well adjusted love of muscle. I know I won’t grieve the super slimness when the weather breaks, I eat normally again, and those pounds re-accumulate. Mainly because I know I won’t grow - or even maintain - these damn glutes, without a decent amount of food in me.

The Ann Widdecombe thing is so unrelentingly grim. The police are asking that people do not speculate about it, so I shan’t; but I am uncomfortable with some of the responses I’m seeing.

That slight energy of: “hey ho, couldn't have happened to a nicer bigot LOL…”

The woman was slain in her own home. You’re either ok with that, or you’re not.

I am not.

I don’t think I agreed with a single thing Ann Widdecombe ever said, or stood for. Certainly not, anything important. Abortion rights (big fan, she was staunchly opposed). Gay rights (as before). Fundamental women’s rights (she quit the Church of England for Catholicism when the C of E started ordaining women priests. I don’t believe in God - but nor do I believe women shouldn’t be allowed to do stuff deemed important by those who do). Brexit. None of it.

But I also know that, a world in which someone gets murdered possibly because of their opinions (we don’t yet know if that is the case, if the anti-terrorism police are now in charge of the investigation, that might be because the suspect had connections with possible acts of terrorism not connected to the murder of Widdecombe), OR if someone gets murdered and the response is: she had it coming… That is a sh*tter world, than one in which they continue to live unmurdered, to espouse views you or I may find deeply unpleasant, or profoundly distasteful, or out and out abhorrent – or actively dangerous, even.

Because it is so much more dangerous to think it’s kind of ok, really, if a person gets killed on account of their ideas and politics - even, that their slaying doesn’t matter quite as much as it would, had their ideas and politics aligned with yours.

If someone is murdered, they are murdered. How much that matters, cannot be contingent on what you or I thought of them. If it is… It’s only a matter of time before someone else thinks our perspectives, politics, ideologies, beliefs, make our killing less important, more justified, than that of someone else.

I don’t actually mind that Harry, Meghan, and the kids, met with Charles and Camilla, in the end. I think a genuine rapprochement, one orchestrated for reasons of love and in the hope of healing some damage, rather than one orchestrated for reasons of content, optics, and re-energising a flagging attempt to Take America, is always an admirable end goal. I’ve burned enough bridges and cut out enough frenemies to know how exhausting estrangements are. They take so much effort! Harry and Meghan strike me as a little too work-shy, for that level of effort.

And as the Palace briefed: “Blood is blood”. God, I love it when the British monarchy goes all Game of Thrones!

I do also love that Charles managed to keep it on lockdown. Nip any hopes (cough) anyone (cough) might have had for leveraging it as a publicity campaign/ sales opportunity.

And hell, let’s give the daft ginger princeling a break, after the court case humiliation.

I guess the next time we’ll see Harry in the news, will be when the courts rule on the legal costs on that case - which of course, he and the other plaintiffs, lost. Apparently, Associated Newspapers – publishing group for The Mail – who saw all those charges of illegal information gathering against them thrown out, are going “for the jugular” on costs which total an estimated £50 million. Harry, Elton John and David Furnish, Elizabeth Hurley, Baroness Lawrence, Sadie Frost and the former politician Simon Hughes, are now liable for that.

I can’t imagine Harry and Doreen Lawrence’s scorching joint statement, the one which questioned the integrity of Judge Nicklin, issued in the wake of his ruling, will do them any favours in terms of leniency. (According to a source close to Harry etc, one quoted in The Times: “This was very stupid and unnecessary, especially given Judge Nicklin still has a huge amount of power over what happens with costs. Releasing that statement was not a decision that the entire team was on board with.”)

Daft ginger princeling.

I was fascinated to learn about who will end up paying, how much, and how. Clearly, some of these litigants have much more money than others, will they all be expected to chip in their fair share? Is that fair?

Well, apparently, according to

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I should perhaps start by telling you that I have a singular point of insecurity. It is terrible and aching and I often feel poleaxed in its hold over me. No exaggeration. I believe it exposes me as inferior and incapable. I think it stands between me, and proper, accomplished adulthood.

Not truly finessed adulthood, I should say.

More: the entry level and basic kind.

It is about the way my home looks. Which is just not terribly nice. Unfinished and messy - actively ugly, in some respects. I think it should be better.

I read the work and gaze at the accompanying pics of homes created by the brilliant and , and , and I feel kind of - fraudulent. All these extraordinary, bold, accomplished, tasteful (but not boringly) house people, who know what they like and how to make it happen, who roll up their sleeves and get stuck in, rip sh*t (like WALLS) out, paint and drape and transform, reimagine, re-spark!

I look at my home, and I feel overwhelmed by all it isn’t. Because I can clearly see what it should be. It’s not subtle about its potential. It’s just so very f**king unrealised.

Except that, as of 9.30pm last night, part of it is.

Part of it, is suddenly quite beautiful.

And I can’t believe how good that feels.

Mr Polly and I moved into this flat, 12 years ago. It’s ex council; two bedrooms, both on the basement floor, and a bathroom, also on that floor; then, one big living space up the stairs, on the ground floor, a kitchen and a living room knocked into one, pretty glorious, airy space. You get to a super sweet garden, out the backdoor on that floor, and down a little iron fire escape.

I’d wanted it immediately I saw the upstairs. There’s a park opposite us at the front, our back garden, backs onto someone else’s back garden, so nothing blocks light. It pours in, from both directions. There’s something easy and gentle and beach holiday home feeling about all that light, all that lightness.

Mr Polly wanted it immediately, for the garden.

We were at the end of a chain that had fallen apart, we had the deposit ready to go, having already sold our last flat, we made about five other families super-happy in restoring the chain; it was a good, healthy house-buying experience.

Mr Polly, who is that way inclined, did our previous flat up, from scratch, and he did it well. He’d had the time and the inclination. After he finished, we’d sold it, and rented somewhere else in the interlude, before buying this one.

I just assumed he’d do the same thing again, to this flat.

But he didn’t.

We never actually had that conversation. I just hung around waiting for the great reno to start, for the layers of ugly and dull and boring and uninspired to be peeled off this flat - the meh radiators, the crappy roll-down blinds on all the windows, the FOUL FOUL BATHROOM et cetera - and the potential beauty which lay beneath them, to be revealed.

But he had no idea.

Oh, he did the kitchen about four years in, and he did it well. Drawer fronts from Ikea. A new sink, new work tops, yadda ya. A deep pink on the surrounding walls.

But then he stalled.

While I continued to do nothing at all.

Oh, and then he put good slatted blinds up, on the upstairs front windows - but we never got around to doing the rest.

When we reached our ten year anniversary of living in this flat, two years ago, I had a Moment.

“You’re never going to do this, are you?” I asked Mr Polly.

“I mean… one day, maybe?” he said.

But I wanted it quicker than one day, and I also realised I had absolutely no right to be arsey about that, because I wasn't going to do it, either.

For a little while, I wondered if I could just not care. I’m not the sort to fall in with society’s expectations of me, after all. I thought I could joodge my ugly, messy, incoherent, unaesthetically pleasing living conditions, into an ideological statement, in the way I do with, me not being able to cook.

Do not impose your unrealistic house beauty standards on me – I will not endure them! I am bigger and better than that, with more serious things to do, with my time and money!

But - I couldn't. Because the fact was, I cared. I cared like I care about my clothes, only I know how to dress, so that’s fine.

Caring about how not good your house looks, and also feeling stuck in your inability to change that, is rubbish.

And I cared because I know how much your environment impacts your mood. And I wanted a pretty house. A house I could - not show off! Ugh. No. Gross, but… Not be embarrassed by.

Last year, when I finished the main thrust of publicising my new book, I decided I was going to Do Something About My Flat. I figured, I could write a book, surely I could fix a bit of my house?

SURELY?

By the way – I wasn’t planning on doing it myself. I was very much planning on hiring someone to Do It For Me.

I settled on the bathroom, because it was the most completely, top-to-toe minging part, with absolutely nothing to recommend it.

Oh, you think I’m exaggerating?

Behold!

Some Befores!

I can’t explain it. There had been a flood at some point, and Mr P had half repaired it, ripped some stuff out, put a random shelf in, but…

Yeah.

No.

Really: no.

I started saying it, saying that I was going to do up my bathroom, because I thought: accountability!

Also, other people get excited about this sh*t. I get nervous, they get giddy.

Then, a friend recommended a builder.

OK. OK.

Another friend said he’d done some work for them, really well.

I sat on his number for six months.

Then… Who knows why you get tipped into action in the end, even with terrifying things?

Maybe it was because Mr Polly found a floor tile of which he was quite enamoured. I liked them too. They were sort of a bit Moroccan, but not absurdly so. He ordered samples.

Or maybe it was because I was sent some fresh new towels to test.

Either way, I messaged Rosen the builder.

(“Do not be put off by him having the Ghostface Scream mask as his WhatsApp profile pic,” the recommending mate said. “I’ve told him to change it, but I think he likes it.”)

I assumed he wouldn’t be available instantly – the good ones never are, I’d heard – but he was. He came. He gave the quote. 12 days to strip everything out, install underfloor heating (UNDERFLOOR HEATING!), tile it, move the loo a foot over, change the radiator for something lovely, change the bath and install a really decent shower system, make it infinitely better.

He had a load of questions, which we fielded, and which sort of indicated he knew what he was doing. He wanted £6.9 k for it, which – I knew from a little light Googling - was about right.

He said he could start in a few weeks, which didn’t tally with the whole, if they’re good, you’ll have to advance book by months thesis, but f**k it! We were excited by now. It began to feel possible. We were In. We had momentum and it would have been dangerous to stop. We hired him and started talking details.

Everyone said “Do a Pinterest”, and just as I was about to sign up, it transpired Mr Polly had a secret one on the go, already.

I KNOW!

I looked at it. I wasn't entirely opposed to a lot of his ideas. Mr Polly is not without taste - though he, like so many men, does slightly tend toward an aesthetic I’d call Space Station ft American Psycho, while I (I discovered) tend towards Maine Beach BEACH Cottage. But we work quite well together, he and I, we’re alright on the compromising and… Well. Look at the before pics. We could only improve.

We started ordering stuff. A bath with feet which also fitted into the corner. Glorious shower fittings. Metro tiles with a crackled finish for the walls (basic but SO PRETTY). UNDERFLOOR HEATING! A lovely radiator, with towel drying potential.

It started turning up in endless boxes which filled the hallway.

OH MY GOD.

Rosen and his mate Michael turned up and started on the last day of that last heat wave. I got in tea and milk and sugar special, but they didn't want a thing. I kept asking. They were fine.

By the end of day one, they’d ripped everything out. There was a concrete hole where the ugliest bathroom in the land had stood - and it was a vast improvement.

We had a loo at night, when they left, but not during the day… I mean, it was there, but I’m not sure I could have evicted them every time I needed it, so I took to touring the local cafes for peeing purposes.

I’m largely WFH, but they were never so disruptive I couldn’t crack on. There was one, incredibly noisy day – maybe day four? – when I decamped to Gail’s, but otherwise, it was fine.

I became fantastically proficient at strip washing at the kitchen sink. I retired to my pilates studio, used their shower to wash my hair once, was due to get it done at the salon anyway, which covered the next wash, and, by the time I needed to wash it again, day nine or so into the reno, Rosen said I was allowed to use the new shower in the new bath, anyway.

By day five, when a lot of the floor tiles were down, and some of the wall tiles… I got my first inkling that this was actually going to be the most beautiful bathroom of all time.

I mean, of course it isn’t. But I think I feel about it, as brand new parents feel about their babies. Intellectually, they know theirs’ is not the most beautiful baby every to be born. Couldn’t possibly be. The odds are stacked high against that.

But in their hearts and their souls and to the tips of their toes? THEY KNOW IT TO BE TRUE.

That’s how I began to feel about my bathroom.

What’s that?

You want evidence?

You want pics?

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And so, the Duke of Sussex’s trip to the UK goes from tedious farce (they’re all coming! Kids and the Mrs too! Oh, they’re not. But THEY ARE! But they’re not etc), to irritating ineptitude (ref those Buck Palace rooms for his stay, which Harry was offered, didn't accept in time, then got cross about) to pitiful humiliation in court.

Yesterday, at exactly the same time Nigel Farage started acting up, Mr Justice Nicklin threw out every last one of Harry’s charges against Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail, alongside every last one of the charges brought alongside it by Elton John, Baroness Lawrence, Elizabeth Hurley and so on. The charges were about illegal gathering of information relating to stories on each of the claimants.

Harry and the others believe, with every fibre of their beings, and to the tune of nearly 40 million quid in legal costs, that their privacy had been violated in the gathering of info on them. But the judge needed proof - rather than, absolute, soul-gripping conviction - and there simply wasn't enough of that.

So Harry lost.

Given that this was supposed to be, I guess, the defining victory in his lifelong crusade against journalists and journalism, the seed of which was planted in the death of his mother, Diana… It’s gotta sting bad, no?

I think this might be It, you know. The end of that fight; and possibly the end of Harry as a significant player of any description.

He was on his uppers anyway. America seems to have fallen fully out of fascination with the Sussexes, whose relevancy was always entirely dependent on their closeness to the Royal Family. In the early stages of their relocation to California, they a) were still close enough to Brit Royalty for that to work, and b) seemed to be promising an imminent complete reinvention of themselves, a new way to be famous and a new way to be royal. But time passed, their estrangement meant they lost claim a) on the US’ imagination - and they’ve failed to deliver on claim b).

I’ve said it before but… They need new material, something other than THE ROYAL FAMILY IS AWFUL THEY DID US SO WRONG - and they don’t seem to have it.

This trip to the UK could have remedied that for them. Had they all come together, had they rebuilt some bridges with Charles, had they shot for magnanimity and familial love, over spite and rage and self pity and estrangement and ire… That could have reengaged America. Perhaps not the UK. I think we are mostly done there, aren’t we? But yeah, maybe the States! Made them interesting again, even given them a second wind on commercial viability, after Netflix and Spotify had forsaken them.

But apparently, Harry couldn't back down on that security issue - which for ages seemed so arbitrary to me - oh!

Until it didn’t.

Until it seemed so bloody obvious!

The official reason Harry back and forthed about bringing Meghan, Archie and Lilibet to London, where his children were due to meet their grandfather, the King, for the first time in four years - something the King was understandably very keen to facilitate - was because the Home Office would not offer him, and them, the round the clock, tax funded police protection he enjoyed until he and Meghan gave up their status as working Royals, and left the UK.

Harry challenged this decision in late 2023, in 2024, the Royal and VIP Executive Committee, RAVEC - made up of Home Office, Met Police, and Royal officials - reconfirmed that no, he could not have this privilege. At the end of last year, RAVEC announced that it was reviewing this decision, but as of most recent updates, that review has been paused.

The broad assumption has been that Harry, in that interminable back n forth on who was coming and who wasn't, was trying to manipulate the King into intervening with RAVEC, which would be an unconstitutional act on Charles’ behalf, and so: he didn’t.

Now - I have had a moment of insight, of clarity, into why it is, he’s acting so very bonko over the security thing. Why he always acts so very bonko, over the security thing.

Why it’s this epic sticking point, this hill, on which he seems entirely prepared to let his relationship with his father and brother, his kids’ relationships with their paternal relatives and their (crazy, but you know…) British heritage, die.

Why he apparently considered citing Taylor Swift’s security - boosted by RAVEC in the direct aftermath of her concert in Vienna being cancelled because of a terrorist threat - to expose a “double standard” on his own treatment.

It seemed so arbitrary and pernickety and easy to work round, to me… But then, I saw it.

It’s pretty f**king obvious honestly.

And it’s not even about the threat of terror attack.

It’s something more. Bigger. More terrifying to him. More overwhelming.

It’s all

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(SORRY, NO AUDIO ON THIS BECAUSE THE BUILDERS ARE IN BASHING THE BATHROOM ABOUT. I tried, five times already and it kept getting f**ked up. Forgive me!)

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An update on my mate H, whom, some of you may remember, ended up most unexpectedly naked, in bed - with a man.

H is 55, divorced yonks ago, with adult children. She had thought all THAT - men, love, sex, intrigue - “was done.”

With zero regrets: “I had a good old go.”

(She really did. One of the things that terrifies me most about our friendship, is the thought of all the stories H hasn't told me, will never tell me, simply because I didn’t think to ask. Periodically, she’ll just come out with lines, like: “We had my dad’s 70th there…” while waving at some building, as we walk passed it,“…There was a mariachi band. I slept with two of them.”)

ANYWAY. This started, when a former colleague, on whom H had always had a crush, got in touch; they had a daytime casual coffee, which somehow ended up with them rolling around naked on her bed.

Turns out, he’s always fancied H too!

HOORAH!

The change in her, has been wonderful to behold. She’s all lit up like a firework. Half terrified, half thrilled to bits. Her eyes, round like perpetually amazed moons. “I can’t believe he fancies me!” she keeps saying, though I forbade her from ever saying that, or anything like it, to him.

ANYWAY.

It’s on-going!

HOORAH!

Every time I see H, there’s some minor yet excellent teenage grade development. He’s texted 29 times in one day! She’s sensed he was cooling off, yet when I interrogate her about why she thought this - he clearly wasn’t! What does THIS emoji mean? Etc.

“It’s making me feel so vulnerable,” she says.

Of course it bloody is! I say. That’s what early stage relationships are. That’s why they’re so bloody brilliant. All that Not Knowing. OH MY GOD!

“He came round, and we didn’t have sex - but I think that’s OK,” she says. He works slightly off shifts; he’s still in the industry H was in, when they first met, so they tend to meet in the mornings, then he leaves, early afternoons.

“Actually, I think that’s better, sometimes.”

Fair enough, I say.

Then: why?

“Because… there’s no reason for me to feel used, or a little stung, when he leaves afterwards - but sometimes I do. Or - I almost do.”

I get that. I wish women weren't emotional about sex, but I also think, we just are. I grew up believing that was social conditioning, and we needed to shake ourselves out of it. And maybe it is. But it’s also true. It’s nothing to do with how much we do, or don’t like them, how cool we are in ourselves, how much we like sex, in and of itself. There’s just this extra layer of: “I don’t want to be used. I don’t want to be just this, to him, (even if, truthfully, he is just this, to me). “

But then:

“Sex is never just sex,” Esther Perel, the world’s greatest psychotherapist, told me once. She’s the single wisest person I think I have ever met - I’ve interviewed her, three times, most recently, just a month ago.

I am ridiculously lucky, I appreciate that.

Anyway:

“Even when you think it’s hit-and-run and it’s supposed to not mean anything,” Perel said, “the effort

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It’s been A Week. We’re FINALLY getting the bathroom done (we only moved in, like, 12 years ago) which is good but also, it’s just not there, any more. It’s an empty shell with a loo that can only be flushed by pouring a large jug of water down it, and not even that between 9 and 6 because the builders are in.

I’ve grown surprisingly adept at a strip wash in the kitchen, otherwise, I’m plotting my path round the neighbourhood caffs according to loo access. Two hours, a coffee and a pee here, etc. It’s all less, spend a penny, rather more, spend £6.50 in Gail’s because you feel obligated to buy cake.

Mr Polly has acquired a plaster bucket from the builders’ merchants opposite, and has rigged up a (cold) shower in the back garden, with a hose pipe and a blanket pinned to preserve his modesty.

The dog keeps going mental at the builders, then, relenting and wagging at them, then forgetting, and cycling back through the whole process, barking like they’re invading hoards, not trained operatives I’m paying moderately handsomely. They keep saying: “When will she like us?” and looking bereft. My best guess? 48 hours before they finish.

Anyway. In the midst of all this, and two days into the heatwave, I had a Zoom call with - the country’s leading AI ethicist.

I keep going on about how awful AI is, right? And how little interest I have in it, how crap it is at writing, but also? How bad it definitely is, for all of us, on so many levels… I bitch and I moan and I fearmonger, but the fact is, I have very little knowledge of it.

And while that can make for good rhetoric - heaven knows, anti-AI sentiment is a solid win on SubStack - it’s not good journalism.

Nor do I enjoy feeling as if AI is some humourless, tasteless, perilous societal iceberg toward which we are all cruising, mindlessly, and at some velocity.

So, when my old mate Verity messaged me with a link to this excellent post (turns out, AI has a cool problem, in that: it just isn’t, which should make you all feel better. I know it did, me), I proposed we have a little convo, during which, she try and educate me better in AI and even convince me, it might be useful to me.

I’ve known Verity for over a decade. We met in 2013, when she had just started working at Google - whose offices were opposite Grazia’s, at the time - having spent three years as a special advisor to former deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg. While she’d been in Westminster, she’d realised very few people in politics knew very much at all about tech. She didn’t really, either “oh, I was a bit tech-y”; so she decided to work in the tech industry, learn everything she could, then act as a sort of intermediary between - initially, government and tech, ultimately, tech, and all of us.

“I thought: somebody needs to be able to bridge these two worlds,”she tells me.

Because Harding had an outsider’s perspective, and because her background was government, because the concept of society, and greater good and so on, were integrated into her world view, she recognised quickly that there were big ethical and moral issues at play in tech, and that she was well-situated to raise them. She loved the experience of Google: “really juicy, really interesting, really cutting edge. It was amazing.'“

In 2016, she turned her focus to AI.

“I got to know Demis Hassabis, the founder of [AI lab] DeepMind, when Google acquired it. He came to give a talk to my team, showed us demos of the stuff they were working on. It was AI, programmed to play old Atari games. There’s this one called Breakthrough. It’s like a little rainbow brick wall, and you had to bash through it, by bouncing a thing around. And AI, if they left the programme on for long enough, AI did it with a move humans would never do. Sort of: burst through and then knock it all down from the top, instead of trying to do it from the bottom. I watched that, and I knew immediately: this is the future.”

You fell in love with it?

“Hmmmm. I saw, immediately, that this could make things a lot better – or a lot worse, depending on what we decide to do with it.”

Harding first went to work with Demis Hassabis at DeepMind, where she introduced an Ethics and Society unit (“I might be the first person at a tech firm to hire economists and philopshers… Demis really believes in that,”), she’d work with the White House on AI ethics in 2018, in 2022, she set up her own AI consultancy firm, Formation Advisory Ltd, and in 2024, she published her first book: AI Needs You: How we can change AI’s future and save our own.

Right, so, I say, when she joins me on Zoom (we’ve both got out cameras off because the heat is waving and we are wilting). First things first, by which I mean, self-important, self-serving, self-interested things, first:

Is AI coming for my job?

Is it just gonna casually rip the heart and life out of my LIFE, my passion, my raison d’être, and my capacity to earn money? And out of all creativity, and all creatives? Replace it with slick, soulless replications of what writers and musicians and filmmakers and artists do, and make money from; work which takes us hours and days and weeks and YEARS - but which it can do in mere seconds?

“No,” she says. “It’s not. It couldn’t.”

AI is, she says, a thing of: “Originality and endless, unbelievable possibility. But it’s the AI industry’s fault no one else sees it like that. I don’t think it had to be like this. I don’t think they [the industry] had to frighten people like this. The focus on AI replacing human creativity? That wasn’t a great shout.”

Where did that come from? And why? Is it because people in tech envy people in creative industries and seek to destroy us because we’re obviously having a nicer time and probably getting more sex?

Verity says she doesn’t think it’s that deep, it’s more like: “I just don’t think they thought about it. It’s a town where everyone’s in tech, talks tech, talks tech to each other and… No. I don’t think they thought about [how offensive and terrifying it might be to suggest machines might scrape the internet of other people’s work, steal it, repurpose and regurgitate it into versions of ever-decreasing merit, thereby devaluing everything we are and everything we do.] Oh, that’s a sweeping generalisation, of course it’s not true of everyone and every company… But no. I don’t think they saw that.”

Happily, Verity thinks - it doesn’t matter anyway. Because AI just can’t do what humans do in terms of art, nor will it ever get close.

“Music and writing and art are such big parts of my life, I have such admiration for people who make them. I’m a technologist, and I can truly say: no. It isn’t [coming for your job]. Only people who don’t really understand and respect [art] think it can. Think that AI can just… do it.”

Is that because they’re tasteless and wouldn't know good writing if slapped them round the face?

“Well…”

She believes AI will offer the opportunity to broaden our creative scope, without replacing us; like CGI in film has changed the parameters on what’s possible, but has ultimately, broadly, made cinema better. At the same time:

“Look. Uncreative people will always want to replace creative people, if they can. They always do. I’m not in that world, but I listen to The Rest Is Entertainment, and, you know: movie execs, that try and crush creativity…”
Story old as Hollywood.

“Yes. There are always people who want to do cost cutting. Though, by the way, it’s not clear to me at all if AI is going to be a cost cutter, because it’s really expensive. I’m sure it’ll get cheaper, but right now, it’s very, very expensive.”
So it’s not cheaper, necessarily, and it’s definitely not good enough to replace human creativity?

“Right. I mean, I wouldn’t read an AI book, I wouldn’t watch an AI film, and not out of some moral principle, but because I don’t care. I’m interested in what people think and write. I think lots of people will be like that.”

I’m inclined to agree. I think there may be a brief interlude of novelty value on AI produced work, but that’ll wane, like Tamagotchi. Humans will always win creativity. I believe that.

But what about the rest of our collective AI terror? What about the jobs market, and the mental health issues, and oh! The very concept of truth - on which, AI appears to have a remarkably slight grasp? (My dad once got it to write my biography. It was hilarious and plausible but so wrong. It got my university right. Literally nothing else.) What’s the broader picture on it?

Verity Harding thinks talking about AI as “the next industrial revolution” is neither useful, nor accurate.

She thinks its more like, the next stage in the bigger story of the internet, which started in the 70s, and only crept properly into our lives - really quite gently, even then - in the 90s, “changed again, with smartphones and apps. But it wasn’t really game changing, not for most of us.”

It wasn't, was it? It was a slow creep on changing our lives, and while, yeah; some of it has wound up being patently terrible for us, much of it, I’d respectfully posit, is either actively useful -or just sort of, fine.

“So - I think it’ll be more like that. Like… OK. Last night, my fan wasn’t working…” again, we’re in the midst of the heatwave here, “…a digital fan. So I took a picture of it, with ChatGPT and said, ‘Why isn’t this working? This is what’s happening, like, why isn’t it working?’ Instead of searching, looking up the model, downloading a PDF of the instructions, trying to find what it said in it… And it did it. It said: ‘It could be this, or this, or this…’”

Verity fixed her fan in minutes, and I can’t argue with that, as an excellent use of AI.

So, Verity reckons what we’re looking at right now, is rather more like how Google revolutionised our ability to search for things online. Until that point: “There were all these web pages, but no way to find them.” Google helped us with that. AI - she thinks - will make things easier again, it’ll take all that information, condense it into the most useful, serviceable format. “With the internet, we’ve got unimaginable amounts of data, but no human brain is capable of managing all that data. So now we’ve invented something capable of sifting all through that.”

On top of which, its potential in terms of medicine is blatantly incredible. I haven’t argued with that, at any point. As a diagnostic tool, as a tool that can process existing data and spot patterns which would have taken humans an eternity, it’ll

Save an awful lot of lives?

“I’m sure it will,” Verity says.

Right, so this is good. It’s not going to overwhelm us, it isn’t going to make me redundant, and it is going to save lives…

Is there anything in it which scares Verity? As someone who really knows it, gets it? Someone who’s seen it close up?

“Oh, yeah.”

Oh God. What?

Read more

I was captivated by this amazing article by Charlotte Cripps, which ran in The Mail last week. In it, Cripps talks about being transformed by Ozempic, and she’s categorically not talking about her body (though that has been transformed by Ozempic, Cripps lost three stone in 18 months).

But weight loss is truly not what her article is about. Her article is about how Cripps suddenly discovered, aged 48, and single for 12 years, that she’s now an imperious ice maiden, where men are concerned. A reverse Pick Me. A take it or leave it kind of a gal, even when presented with a very handsome, very sweet man, who is clearly into her. Where once Cripps would have been super keen and propelled head long into fantasies of What Might Be between her and Mr Whoever, overthinking every last emoji on every last text, she is now:

“An ice queen… Aloof and irresistible.”

Cripps discovered her new super powers while on holiday on a Greek island. There she was, enjoying her newly medically slenderised bod in a “skimpy yellow Melissa Odabash bikini” when a handsome man approached and asked if her young daughters - two of them, aged 10 and eight - would like to hang out with his similarly aged children.

Over the course of the following week, they’d hang out more and more: the kids, Cripps, and the handsome dad, but, and despite being attracted to him, Cripps writes:

“I didn’t do two things that usually I very much would have done. I didn’t leap on him. And I didn’t think about him all the time. Or even very much at all.” The chemistry was there, she said, but she felt like she could take it or leave it. It was the same way chocolate felt to her, now she was on Ozempic.

And you might at first imagine this is connected with Cripps’ sense of self worth, one dramatically improved by her recent weight loss. If, back when she was bigger, she relied upon the approval and interest of men to boost self confidence otherwise battered by her dislike of her own body, and society’s disapproval of it, she’s now perfectly content in the knowledge she’s slim, so, dismissive of tentatively proffered exterior validation.

But, you’d be wrong. Because there’s science - really surprising amounts of it - to suggest what we’re looking at here, is an actual change in character.

In some cases, these jabs really do seem to be Cool Girl drugs.

I’d heard about it anecdotally from mates who’d mentioned feeling:

Less hectic. More contained. Less chaotic. More measured.

“I’m not even a hot mess any more,” one said to me - and, as she said it, I realised it had indeed been some time since she’d turned up to meet me at a prearranged date, 45 minutes late with wet hair and just the one shoe, having forgotten her phone, so could I possibly pay?

Another mate ended a long term extra marital affair - like, six years of it - and thinks Wegovy is why. “I never really fancied him, as you know,” she said, (I did. It always puzzled me. He is not hot. I sort of assumed outrageous hotness of the other is the main reason to risk an affair.). “I just felt like I needed him wanting me. Really, really needed it. Now - I don’t. It’s gone.”

Maybe there’s such a thing as Sex Noise, I said, as a joke, and Wegovy turned if off, pun intended, like it turned the food noise off? “It really feels exactly the same,” she said.

Cripps called it “Romance Noise”, and made a similar comparison.

“I’ve never looked hotter and never wanted it less,” said someone else of male approval, a year into her GLP1 JOURNEY* (*I still loathe “JOURNEY”).

Which raises a sh*t load of questions, mainly:
Why?

How?

And: do we really want this?

Do we want to be intimidating slim bodied ice maiden automatons who carelessly flick handsome men aside like they’re particularly persistent charity muggers; remain perfectly in control of our lives at all times, serene and aloof, unmoved and unbothered, just by taking a drug…?

Actually - I think maybe I do want that…

Just me?

Anyway, I started digging. And what I found out has kind of intensified my suspicion that these drugs are going to transform society in so many ways. And truly not just because we’re less obese.

And THEN I found out that the newly approved Wegovy pill, the first GLP1 in oral form - which has only very recently become available for use in the UK, though its been on the market in the US since the beginning of this year, which is why data exists on it - that seems to have yet more of a cool girl impact again, than the jabs.

Blimey.

Might this be the most unlikely, unexpected side effect of weight loss drugs ever?

This is what’s actually going on:

Read more

Gah, Prime Ministers’ resignation speeches always get me! It’s how they look: their complexions, ashen, on no sleep; on all those hours of exhaustively talking it out with the increasingly minute circle of people in whom they can still place trust.

Trying to find a way out, a plan, a chance!

Finding none.

The haunted, hunted demeanour, that emotional hangover of just SO MUCH betrayal, all at once, so much backstabbing; perpetuated by people who once championed them to the ends of the earth and back.

Cos even if they knew, theoretically, that that was coming for them sooner or later, which they must…

The realities of it!

Of:

Oh - not you?

Not you?

And it’s how power ebbs from them as they stand, at that podium of doom, saying words they do not want to say. How power bleeds from them, leaving them suited and booted, depleted and ordinary, in the time it takes to say: “I have spoken to His Majesty the King…”

The pity. The rapidly enforced humility. The barely-contained tears.

The recourse to family, to the husband, the wife, who’ll hug them with devoted ferocity the moment it’s over, because they still have them.

Ah, it gets me good!

I mean, maybe not with Johnson - too jolly, too defiant - definitely not Truss, but: May (when her voice broke on “country I love”), and Sunak (walking hand in hand with Akshata Murty, away from Number 10, toward family), Thatcher, crying in the car, and now Starmer… I believe they cared, most of them. I believe they were - again: most of them - half decent men and women, who truly hoped to make things better, even if I did not agree with their approach, didn’t share their values.

It’s like they get unmasked as just humans, in that moment. Like when zombies in horror films get shot through the head and, as they die, transform back into the gentle, average people they were, before they got bitten.

Prime Ministers, in the moment of their ousting, stop being the stern faced embodiment of everything that was going wrong in the country, and in your life, and turn into - just people, who tried, and who are now accepting failure.

I… “cheered myself up” is truly not the turn of phrase for which I reach; erm, “shifted my vibe” might be closer… by watching the new BBC doc on OnlyFans (OnlyFans, Inside The Machine) on iPlayer. It is not edifying. The platform, which allows users to create, broadcast and charge for adult content, in much the same way SubStack allows writers to create, publish and charge for their writing, has generated an eco system of wrong ‘uns around it, men who set themselves up as managers, promise OnlyFans creators vastly increased income, then rip them off financially, push them into filming things they never wanted to film, and bullying and threatening them until they try to leave, at which point, some of the “managers” became physically violent.

They’re often called e-pimps, except apparently they don’t like that. They like “OFM”. OnlyFans Managers.

I guess they find “e-pimp” demeaning.

I have tried to be cool with porn. Truly, I have. Some people insist it’s feminist. But I dunno, I just always come up against that thing where, when we’re talking about an industry which - however its formatted, OnlyFans or classic OG version - relies uniquely on the bodies of women too young, and too economically vulnerable, to realistically be considered as having all that much of a choice, (throw in OnlyFans narrative there is empowerment in doing it “their” way, in owning and controlling your content - up until an OFM ensnares you - never mind, a cultural context which tells you, you just don’t matter until you’re dripping in the moist blatant signifiers of wealth, how you get the money to buy them, doesn’t matter, the ends justify the means… )

In my experience? Those propositions? They never benefit women. Reliably, they harm us. They harm us if we’re directly involved - the OnlyFans creators interviewed in the BBC doc talked about how they went into it with a load of boundaries, really clear ideas of what they would and wouldn’t do… And how quickly that got steamrollered, either by the managers, or just by the urgency to get the clicks, play the algorithm - and they harm us if we’re not, if we’re just swimming around in an offline societal soup increasingly influenced by behaviours and expectations set online.

I don’t see how this empowers anyone, honestly. Not us, not the models… Not even the men paying for OnlyFans, whose loneliness epidemic is being wilfully, gleefully exploited by OFMs, who say things like: “We didn't create it, but we will cash in on it”.

OH GOD I’VE GONE DARK AGAIN!

I’m sorry.

I’m actually in a fanatically good mood. I know it’s stupidly hot, but that means everyone is dressing really creatively to accommodate it, which I so enjoy, plus the array of sundresses suddenly on display makes my heart soar!

Me? Oh, I think I have found THE perfect heatwave dress. I have been having such a great time with myself while wearing it.

It’s the Edina by Rixo. It’s perfection lies in its wafty off whiteness - it is so light I nearly didn't even sweat on the Tube - and off white is v flattering, but also, in that it’s ostensibly quite modest - full length, big collar, half-length sleeves - AND YET, it is distinctly opaque, which adds to the wafting, but also makes it sexier than it would be if it were a heavier cotton. £285, affiliates. (It’d look amazing with a slip underneath too - you know, if you’re not quite as me, as I am.)

(Won’t lie, I partly wore it to reinforce Toxic Neighbour’s belief I’m Up Myself. It does make me feel quite Up Myself. But it is also possibly perfect. Could do for wedding guesting, garden partying, or just p***ing people off. Fit For Purpose - if you know what I mean.)

On the theme of keeping cool, my mate Nora also gave me a recipe for The Best Salad Ever. Long time listeners will know I am not one of life’s chefs (I only recently taught myself how to poach eggs off YouTube - that’s what you’re dealing with, here), but we were leaving strength training together, she was talking about making it, it sounded DELISH and crucially EASY, so she took me to Fam with her, to make sure I got the ingredients right.

Fam is a local institution, a hilariously expensive organic shop which everyone in the Archway/ Tufnell Park area of North London moans about yet - could not exist without.

Here are the ingredients

1 big fat wodge of watermelon.

I chunk of feta cheese.

I bushel of mint.

Quarter of red onion.

2 limes for the squeezin’.

You roughly chop up basically everything that can be roughly chopped - the melon, the feta and the mint… Oh, but not the red onion. You finely slice that… Whack them in a bowl together, salt and pepper them liberally and squeeze the limes over them, “then don’t forget a glug of olive oil” Nora told me, “Yes! Even on the melon!”. I did as she said and honestly, it might be the height of my culinary reaches, which I appreciate isn’t saying much, but blimey it is tasty and refreshing and good. I ate it before photographing it, so here’s the greatest cinematic watermelon reference ever instead.

I bought these Monica Vinader hoop earrings in the sale (£118.30, down from £169, that’s 30% off), and they’re also pretty perfect. Big enough to be dramatic, light enough to not even slightly weigh your lobes down. I can forget about them and they cause no bother, I wear them to exercise classes even.

And that bangle I told you about earlier seems to have sold out before I got it, so now? I’m contemplating THIS (I really REALLY love a bangle slip-sliding about on a bare summer arm). £111.30, down from £159, 30% off . Affiliates on both these.

Absolute did NOT see it coming but… win of the heatwave so far, is these white balloon pants from Albaray’s collaboration with Anna Unwin. I was gifted them because I am a spoiled be-atch; when I first unpacked them, I thought, yeah, not in a GAZILLION years, because I wouldn't describe them as balloon pants, I’d call them harem pants: the crotch is WAY down between your calves, you see. ANYWAY, having thought not in a GAZILLION years, I put them on, and instantly changed my mind. How can something so theoretically preposterous in fact be so easy? I do not know. But they are. All that movement is just kinda gorgeous, the voluminous volume is a) really literally cool, b) really conceptually cool, and c) immensely flattering; they’re made to create the illusion of a super defined waist. £99, affiliates.

(They also have that opaque Rixo dress factor going on. It reminds me of the pic of young Diana in the transparent skirt, which was deeply problematic in retrospect, yet still something toward which I quietly aspire. )

Also getting SO MUCH WEAR out of the M&S leather flip flops, £30, which have all the insouciance of flip flops, but with the leather, which makes them substantially more chic.

One last thing: I went to my local chemists because my hay fever was going haywire, and asked for Allevia, which had, to this point, been the most impactful thing by far, and my chemist said:
”Would you like something stronger?”

“HELL YES!” I said, at which point she furnished me with 30 of these beauties, Histahive.

The drug in Allevia is Fexofenadine, street name “fexy”* (*not really, it’s an OTC drug, broadly available, it doesn’t have a street name); Allevia has it at 120mg a tablet, but Hitsahive? Oh, 180, my friends! ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY! Better yet, it’s non drowsy.

It worked like a charm on my hay fever, but then, when I got an especially infuriating mosquito bite on my shoulder (f**kers are active this year, no?), within 20 minutes of my taking a tablet, it was pretty much all gone. Shrunk to non-itchy irrelevance.

Can not recommend enough.

TTFN!

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