(Also, it is very much not a given that I would be good at keeping an eye on my general health: lots of people don’t, especially when they are busy with work and kids and elderly parents and leaks in the roof and saving for a new boiler and of all the other things that life might entail. It’s hard to prioritise yourself when you perhaps have other people to care for and your days are jam-packed.)

Now I wouldn’t say I’m Simon Cowell-level good at keeping an eye on my general health, but that’s mainly because I don’t have a medical centre in my £1.6 million winnebago that comes with all the equipment necessary to monitor my vital statistics. Indeed, I don’t own a £1.6 million winnebago in which to install a medical centre in the first place. Or any winnebago. (Also, if I had constant access to my own medical centre, equipped with heart monitors, ear monitors and a special glove that can remotely detect heart attacks, I would get nothing else done.)

I just make sure I go to any screening appointments I’m summoned to, try to be familiar with what’s normal for my own body and attempt to keep a certain level of self-awareness that means I notice if there are any significant changes. That’s pretty much all any of us can do, surely, short of having one of those mega-MRI-scans I keep seeing advertised.

(Would you have an annual whole-body MRI scan if you could? If it was affordable? The more I see these services advertised the more I wonder whether we’re missing out and at a disadvantage if we don’t have one or, if people are relatively healthy to start with, scanning every tiny bit of the body is just unnecessary overkill? I suppose that it would always catch things early if there was anything amiss, which is an amazing thing, but would it also create lots more health anxiety? Thoughts in the comments…)

Anyway the point is, I’m usually pretty good at keeping an eye on my general health and wellbeing, so it makes what follows even more weird and surprising: because the fact is, I’ve had a number of bothersome health and wellness issues that until quite recently I had been completely ignoring. Just blatantly pretending not to notice!

No, worse than that, actually: issues that I’d noticed, but then decided to simply accept. Accept as being part and parcel of being alive, being 45, without even really questioning if I could do anything about them.

How defeatist of me.

I say the word bothersome, which sounds pretty cute and politely British, but some of these things were severely affecting my day. I thought I’d list them and tell you what I’ve finally started to do about them, because a) I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself and the level of proactiveness I’ve suddenly managed to conjure up and b) it might be helpful to anyone who has similar issues.

(Should have really written those the other way around, so that the charitable reason appears before the self-serving egotistical one but I like to keep things real.)

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My Thinning Hairline

First though: this post is very kindly sponsored by a brand I’ve had a beautifully long relationship due to the fact that their LED masks are the best in the business and have had a dramatic, visible effect on my skin. Yes, it’s CurrentBody.

You can find dozens and dozens of places where I’ve raved about their LED masks (I use both the Series 2 LED Face Mask and also the Neck and Decolletage mask) and I really would not be without them. They’re not “quick fix” solutions, these masks, they require commitment and consistency and patience, but I saw significant visible changes after a few months of use and am still using them religiously, years later.

(More info in this post, if you want to hear more.)

But we’re not talking skin here, we’re talking hair. Specifically my gradual thinning of, around the temples and hairline, and also my (hopefully temporary) Telogen Effluvium, which is when more hair than usual is pushed into the resting-and-shedding stage of the growth cycle.

Not the first item that was on my original “things I’ve been ignoring and now I need to take action on” list, but definitely something I’d have shunted down the line until later.

I have long been fascinated by the CurrentBody Skin LED Hair Growth Helmet; Rich started to use it last year, every night without fail, and within a few months I could definitely see new growth. He has fallen off that particular wagon because he’s been down in Dorset so much, doing stuff at the new cottage, but I was heartened and surprised by the results that he had, so much so that I am excited to try it for myself and see what happens.

What also excites me about the CurrentBody Hair Growth Helmet is that the clinical trials on home LED devices for hair loss seem so very promising. And not just clinical trials conducted by the brand, but much larger, peer-reviewed studies that show really good results. CurrentBody’s own clinical trials on a group of 31 people (who all had mild to moderate hair loss) showed a 123% increase in hair growth rate and 72% reduction in hair loss after just 12 weeks of using the Hair Helmet on a daily basis.

Incredibly impressive and I can’t wait to see what the difference might be for my own hair. Here are some before photos of the areas I’m going to concentrate on, namely the temples and front hairline, where I have had thinned patches since my pregnancies and also a constant halo of weird flimsy nothingy hairs:

The benefit of the Hair Helmet over surface treatments (serums, etc) is that the Helmet works below the surface, stimulating dormant hair follicles and encouraging them to re-enter the active growth phase faster. (I’m hoping this will support the Telogen Effluvium side of things as well as the thinning.)

The specific red light wavelengths from the LEDs also help to boost blood flow in the scalp and support repair, which in turn should have an effect on growth. And apparently the LEDs help to improve scalp inflammation and oiliness, though these changes are possibly harder to gauge if you’re not working under scientific test conditions!

CurrentBody promise visible results in 12 weeks, so I will be back to you with an update. I can’t imagine it’s going to be a very taxing trial period: I absolutely love wearing my CurrentBody masks, I find it very relaxing and imagine I’m lying on a beach! The Hair Helmet is even easier - the same 10 minutes a day, but just plonk it onto your clean head and relax. It even has build in Bluetooth speakers so that you can listen to True Crime podcasts and Death Metal or whatever it is you listen to in order to relax.

I have a 10% discount code for the Hair Growth Helmet, RUTHHAIR - it’s £649.99, so the code brings it down to £585. It’s obviously a very sizeable investment, so I think it’s well worth reading through all of the info on the website (and other sites) and looking at the before and after photos. I thought that these were particularly compelling:

Let me know if you’ve been trying the Hair Helmet - I see a lot of excellent videos and pictures online, where everyone looks like an extra from Tron, so do fill me in with your results so far if you have any.

The CurrentBody Hair Helmet is here online.

Onwards with my small catalogue of complaints:

My Exploding Knees

My knees started aching at the end of last year and gradually got worse and worse and by March this year they were so painful that I couldn’t do certain essential movements. Squatting down to get something from the floor, for example was absolutely out of the question and to climb up steps or stairs, I had to turn sideways and shuffle up them like a crab because the pain of climbing them normally was too much!

How long did it take me to seek help, once I’d got to this near-incapacitated state? Eight weeks. And it wasn’t that I didn’t have the time to seek help, I could have made the time: I just sort of accepted that I was going to have bad knees for the rest of my life and that they would probably get much worse. That it was my destiny.

Completely ridiculous. Luckily one of my school mum friends is a physiotherapist and also very no-nonsense and just looked at me when I started telling her about it and how long I’d been going sideways up the stairs and said, very sternly but with a slight look of exasperation, book an appointment.

I’m going to write a whole post about this, but it turns out that my five years of doing high intensity Peloton spin-cycling and no other type of exercise or strength training means that I’ve just been making my legs go round and round and round really fast using my muscles in one particular way and all of the other muscles have been screaming

“RUTH! What the actual fcuk! We’re wasting away down here while the knee muscles (or whatever they are called) are doing the equivalent of the Iron Man competition every week!”

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Dedicated post on knees is a-coming, but safe to say that the first physio appointment completely changed a) the way I thought about my knees and legs and muscles in general and b) the way I exercised. I’ve been doing strength training and Barre classes on my Peloton app to build up all of my leg and bum muscles and have been loving my workouts!

I can now squat, really quite proficiently, and am pleased to tell you that when I climb the stairs I do so in the traditional way. But more on this, as I say, later.

My Weak Wrists

Ditto the weak wrists. Except that I’ve had those, to the point where I can’t use my hands to push myself up off the floor, for ELEVEN YEARS. I first noticed the extreme weakness and pain when I had my first baby and I’d finished a year of breastfeeding where, let’s face it, you spend quite a proportion of your time holding a heavy item (the baby) in your arms with your hands at a weird stress-position angle.

Apparently it’s quite a common thing. Loose ligaments during/after pregnancy + holding a baby for long periods of time + (probably) also holding your iPhone whilst the baby is feeding and doom scrolling for hours on end. Recipe for disaster.

Anyway, I have exercises for my wrists to strengthen them and the muscles that work with them. The progress seems to be slower/negligible, if I’m honest, but I am not ignoring this matter again! Back I go to the physio, as soon as I have a moment and the back-to-school chaos is over…

My Fatigue

I was very, very tired all the time for quite a long while. And of course anytime I mentioned it, a million people screeched PERIMENOPAUSE, because that is apparently the answer to everything these days and no other causes of tiredness exist, but I personally do not buy into this new belief that absolutely everything is linked to perimenopause, or menopause itself and that other things can feasibly be going on to make people knackered.

Mine turned out to be low iron. I knew I had low iron, I’ve had low iron for years - probably since before kids, so over a decade - but when I had my bloods done it was even lower than usual.

I’d dallied with iron supplements in the past but none had really agreed with me; this time around I did quite a lot of Googling and (sorry) used Google AI to whittle down the many options to one that would be completely suited to me.

And, miraculously, the one it recommended was really suited to me. I have nothing bad to say about this iron - it’s the Solgar Gentle Iron 20mg - and my energy levels have steadily increased. Slowly but surely.

I mean I have two kids and about eighty thousand business ventures going on so I’m never going to feel massively perky, I don’t think, not in the near future, but I feel a hell of a lot better than I did in March.

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My Annoying Piles

Well, we all know how this one turned out. How rude. You take action on something, something really quite demoralising and embarrassing, and then you go through a procedure that’s like the sort of thing they might do on a farmyard, to livestock, and then you have twenty-four hours of intense pain, and then it turns out the thing you thought was a pile wasn’t a pile at all and all the piles they did the procedure on were ones you were completely unaware of and could quite happily have lived with.

You can read all about that experience here. I won’t be messing about in that department again, if I can help it, mark my words!

Righty-ho, on that jolly note, you can now all get on with writing down any health or wellbeing issues that have been concerning you and promise yourselves you’ll take the time to look into them. I can’t tell you how glad I am that my knees were a fixable problem - I was sure it was my joints going, or arthritis, and that I’d have to build some sort of funicular to get me up and down my driveway.

(Although: not a bad idea!)

I did it with the towels I loved, also in case they stopped making them (spoiler alert, they did, it was back in 2009) and I even did it with a pair of Belstaff motorbike boots which were horrendously expensive even back in 2005.

Guess what?

I haven’t even worn the backup pair of Belstaffs. The first pair were so well made, it seems inconceivable that they will ever bite the dust. I’ve had to reheel them every few years (less now, because the heels are over an inch tall and so I don’t want to risk an A&E visit and three months in traction) but apart from that, and the obvious softening and creasing of the leather, they are fine and dandy.

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Do not get me started on my collection of “spare” crockery for the dinner sets I didn’t want to risk being incomplete if someone smashed a plate, or a cereal bowl. Gah.

Anyway, all this to say that the things I should have bought in duplicate, this year, I didn’t. In fact, because I have been trying to be a little more discerning about my purchases, one of the items I did actually buy in duplicate but then I had a word with myself and sent the second one back! What an idiot! All those plates (one set has seventeen plates, nineteen bowls, sixteen side plates, it is why I invite so many people at Christmas, just to feel slightly better about what is a ridiculous situation) yet I’m having to speed-wash my favourite crop-top bra thing because I only have one, I’m constantly sweating, and there’s never a back-up version in stock!

Here’s the bra in question, and another (slightly different) bra that I require in order to be able to wear my neon pink Autumn Cashmere vest top, and also a duplicate of one of the best, comfiest things I’ve bought in 2026. Let me save you the pain of spending on the wrong thing, and guide you towards the tried and tested…

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Yes please.

And it doesn’t have to be all rustic and gingham-y either; rattan can be beautifully sculptural, case in point my linen basket which we will come back to shortly.

Anyway, since I drafted this post on wicker and rattan, which was a mere few weeks ago, the online world has been turned upside down by a certain movie trailer that has been released. A film starring Olivia Coleman, Alexander Skarsgård and Peter Dinklage, in which a woman (Coleman) gets herself a husband magically made and when he turns up for the wedding he’s entirely fabricated in wicker! Yeah, all of him!

ALL OF HIM. Rattan cock and all! Woven balls! And if you think I’m being crass and immature, wait until you see the trailer! Embedded (bit like the woman who married the wicker man, fnar fnar) for your viewing pleasure here:

I tell you, from here on in I shall not accept an erection unless it is accompanied by that tremendous creaking sound, rising noisily to full mast like an ancient oak.

How gloriously silly, I am in my absolute element with it all and have watched the trailer five times. How is it that someone has finally conceived of a film plot that is as depraved and farcical as my own imaginings? It’s almost as though I thought this storyline up myself. I fear it will be one of my life’s greatest disappointments, that Wicker wasn’t my own mad creation…

But to get back to the interiors stuff, my point is is that I drafted the below post on wicker things before the trailer came out and now that I’m editing it almost everything I say sounds like a double entendre and I’m having to cut bits of it out here, there and everywhere. (Especially phrases like “bulbous wicker bottom”.)

Enough stalling. Let’s be having it.

Some Rustic Jute and Wicker-y Stuff That’ll Add Texture and Charm to Almost Any Room

Since I am now on my (counts on fingers) fifth home renovation/restoration/interiors project I thought I’d share a little trick with you, one that has worked in every setting from my mid-century-modern-house-on-stilts to the most recent, an ancient rural cottage. It’s a very easily executed trick and also relatively inexpensive and it adds instant warmth, texture and interest.

I’m talking about using rattan and jute. Stay with me. We don’t have to go full-on with this stuff, don’t short-circuit yourselves over it, I just feel that these are materials that get massively overlooked and then, when you add them into a room, you realise they were just what you were missing.

The honeyed hue, the intensely tactile nature of it, but the fact that at the same time it’s delicate and doesn’t add bulk… I think it can look so brilliantly chic.

Take those big IKEA shelves as an example - I think they are called Kallax: we’ve all had them, or have them still, the units that are made up of large square holes that are actually quite useless for holding books and objects, unless you stack the books in like a Tetris game or have square objects or only read coffee table hardbacks.

To use them for anything remotely normal you have to procure yourself some of IKEA’s purpose-made boxes that are exactly the right size for the holes. And if you’ve ever seen one of those units filled with the plain fabric or cardboard boxes then you’ll know that it’s not a hugely attractive sight.

But have you ever seen a Kallax unit filled with the rattan baskets they also make?

Instantly a million times better. I say this as someone who has owned multiple Kallax units with nearly every combo of box and basket known to man. (Kallax are excellent for storing beauty samples. These days I have a vintage haberdasher’s unit with dozens of tiny drawers for my beauty storage and it looks amazing, but as a functional piece I have to say that it is totally shit.)

There’s something about the rattan that is pleasing and gentle on the eye, even when mass-produced and slightly clinical-looking, like the IKEA stuff - Minecraft Rattan. It’s the warmth, the weave, the way it breaks up a surface so that your eye doesn’t hit a solid wall of material…

And I’m not saying to rattan the absolute bejeezus out of everything, I just think that the odd hint of it is a useful trick for adding an extra layer of beauty. Or, for when you need storage solutions, and the alternative is - for eg - a plastic set of boxes for your dressing table to hold all of your makeup items, or a wastepaper bin that looks like something from the set of Severance.

Here are some of my favourite wickery rattan jute bits:

Ferm Living Braided Laundry Basket.

This is one of my favourite household possessions. I like it so much that I have banned my kids from getting inside it for hide and seek, thus depriving them of one of childhood’s greatest activities. (We used to climb into my Mum’s linen basket and then tip it over from the inside, so that we rolled across the floor in it. Tell me a better game on a rainy day.)

The shape of this linen basket is exquisite and it took me weeks to find this exact shape. I was trying to find a copy of a vintage one I have from the sixties that I bought via Vinterior from a dealer, the one that Rich started using TO STORE KINDLING IN which is why he now has holes cut into the toes of all of his socks.

Neptune Jute Rug.

I have a Neptune woven rug in my work cabin (above) and it looks the absolute business. It was expensive, but I can now declare that I have massive experience in jute rugs because I bought two cheaper ones for other rooms and the quality is annoyingly bad. The cheaper ones shed all over the place and already have pulls in them, don’t have any backing on them and will undoubtedly have to be replaced in the next few years. The Neptune rug is perfect and beautiful. It was an absolute false economy trying out the cheaper ones and will have cost me more in the long run!

The Neptune rugs are here online

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Garden Trading Templecombe Chair.

What an absolute beauty this chair is. I have ordered one for The Dorset Nest, the thatched cottage we’re currently getting ready for holiday bookings. Because the cottage already has some beautiful, relaxed velvety armchairs in it (in the living room and in the ssshhh secret snug upstairs) I wanted a chair for the bedroom that was a bit different. Not so…upholstered. Not a mass of sumptuous fabric, because I’d already ticked that box.

RATTAN!

I mean the ticking stripe cushions are the cherry on the cake here, I can’t resist a bit of ticking stripe thrown in somewhere, but look at the frame! I’m excited about this chair even though I’ll very rarely get to actually sit in it.

Sometimes I think I run this holiday cottage business just so I can live out my interiors fantasies.

The chair is here online - they also do a plain cushion version.

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XL Rattan Lamp

Hurrah, something that doesn’t cost a billion pounds, you’re thinking. Yes I do think that this Habitat lamp is quite the steal, for a piece so large and striking. My concern is that it wouldn’t let out much light, but I love it for its sculptural appeal. It’s £80 here.

Hasthilp Rattan Mirror

I really really really really really love these Hasthilp rattan mirrors but they are, alas, outside of the current cottage reno budget. What craftsmanship! Superb. This, hung just above the most beautiful antique chest of drawers, a little jar of dried lavender off to the side, windows open, cottage curtains fluttering in the light breeze, sound of birds coming in from outside, a la Disney… ooph.

Hasthilp seem to be the king pins of luxury rattan stuff, by the way. I feel as though I could do a degree in wicker at this point.

Hatherley Antique Brass and Rattan Wall Light

I think that rattan mixed with metal looks very smart. Want a traditional-looking wall light but then with a softer, more rustic lean? Bingo. Neptune also do something similar (more pricey) and Pooky do their mix-and-match lamps with little rattan shades available, but I really like the simplicity of this wall light.

It’s here.

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Kallax Baskets

And finally, if you do have Kallax and fancy giving them a bit of a spruce and a prettify, the baskets they do to fit them are online here. At £15 each they’re more expensive than the cardboard ones, obviously, and also more expensive than the fabric ones, but not by much and the good thing about them is that they don’t break over time (the number of fabric ones that have died a death!) and you could use them without the Kallax, in the future, so I see them as more of a solid investment.

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Right, off to re-watch the Wicker trailer and plan my Wicker-viewing evening and also work on my masterplan to get invited to the Wicker premiere so that I can wear a dress made out of rattan and a matching rattan hat. Maybe one of the lampshades from Pooky would work well?

It has taken me a couple of weeks to prepare this highly scientific post about piles banding (haemorrhoid ligation, for those who prefer to use proper terms) because I wasn’t quite sure how to approach it.

One of my friends told me it might be a bit of a turn-off to write about haemorrhoids, that people might never look at me in the same way again:

‘A lot of your content is about beauty and fashion,’ she said, ‘I’d just be very, very careful about your tone if you do decide to talk about it.’

To which I say a) has this friend ever met me? and b) how does one be careful about one’s tone when they’re about to describe how a man in a surgical gown spent five full minutes firing tiny elastic bands at the inside walls of their rectum?

And that was just at the drinks party I went to the week before! Hohoho.

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Anyway, what my friend has missed is that I am mostly doing this post as an act of public service. Because millions and millions of people have piles, but they’re not really something that gets discussed in polite society.

(Possibly because what you’d be discussing would be the “swollen and inflamed blood vessels in and around your rectum and anus”, which has to be the least appetising ice-breaker known to humankind. Even if you’re on friendly terms, no ice-breaker needed, talking about the inside of your rectum has to be up there with the boldest of subjects. It’s the mental image it conjures up, isn’t it?)

It makes me wonder: how many people suffer with their piles and never do anything about them? How many women sit there wondering what solutions are on offer for getting rid of their little downstairs “friends” but are too embarrassed to go to the doctor?

And I am here to tell you, categorically, that unless your piles are causing you frequent stress and pain, unless you feel they are ruining your life in some way, you should absolutely just get used to them being there and/or popping them back in when they make the odd appearance in the outside world because oh my GOD I found the alternative so grim and painful and not in the least bit balanced out by the benefits, which for me have been nil, and which we will come onto in due course!

Now by all means go and get your arse checked out. It isn’t pleasant and feels ten times more undignified than having your vag prodded about, but if you are really inconvenienced by your haemorrhoids, or they are very painful, or they are massively affecting your life to the point where you’re unhappy, or you are having any other symptoms in relation to your bowels that could be serious, then please do go and discuss options. I am all for staying on top of things and knowing my normal and asking for help if things seem off.

But if you, like me, are more concerned with just the odd alarming piles episode, the infrequent appearance of multiple external piles that make it look and feel as though you are prolapsing your entire colon out into the toilet, but then the rest of the time the thing that bothers you the most is, erm, the aesthetics of the whole thing, I can with confidence say that the alternative - even the “entry level” procedure - was not worth the trauma.

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Due Diligence

I cannot believe that I didn’t do my due diligence on the whole situation, on the piles banding and the laser treatments and on the most dramatic of the solutions, the pro-level surgical option, the Haemorrhoidectomy; because if I had done a bit of online research then I would have noted that the common denominator in almost every comment thread and forum post for all types of piles treatment was…drumroll… pain.

When I was writhing around, fifteen hours post-ligation, an ice cube wedged point-first into my emergency exit and a hot water bottle between my legs, I felt so incredibly naive and silly not to have anticipated any pain. I mean, someone was going to go into my back end with a camera, fill my rectum with air and then snap tiny elastic bands around living, growing things that are on the inside of my body that would then be starved of bloodflow and gradually fall off leaving an open wound that poos would have to graze past on their farewell tour: what part of this did I think would be completely pain-free? Why would I ever, in a million years, not prepare myself mentally and physically for what would so obviously be a highly uncomfortable situation?

I’ll tell you why. The following is from the information that I was given to read beforehand. I’m cherry-picking, obviously, but for our purposes here I’m giving you the significant bits, the bits that jumped out at me and that told me, indirectly, the whole procedure was nothing to really worry about.

“You will not need an anaesthetic as there are no nerves that sense pain at the top of your anal canal.”

Marvellous.

“A silicon band will be placed onto the lining of your anal canal. The band should block the blood supply to the haemorrhoid, causing it to shrink back up your anal canal.”

Splendid. Seems straightforward.

“It should fall off itself after 7 to 14 days. MOST PEOPLE DO NOT NOTICE THIS. (MY CAPS.)”

I mean for the love of God, this sounds easier than a wisdom tooth removal, doesn’t it?

Other pertinent hard facts from the brochure: “pain is usually easily controlled with simple painkillers such as paracetamol” and my favourite, “you should be able to return to work the next day.”

Top Trumps of Orifice-Related Procedures

I want to give you a brief run down of the procedures I’ve had in other orifices: not to show off, this isn’t Top Trumps of undignified orifice explorations, but to try and describe to you where on the scale the pain and discomfort from the Sigmoidoscopy (the camera) and Banding (the piles-shrinking bit) seemed to sit.

Hysteroscopy without pain relief or sedation, circa 2011: camera through the cervix into the womb. Grim at the time but no pain afterwards, just felt I couldn’t speak to another human without crying for approx eight days and spent a fair while rocking back and forth hugging my knees in the bath.

Laparoscopy without pain relief or sedation, circa 2012: as above, but cried during the procedure because they left me in the room on my own, because it was a camera into the womb but then my womb and tubes were filled with dye and then I had a giant X-ray done, and I felt very alone as they all watched me through a protective window. Grim x2.

Colonoscopy without pain relief or sedation, Jan 12th 2012: excerpt from diary “had to go for my colonoscopy today and it was awful! Had an enema (WTF!) and had to wear a backless gown!” This is a camera up the bum (I used to have IBS type symptoms when I was a model, probably was the fact I lived on Diet Coke and Marlboro Lights) but it goes much further up than the little one I had during the piles procedure. Pain: uncomfortable at the time, no pain at all afterwards.

Cystoscopy without sedation or pain relief, 2019: small thin tube up the urethra (wee hole) aka my actual worst nightmare, aka when I had to go again I paid to go privately and be put to sleep because I couldn’t handle the idea of being awake again. It was actually more psychological than acute pain, the pain was more of a weird discomfort, but I am FUNNY about anything in that area due to years of frequent UTIs (now thankfully not a thing) and it took me days and days to get over it.

Where did the banding pain sit?

In short, none of the above caused me actual pain beyond the time of the procedure. Because I wasn’t expecting the pain (mainly with the womb stuff) I think it was just a terrible shock in the moment but then I staggered home and cried, staring at a wall, and then carried on with my life. The difference with the flexible sigmoidoscopy (the camera I had before the piles were banded) and the piles banding (pipe put up that sucks the pile into the pipe and then shoots an elastic around the base of it) was that a) the pain seemed worse at the time, but was mostly from the air trapped inside me, but then b) the pain afterwards was excruciating. And I wasn’t expecting either.

The pain, I think, was a combo affair: pressure inside from the banding itself, which makes it feel as though you’re going to unconventionally give birth to a massive cactus, but then all the pain - which is intense! - from the trapped air, coupled with the fact you’ve had various implements in and out of your back passage for half an hour. I just found it unbearable, pretty much from the minute I got into recovery.

I had been told that I’d be able to drive myself home, which I think must have been another indicator to me that I needn’t worry about the procedure at all: thankfully Rich had dropped me off, taken the kids to the park, because I thought it was a 45 mins in and out job, taken the kids for lunch, taken the kids to the park again, taken the kids to B&M to buy pool noodles and then taken the the kids to the park again, and then there he was at the end to pick me up.

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Zombie Arsepocalypse

I walked out of the hospital like a zombie. I could barely stand up straight. I had almost fainted in recovery, where I had to beg for even a paracetamol, and my entire stomach felt as though it was trying to push its way out of my body. The pain just got worse and worse over the course of the following hours, making me think that something had gone seriously wrong because why would I be experiencing so much pain when it was, essentially, according to the literature, a relatively painless procedure?

When I called the hospital outpatients number the following morning, having not slept, I spoke to two different consultants who both said that - I quote - “your level of pain and discomfort is entirely normal.”

Excusez moi?

How can they say that pain is manageable with paracetamol in one breath but then describe that same pain, which was excruciating, as normal?

I decided to take a look online and do some pain research. Bit “shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted” but I needed something to distract me from the fact that something the size of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket felt as though it was trying to launch its way out of my rectum.

Though some websites and online sources did seem to acknowledge the existence of significant pain after banding, lots appeared to base their patient pain expectations on the following statistic, which I managed to squirrel down to source and find in this National Library of Medicine guide to complications after banding, here, that at “1 wk, 75% of patients reported themselves as being pain-free.”

No shit! A week! Who measures things by a week? Of course things are going to be better after a week! You could probably get ravaged by a tiger and feel mildly better about it a week later!

‘Oh don’t worry Mr Beakers: we’re going to amputate your arm now, and we’ve actually run out of anaesthetic so you’re going to have to make do with this quarter of a bottle of vodka, but don’t worry! 80% of patients feel no pain at all five weeks after procedure, you’ll be absolutely fine! Maybe not to drive yourself home afterwards, but we expect you’ll be able to manage to get back to work tomorrow if you keep on top of the paracetamol. Just call us if you bleed more blood than can be collected in a wine bottle.’

The thing that some of these advice pamphlets and website sources miss out, is that the guide also says “pain was the most common symptom occurring in almost 90% of patients, with the pain scores higher 4h following the procedure.”

Thank you, yes, and I’d say increasing exponentially until approx 12-24 hours later when the only thing to do is pace deliriously and wait for the next round of paracetamol.

Gnarly

It just feels weird to me that so many outpatient procedures are so unbelievable gnarly - in this case someone literally shooting elastic bands inside your rectum, like a builder with a nail gun or something - yet you’re advised to just take paracetamol, drive home and go back to work the next day, and given no pain relief or sedation options at the time.

Oh bloody hell, I do feel like I’m moaning a bit now, but equally I am really trying to play it down because I found the whole thing quite awful and the memory has not faded with time. I think it’s all made worse because I’m cross with myself: had I researched properly, and not just read the stupid leaflet from the hospital, I would have seen that the majority of people talking about it online had been in lots of pain and not had a good experience and that for a whole load of them it hadn’t worked anyway (5 in 10 procedures don’t even work! HALF!) and I would have weighed this up against the minor inconvenience of my piles and thought

not on your absolute Nelly.

Of course had my piles been more painful, or much more inconvenient, or life-ruining, then I would have weighed it up differently as should you or anyone who is thinking about banding, but the thing is is that you can’t weigh up the facts if the facts you have are inaccurate!

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For Your Delectation…

And here’s the worst part for your morbid delectation: I had three piles banded, and as the consultant talked me through it I thought, HURRAH! Now I won’t have the equivalent of a bunch of muscat grapes launching out of my rubbish hatch every time I go to the toilet!, but as he collected his tools and whisked off the dust covers, my construction worker, I mean surgeon, said, “oh, by the way, the one on the outside is a skin tag.”

SAY WHAT?

I almost passed out with dismay. The “one on the outside” was the only one I knew about! That was the thing I’d gone to the GP about, the thing I’d said was really bothering me, that I felt was just unhygienic but also kind of embarrassing, never really painful but sometimes uncomfortable and guess what friends?

IT IS STILL THERE!

Could you even make this up? I could not. It’s the most ridiculous, annoying, upsetting twist in the tale. I didn’t even know the other three existed. I could have lived with them for a lifetime none the wiser. I almost feel sorry for them: living peacefully up there, harming no-one, staying in their lane, waving around like fronds of seaweed in the ocean (I imagine?), and then bam. Strangulated with rubber bands around their very necks. Slowly starved of life-force. Eyes bulging as they withered and died, falling off like spent barnacles.

And even they have a 50% chance of coming back to life.

Bloody hell.

Silver Lining

So basically, the only beneficial thing to have come from this experience is that I can tell you about it, so that if you, like me, were weighing up your options, you’d maybe take some time to do a little more research. The aim isn’t to discourage, but to demystify. If you feel as though you might read up a bit on it, ask around, see what options are available for better pain relief post-procedure, or perhaps sedation during, if you know you’ll find it distressing.

The other beneficial thing that has just occurred to me is that the whole farce has been a 9/10 on the comedy rating scale, mainly because I got to wear something called Modesty Shorts. I could barely contain my glee, quite honestly.

These bermuda-style shorts were made out of papery stuff that was slightly see-through, but that wasn’t the best bit: over the bum crease, there was a square door, a peekaboo flap, that was fastened on with velcro!

Oh, the joy. How many times during my one hour wait did I open and close that access hatch! I’ll tell you: eight. Which is why when it came to the actual procedure, the velcro had stopped working and the flap just hung open, like an invitation.

Shame, because I was looking forward to someone having to noisily rip it open at the start of the procedure, really dramatically, and then I’d be able to crack some kind of massively inappropriate joke, like, “ooh, everyone loves an easy access!” or similar.

Alas, I lay on my side on the operating table/pleather bed and it just flopped open behind me, revealing the bright side of the moon before anyone had even asked for it. Embarrassingly forward, borderline crass.

Mind you, the consultant was chatting away to his colleagues about his house renovation, and I’m not sure you really notice bare arses much if you spend the whole day looking at them?

I cannot write the word arse again, today: I’m starting to worry that my friend is right, and that I shouldn’t be telling you any of this at all, even though my archived post Accidental Penetration and the Fibreglass Cow is one of my most-read posts of all time and also Topple, Tipple, Grab my Nipple, both of which go in deep with overshare and inappropriate content. But anyway, in case she’s right this is where I stop, and I now open up the comments for all of your own piles-related anecdotes and private parts experiences.

What a time to be alive.

Hit the heart button on your way out and do share this with anyone who might find it useful, just preferably not any of my relatives, my husband, or people I have to deal with in a professional capacity in any way, shape or form.

Thanks in advance.

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Questions my kids asked me yesterday as I was trying to reverse park my car, which is approximately the same width as a cross channel ferry, between two concrete pillars:

“What’s the smallest sound a human can hear?” (9 year-old)

“Is air lighter?” (9 year-old)

“When they open the new Primark will they close the old Primark on the same day and then quickly move all the clothes across to the new Primark, or…?” (11 year-old)

I’m starting to find it hard to string a proper sentence together. This is not a complaint, just an observation. It happens every August, once my days begin to revolve solely around children and not around work. My cognitive tools go blunt, I become mentally flaccid. My brain feels like a little blimp that I’m gently leading around on a piece of pink ribbon, floating just to the side of my head but not quite connected.

It’s weird, when I think about it properly, because on a normal term-time day the kids are only at school from (let’s round it all up for ease) 9am-3pm: it’s a mere quarter of the twenty-four hour period. But those six hours are so precious, aren’t they? Not just for working and “getting things done” but for being able to do absolutely anything you want to do, on your own terms, knowing that someone else is completely responsible for your children. It’s a short period of relief, like someone else has taken the wheel on a particularly perilous mountain pass.

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On that note, some recommendations:

1. Giffords Circus

Have you been to Giffords Circus? Have you heard of it? Forget everything you think you know about circuses (circi?), especially if you last went to one in the eighties: wipe the slate clean, because Giffords is not what you’d expect. Think magical, whimsical musical crossed with the world’s best talent show crossed with a bit of very stylish cabaret and all heaped with a very special sort of sexy-glint-in-the-eye bohemian charm. Every year has a theme - this year it was the English countryside - and special acts are interspersed with music from the live band, dancing, acrobatics and the kind of clowning around that has kids of all ages in hysterics.

We went last year as a family and loved it so much that it was the kids’ number one top thing to do again this year. It’s not too long (forty minutes each half maybe?), there’s a good interval in the middle and loads of food and bar stalls that make it feel a bit like you’ve been to a mini festival.

Peak entertainment for me, this year, was watching the aerial performers gracefully twisting themselves around one another, high up in the air, as the band and lead singer did a brilliant rendition of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights. Just excellent. So stylish, so cool.

Tickets costs from £14 each for children, £23 for adults and there are various locations around London, Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds, though the remaining dates are all now in Wiltshire and near Stroud. A good one to bookmark for next year, too, as the shows start in the spring and it would be a lovely way to see in the warmer weather.

Giffords Circus

(I have attended both as a paying customer and a guest of Giffords. Whole family agrees it’s the best value for money of anything we do over the summer, and they’re hard to please!)

2. Unearthed Tortillas

Not a new discovery at all but I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to mention these delights and now seems like as good a time as any.

I don’t know why they’ve called this product Unearthed: I mean I get it, it’s a nod to how simple and wholesome the ingredients are, straight from the ground, potatoes still with the soil stuck to them, etc etc.

I just find it slightly off putting when we’re talking about a Spanish tortilla, a dampish sort of foodstuff that has eggs in it and so on: the idea of unearthing a moist egg-centric dish from the ground is borderline heinous. Imagine the state of it! Eggs need to be consumed immediately upon deliverance to the table, if you ask me: no type of cooked egg ever got better with time and burying it in the ground to then be unearthed is just lunacy.

Name aside, these ready-made Spanish tortillas are bloody amazing for people like me who want a quick lunch but don’t want to put any more effort into preparing it than simply opening the fridge.

Lunch is often my downfall: if I can’t immediately fathom what it is I’m going to have, then I take out a block of cheese and the butter and I spread the butter into a white roll, fill the roll with cheese, maybe some sliced tomato if I’m worrying for my general health, and then I stretch up to the cupboard that sits above the fridge, out of child-reach, and I get myself a packet of Walkers Salt & Vinegar crisps (the elite crisp and I won’t take other suggestions) to add texture, crunch and variety to the plate.

The Unearthed Spanish Tortilla saves me from myself. There it sits, all fresh and lovely and air-sealed, layers of cooked, salty potato trapped in the firm, eggy goodness. Perfectly seasoned. So much protein! Just slit open the lid with a knife and cut the tortilla in half and tip one half of it onto a plate with the aforementioned tomatoes that would have gone into your cheese roll, add some rocket dressed in good balsamic and extra virgin olive oil! A ten second wonder.

Yes I know how “easy” it is to make a Spanish Tortilla from scratch and save money, it’s also easy enough to wash dishes by hand, or to open a road atlas and read a map. What I want at lunchtime is convenience.

The last time I got shot down for a food recommendation it was McCain’s ready-made frozen jacket potatoes and I’m still reeling - though people had a fair point. Even Rich couldn’t believe my laziness.

“It takes me barely ten minutes longer to cook one from scratch,” he said, “and I can buy the potato for 25p.”

I stand by them, the frozen jackets - absolutely genius idea. Because having to microwave a potato on one plate and then transfer it somewhere else to finish cooking, it’s just too much to think about when I’m mid work-flow. I’m trying to solve world problems such as how to make a curl last longer on mid-length hair, I don’t have mental capacity for potato cooking times in the middle part of the day.

So, the ready-made Spanish Tortilla. They do a plain one and they do one with spinach. Both are juicy, tasty and feel so wholesome and good that you have to find something really processed to nibble on afterwards. I just ate a mini bag of Haribo Tangfastics, balanced it all out nicely.

Do not buy the tiny 250g tortillas, even if you’re just feeding yourself and thinking the other half of the big one will go to waste. The 250g is almost the same price as the 500g. And I can guarantee you’ll eat the other half of the big one for lunch the next day…

In fact, I don’t know how filling you like your lunches! Maybe you’d eat the 500g tortilla in one go - I tend to err light on my lunches because I like to have a stop gap at about 4pm and line up some cream crackers with cheddar to see me through to dinner time (I think I’m probably classified as a grazer), but I have gone in for the whole thing in one sitting and it felt hard going. Proceed with caution.

The Unearthed Spanish Tortillas are here - I get them from Sainsburys and they are frequently on special offer there.

Edit: have just seen this Guardian article about the best supermarket Spanish tortillas: Sainsburys own comes out on top! I haven’t even seen the Sainsburys own! Will try and report back.

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3. Child Master Photograper Competition™

Full disclaimer: this idea is a Crilly Original and I only thought it up yesterday, but it was so successful I needed to immediately tell you about it. I was at my friend Harriet’s house and all of the kids were under our feet in the kitchen, wanting various things and needing constant inspiration despite there being a huge garden with hiding areas, laser quest guns and a semi-lethal tree swing whose natural trajectory sends the swinger straight through a holly bush and into the sturdy, wide trunk of an ancient oak.

I am useless at thinking up activities for my own kids but I seem to have some weird brain wiring that makes me the most creative parent on earth when other people’s kids are around. Honestly, the stories I think up! The games I invent! My own kids look at me when this happens as though they are witnessing one of the world’s greatest betrayals. It must be as though they don’t even recognise me as a person.

Anyway, yesterday, on the spur of the moment, I invented this thing called the Child Master Photographer Competition™, where they all had to take the iPhone out and capture the very best photo they possibly could of a set subject. The subject this time being chicken/s. I’ve never seen kids disappear so fast! The best photo wins.

The cynical among you are thinking that they disappeared with my iPhone and hid behind a hedge Googling words like “bum” and “boobies” but my phone was locked, they could only take pictures. And they were gone for a good half an hour. My eleven year-old, bless her, was gone indefinitely because by the time she got her turn with the camera the hens had all hidden in the bushes, traumatised by their enthusiastic up-close portrait sessions. I went out to find her cross-legged on the grass, waiting patiently for one of them to come out.

I didn’t even have to judge the Child Master Photographer Competition™, just look at the various entries and say all of the encouraging things that we as modern parents are supposed to. “Goodness that one is fantastic! Really professional!” (Blurred red beak and a large, shiny eye, widened in terror, whole iPhone reflected in its surface.)

I think I might do more of these comps. “Find me the fastest snail!” “Get the most interesting twig!” “See who can sort this bag of recycling the fastest - glass into the green bin, cardboard into the bag!”

Well there we are, three recommendations. I don’t have a je ne recommendez pas this week, only a long rant about customer services and my missing sports bra, but it’s a rant I need to sit on for a couple of days so that I’m not speaking in anger…

Mind you, if I did happen upon a time travel machine then I’d have bigger fish to fry in terms of the recent things I’d do differently; namely the Bum Procedure of Doom (post coming, context here) which I would absolutely 100% run a mile from, backless gown flapping behind me as I sprinted through the exit of the outpatients department.

I’ve just realised that the pile of books I was supposed to be ploughing through isn’t the same pile I’ve actually been ploughing through (my God, can I please stop using the words “pile” and “ploughing”, it’s far too soon): nevertheless, I have some very strong book recommendations for you. And also some book dislikes, though these are always more controversial…

Let’s start with the loves.

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John of John, Douglas Stuart

The first and only hearty recommendation so far from my summer reading list. I am yet to read Land by Maggie O’Farrell because my mum made off with it the day I bought it and I am downloading The Correspondent to my Kindle to read on holiday later this month. The others, well. You’ll see.

(I’ve just seen that my Kindle is fifteen years old. Should I give it an upgrade? I think it must be the first ever edition of the Paperwhite. It has a little dink in the screen that lets light escape, which is quite irritating, but otherwise seems to work perfectly. I’m just wondering whether a newer one would be ridiculously amazing, like going from one of those early Apple Mac computers that had the plastic see-through backs and came with 2GB of storage to, I don’t know, my current MacBook Pro? Would I see some dramatic difference, or would it be exactly the same, minus the dink?)

But John of John. I really enjoyed it, if enjoy is even precisely the right word when it comes to Douglas Stuart’s books. They really put you through the wringer. I would really advise starting with Shuggie Bain, moving onto Young Mungo and then starting John of John, because although they are all completely unrelated stories, there’s a definite kind of process you’re moved through; violent Glaswegian upbringings, poverty-stricken backgrounds, themes of forbidden love and loneliness and brutality.

AM I SELLING ALL OF THIS TO YOU FOR YOUR SUMMER SUNBED READ ALL RIGHT THEN I WILL CARRY ON.

John of John is set on the remote, wild Isle of Harris rather than Glasgow, but almost as soon as you start reading the themes feel familiar - you could absolutely tell, without ever being told the author, that this is a Douglas Stuart book. Violent father, secretly gay son, small, forbidden pleasures, relentless work, bone-tiredness and a sense from the characters of for the love of God when will this all end?

The story, in short: son (Cal) comes back from his studies to the Isle of Harris, where his Dad is a weaver and also farms his area of rocky, inhospitable land. Both are secretly gay, made more complicated by the fact that they are also (supposed to be) strict Presbyterians and completely wedded to their faith.

Some of the situations that arise are genuinely hilarious, despite the sense of impending doom and peril, but this is countered by absolute dismal heartbreak and a background of drizzle, cold winds and constantly chapped hands.

Look, I love Douglas Stuart. I don’t know another writer who can pen things so very bleak with as light a touch. It’s always an education, reading him, and John of John was no different.

John of John is in hardback here.

Ripeness, Sarah Moss

I raced through this and immediately ordered two more books by the same author and then bought tickets for her appearance at Toppings in Bath in the autumn! That’s how much I liked it.

I realised that I had read another one of Sarah Moss’s novels years ago, one called Night Waking, and I didn’t like it so much. It was about a woman who moves to a remote island with two small children and struggles to cope with their demands and all the other things that life is hurtling her way.

I do wonder whether I’d enjoy it more now, with a bit more life under my belt - I note from my records (Kindle download history) that I read it in 2011, so I was juggling modelling with blogging, was unhappy with where we were living in London and also would have been right in the midst of it with unexplained infertility and pregnancy loss. (All for another time, maybe.) Have you ever wondered whether you disliked a book simply because you read it at an inopportune time? I might give Night Waking another go this summer, seeing as though I’ll have my Kindle fired up already…

Anyway: Ripeness. Absolutely excellent. Two storylines: young Edith, who is sent to Italy to help “sort out” her older sister, a ballerina who is in the late stages of pregnancy, and present-day seventy-something Edith who lives in Ireland, alone, and is (if you ask me) just so incredibly wise and thoughtful and grounded and has mostly managed to work herself out.

I found her character very comforting; I know she’s fictional, but she has been absolutely brutally honest with herself and we get access to all of these thoughts, all of these revelations and slow realisations that she has gradually made about her own life and the people she has shared it with. I found it poignant and such a compassionate and optimistic way to write a character, especially because she is a woman in her later life - no “bitter, blunt, accidentally hilarious old woman gives memoirs from rocking chair” trope here.

I really felt as though this book gave something new and different. And the modern-day storyline was the one I liked least! Imagine how much I loved the Ballerina Troupe Sequester Themselves in Lake Como Palace storyline! With a seventeen year-old Edith, set the horrendous and completely age-inapprorpriate task of seeing her older, snippy sister through the last of her pregnancy and the giving-up of the baby. Oooph! What a read.

Ripeness is available in paperback here.

The Artist, Lucy Steeds

The Artist, currently 99p on the Kindle, by the way, is Lucy Steeds’ debut novel and I am totally bowled over by it. Finished it last night after devouring it over the course of three, long nights, and it is so exquisitely executed - not a dud moment did I skip over, not a dull passage did I skim!

Set in the South of France, in a hot hot summer (already perfect holiday read), it’s set at the crumbling old farmhouse of one of the world’s most revered painters. He’s a bloody tyrant, this bloke, but you fully get sucked into his orbit of genius alongside the other characters, magnetised by his moods and his methods and the way he snatches plates of half-eaten food from his guests so that he can take them off to his studio and paint them as they decompose.

You can smell the rotting fruits and the sardines and the out-of-season oysters as you read through the unbearably hot weeks and uncover the secrets that are stewing away beneath all of the tubes of oil paints and huge stretched canvasses and overflowing ashtrays.

In short: boy meets girl, girl has a secret, whole thing is loomed over by this borderline-psycho world-famous painter. Oh it’s so good, I almost don’t want to tell you anything else! Delicate, trembling, naive love scenes, descriptions of art and of food and of people that makes you glad to be an alive, feeling human, it’s the absolute antidote to AI dross and will make you want to spend the rest of the summer visiting old churches in France and touring art galleries.

Strong, strong recommend.

The Artist is here.

Right. That’s three books I’ve loved, here are three books I haven’t:

Thanks for reading, everyone - I’m off to make Kedgeree, which I love but have to call by a different name because it’s the only thing Rich rolls his eyes at. He just has a total mental block about eating it, says it’s something to do with the name. Anyway, he made the kids’ dinner and so it’s my turn to do ours. (We don’t all eat together, are you mad? It’s like willingly eating inside an animal enclosure at the zoo.)

Tell me which books you’ve been reading in the comments - good ones that I can add to my list, not-so-good ones I can avoid.

If you’re wondering where the second half of my arse-related saga is: it’s en route. Fear not. So many of you read the first part about the enema (here) that I thought I’d been given a shout-out by someone, Ronaldo, or India Knight, but no. You all just love reading about my discomfort, apparently.

But let us not sully this post with bum talk too, lest it become tiresome: onwards and upwards, towards the light, my friends! Let us leave that particular tunnel of darkness (lol) and proceed with the favourites:

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David Sedaris, The Land and Its People

I went to see An Evening with David Sedaris a couple of weekends ago. Sedaris is one of my all-time favourite writers, absolutely masterful at recording daily observations and his own reactions to them in a way that is endlessly funny. I long ago banned myself from reading his books in public because they make me laugh so suddenly and so violently that anyone in my immediate vicinity swiftly moves away from me, as though they’re worried I might be the sort of person who is about to poo into my own hands and then daub it on the interior walls of the London Underground carriage we’re all travelling in.

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So anyway, I went to see David Sedaris and came away feeling quite inspired about my writing. But not epiphany-level inspired, where you feel so suddenly driven and energised that you arrive home and dramatically sweep all of the crap from your kitchen table, thunk a typewriter down onto its surface, snort a line of Pro Plus* and then spend four straight days tapping out half of a novel that, when you read it back, is complete nonsense. That kind of “inspired” is always a double-edged sword, if you ask me. You can’t go from 0-60 in writing and expect it to be sustainable! You can’t have not written for two years and then gurn your way through most of a working week and then, when the excitement subsides (and/or the typewriter needs a new ribbon) you don’t write again for another two years. It’s pointless!

No, I came away feeling the better kind of inspired. Low-key inspired. I prefer to be low-key inspired, really. It’s less stressful. More like meh, I should really pay a bit more attention to my schedule and carve out the proper time for doing what I love most.

Or, maybe I should buy some new pens.

What I like about David Sedaris and his evening of entertainment is that he doesn’t even talk about his writing process. He just reads from his diaries and his notes and you realise, without Sedaris having to explain a thing, that he is showing you how he writes; by observing constantly, and writing these observations down in a disciplined manner. And you also realise that not only does he not mind doing this, the observing, it’s his very life-force. He loves it!

And it made me realise that I love it, too. And that I used to also write everything down, all day long. My book, How Not to be a Supermodel, was written largely from notes that I had taken throughout the noughties. Nearly every story, every anecdote, was taken from the (very extensive) notes I’d made at the time, twenty years earlier in many cases.

Anyway, I got home, immediately ordered David Sedaris’ new book (The Land and Its People) and then ordered a Collins Day-to-Page diary, which is what I wrote in for years when I was doing my writing courses and my MA. The diary has been with me for two weeks and I’ve written in it every night. Expect the sequel to How Not to be a Supermodel imminently.

You can buy The Land and Its People online here, but if you are new to David Sedaris I would highly recommend starting with Me Talk Pretty One Day, Naked and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.

Oh, and Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls. I could keep going.

Love Story.

On a very distantly related note, I have been totally blown away by Love Story, a Disney Hulu series that is based on the story of JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette. I don’t know why it hit me so hard, but from the moment their (JFKJ and CB) eyes locked across the room and Kate Bush started singing This Woman’s Work, I was absolutely invested.

Disclaimer: I had no idea who either of them even were before I started watching because that entire era passed me by, in the mid-to-late-nineties, busy as I was drinking Kiwi 20/20 and smoking Benson & Hedges and frequenting terrible local nightclubs wearing flammable bodycon dresses.

I would have had not a clue about the ending had a thousand people on Instagram not replied to my stories with “such a shame about how it ended though, so so sad!” and then put two and two together with the aeroplane.

But the outfits! The after parties! NYC in the nineties! Calvin Klein! I know the execution of this series is supposedly quite inaccurate (and I do actually think it’s a bit shitty when they do this “based on truth” thing and then make stuff up, for the families and friends of the people involved) but my God. It has stirred something within me, Love Story, and I can’t shake it. Is it because I was in New York as a model a mere three years after this story finished? Is it because it all feels so weirdly recognisable? And I was about to launch into a Love Story of my very own, and it brings it all back?

The mad thing is, the nineties and noughties don’t even seem like nostalgia: they seem like yesterday. I can still feel the brutal heat rising up from the pavement outside my New York agency as I hefted my massive suitcase out of the taxi. Can still hear the crackle of paper as I lit a Marlboro Light, the feel of the window frame pressing into my back as I sat half out of the window to smoke it.

Oooph.

And that feeling of sinking into love with someone, when it’s so uncomplicated, and you have it all still to discover, and whatever that is when you have the instant chemistry that makes your entire being do a sort of jolt. I wrote about this period of my life in my book, How Not to be a Supermodel, but I feel as though watching Love Story has unlocked a load of other memories that I had buried deep down. I mean how utterly mad was it, how totally wild, that I was in New York City when I was twenty-one and I was just galavanting around the place, hanging a bedsheet up at my window instead of a curtain and also getting taken to dinner where starters cost thirty dollars. (And that was then.) I just went off and did whatever, going to the Hamptons with a load of people I barely knew, going to see a band play in a basement uptown and walking twenty blocks home afterwards, listing to Ministry of Sound CDs on my diskman as I walked. With not a soul to look out for me. I didn’t even have a working mobile phone!

Love Story sort of brought it all back. How mad is it, also, that Calvin Klein was a proper designer label, doing shows and dressing famous people for red carpets but then they started making a shit tonne out of selling underpants and now they just make this high-volume, mass-produced stuff that everyone and anyone can buy. And yeah, the waistband of the underpants is iconic, and they still do great ads for the underwear, but you can buy it from a cut-price bargain basement off the Edgware Road so it’s not exactly the minimalist mecca it was in the nineties, where red carpet looks were carefully considered and “only black paper clips” on the stationery would do.

I have to say that the Love Story itself did wear a bit thin by the time I was halfway through the series; it seemed to be 90% made up of the lovers being (frankly) totally incompatible and perhaps not really liking each other as much as you should if you have just got married, and then lots of crying and lip biting until yes, they died. Still. Loved the whole thing.

It’s on Disney Hulu here.

The Lexon Flip

I bought a digital alarm clock in an attempt to remove my iPhone from the bedroom. I am seriously trying to cut down on my iPhone usage and “before bed” as well as “the first moment I wake up” are big danger times for me - I use the phone scrolling as a weird sort of soother to ease me out of the day at the end of it and into the day the minute my eyes are open.

It’s mostly Family Wordle’s fault: I have a group with my parents and my sister and everyone does Wordle first thing and so, for the past few years, I have become accustomed to opening my eyes and then immediately, before I’ve even worked out what day it is, loading up the NY Times on my phone screen.

Terrible phone hygiene. Obviously once the Wordle is done I then have to share my results with the group on Whatsapp, and then I check all the Whatsapps I’ve missed overnight, then I look at my emails, and usually a load of Substack posts have come through to my inbox, so I click over to the app to read them so that I can “heart” them and share them or leave a comment, and then usually I get drawn into seeing some posts on the timeline that have been published by people I don’t follow…

…and by this time it’s at least twenty minutes after my alarm has gone off and before I’ve even stretched my legs out I’ve read about a woman in America who escaped an abusive husband only to accidentally marry his brother, bought a pair of socks that promise to reduce calf ache after exercising and added three things to my admin to-do list that arrived in my inbox overnight.

I mean how is this good for me?

It’s worse before bed. I scroll when I have my Current Body LED Mask on and look for clothing items that would definitely, if I had them, fix every single dressing catastrophe.

Again: how is this good?

So the idea is to remove the phone from my vicinity in non-working hours. Oh OK, so I need to look at messages from the school mums, village chat, etc, to find out what type of uniform the kids are supposed to be in and to see if any trees are blocking the route out of the village (happens) and other vital morning news, but most of the non-working hours need to be phone free. Otherwise my brain is going to melt into a weird pool of brain slushie and start leaking out of my nostrils and ear holes.

Anyway, I bought an alarm clock. It looked very stylish when I found it online, and despite it being four times more expensive than the one that did exactly the same but looked like shit, I was drawn in. I obviously have a supreme eye for design because I picked it out instantly from about forty alarm clocks and - lo and behold - this one has won prestigious awards that single it out as an iconic object.

Smug.

Not so smug about the price, which was forty pounds, but I reasoned that it looked excellent and would be one of those objects I instantly treasure because I just love the design and function of them.

But look at the bloody size of it! I laughed when it fell out of the outer box. I thought it was the little box of pavement chalks I’d ordered on the same day! I thought it would be the same size as our alarm clocks of the eighties and nineties - remember the annoying stringy radio aerial they had hanging out of the back of them that you never quite knew what to do with?

This is less than a quarter of the size. It might be an eighth of the size, when I weigh it up. How hilarious! I’m trying to think of it as a piece of tech rather than the kind of alarm clock we used to buy at Argos. After all, that Brick thing (I actually have one, it got sent to me, I got confused on the first minute and then gave up and put it in a drawer, must revisit!) costs £54 and is smaller still. And doesn’t even tell you the time!

What I loved about this Lexon Flip Classic was a) it came in a very seventies, Tom Ford-esque cool-toned brushed gold, which I am a sucker for, b) it had this large ON / OFF on either side (you flip it to turn on or off) which looked incredibly funky and c) the battery (it’s rechargeable) lasts for about six months. So not only do I not have to plug it in and have another wire hanging down off my bedside table, I can carry it with me if I travel and I don’t have to worry about it running out.

I’m already very enamoured. You just tap the top of the clock to snooze it, which I do four or five times, because there’s no Wordle to encourage me to wake up properly, or flip it over to OFF to turn it off completely. Satisfying.

And at least this one doesn’t have a radio. Nothing was more terrifying than being launched out of a deep sleep as a teen to the sudden raucous din of Our House by Madness, or Vindaloo by Fat Les. Just right into it, no warning, straight into the middle of the song. Except accompanied by shitloads of crackling, because we never knew what to do with that stringy aerial thing, so radio stations were only partially tuned in. 40% at best.

Those were the days.

I mean they really must have been because look at me! Shunning my phone for the simplest of (designer) alarm clocks. Considering swapping the washing machine for a mangle. (Joke.)

I bought my Flip clock here.

My God, why is this month’s favourites so long? Are you still here? There’s even a new bonus section for paid subscribers, called Je Ne Recommendez Pas, where I tell you about the things I’ve tried that were rubbish, which might push this post into thesis-length territory!

I’ll keep the shirt bit quick:

Seersucker Berry Stripe Shirt

Saw this shirt a month or so ago, obsessed over it daily, because who can get this image from their mind once it has been seared on:

Doesn’t she look the very picture of cool and sultry? And I have wanted to experiment with this sort of colour (colours) for a while. The shirt almost reads as red, a pinkish red, but isn’t: it’s berry and pale-pink fine stripes.

Not sure seersucker is my favourite material but I do have to say that it feels quite cool in the summer sun, it seems to stay separate from the skin, almost as though it is scared to touch you, which means that you have this air pocket layer all around you and the fabric feels light and unobtrusive.

I used an intro discount code for my purchase, you can find them online (or on the home page, if it pops up) but would happily have paid full price - it feels like a special purchase, all beautifully boxed-up and with the collar cardboarded out and so on.

I bought a 10-12 (and I am a 10-12) and would say the fit is oversized. I bought mine here. Goes amazingly well with a huge variety of things, including my summer floaty trousers, all of my shorts, and thrown on over dresses and a light cover-up.

Piglet Towels

I replaced all of the towels at my holiday cottage, The Dorset Nook, and bought new ones for the new cottage, The Dorset Nest, (website incoming), all from Piglet in Bed. Which made me feel as though I was Jeff Bezos, because these towels ain’t cheap and I bought enough to fill a huge, fridge-sized box, but at the time I bought them they had a brilliant sale on and an extra 10% off on top.

I am a hound for a sale. If there’s a big purchase I know I need to make and time is not of the essence, I keep my eye on that thing (or things) for months until the appropriate discount appears. (In this case it was near enough 30%, which bought the towels down to M&S prices!)

I’m afraid they’re not in the sale at the moment, but Piglet do have a 15% intro code for new customers. When I tell you that these towels are supreme… crikey. Piglet don’t even really boast about the quality and thickness, you have to go looking for the official figure which is a whopping 600gsm, but it’s the stripe colour combos I love the most. They could jazz up the most drab bathroom, single-handedly.

Piglet towels are here.

Right. Onto the new segment for paid subscribers, Je Ne Recommendez Pas. Things I don’t recommend. (Yes I realise this French isn’t accurate.) This week we have the online clothing company I thought was a scam and a book that very sadly bored me so much that had to skip big chunks of it:

Until Sunday…

I’m editing the piles post tonight. I’m not sure there are so many laugh out loud moments as the enema story, I’ll be honest, but that’s mostly because someone went up my bottom with a glorified poker and snapped elastic bands around parts of my rectum. It’s a difficult one to get a giggle from, though I did crack some pretty good jokes while he was up there.

Jobs for you to do before you depart: press the heart button (if you’re not reading in the Substack app then why not, it’s so much better); leave me your comments re Love Story and also whether you’ve read anything by David Sedaris; tell me what you think of my new alarm clock. Don’t be rude about it, it’s my new favourite thing.

AD info: this post is sponsored by Dove Whole Body Deo.

Who better to test out a new deodorant than me?

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: there are a million people better suited to testing out a new deodorant than you, you desk-bound twerp! What about world class sprinters? Jockeys? Spies!

People who do high-stress activities that see them perspiring from every single pore on their body? They would be good deodorant testers! Gamblers. Lion Tamers. People who do physically demanding activities all day long. Ballerinas. Paramedics. Road fixers!

And yes, you could argue that any and all of those people would be far better placed to test out Dove Whole Body Deodorant than I am, but hear me out: those people know they’re going to get dramatically less and less fresh over the course of the day. It’s absolutely expected.

The undercover agent working in enemy territory gets ready in the morning knowing they’re going to spend the day rifling through the desk drawers of a megalomaniac, hoping he hasn’t guessed that “Brian the music teacher from Milton Keynes” is a fabricated persona.

The Red Bull extreme downhill cyclist knows that by the time she reaches the last 100 metre stretch she will have sweat rivers running through the ravine of her cleavage, that her top will be stuck to her back, that her feet will be hot and sticky. (I’d have a lot worse things coming out of me if I had to do one of those downhill courses, let me tell you!)

And yes, they would put Dove Whole Body Deodorant through its paces, but it would all just a bit obvious, if you ask me. If you ask me (and I know you haven’t, but I shall continue), a better test of their new deodorant would be on a person who maintains a relatively steady stress level for the majority of the day, with no real ongoing efforts or physical exertions, but who must then withstand sudden spikes of stress and adrenaline so monumental, so heart-stoppingly significant, that it’s a miracle she’s still alive.

It’s me, I’m referring to, in case you haven’t put two and two together. Me, with the same stress profile as an FBI Negotiator: relaxed for hours at a time, all fine and dandy, but with sudden and violent plunges into high-tension situations that I (unlike an FBI negotiator) seem apparently completely ill-equipped to deal with. Situations that send the protruding vein on the side of my forehead into pulsation overdrive.

Take last Wednesday as an example. There I was, minding my own business, working my way through my admin to-do list and putting off writing a blog post that’s been in drafts for a month: I could see the whole rest of the day stretching ahead of me and only one urgent task that couldn’t be deferred. Absolute bliss.

But then the intercom rang for the gate and it was a man selling olive trees - “yours for £850”.

“No thanks!” I said, very politely, but it is a quirk of the gate intercom that anything you say into one end of the receiver comes out the other end an unintelligible, garbled mess. It sounds like a goose is honking through a megaphone.

And so the olive tree man didn’t understand my “NO THANKS” and carried on talking into the camera about the age of the olive tree and the fact it came with the gigantic pot (it was probably quite a good price, in all honesty, considering it was about a thousand years old and eight feet tall, but putting it in my hands would be like signing its death warrant) and so I thought I’d stop being lazy, put some shoes on and go down and tell him I didn’t want the olive tree in person.

Except that instead of turning off the speakerphone button, I pressed the button to open the gate!

If I say that as though it’s an epic problem, me opening the gate, that’s because it is. We have a long and very steep driveway, and once someone starts bringing a large vehicle through the gate, they commit themselves to at least five minutes of pained, extreme manoeuvring at the top. Any big vehicles that absolutely must come up (small skip lorries, heavy deliveries) have to turn around so laboriously (and usually churning up the grass at the sides of the driveway in the process) that it becomes this really tense, high-stakes spectator event that you didn’t want to have to partake in in the first place. Especially if they get too close to where the drive drops off into an almost vertical hill. Whooph!

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Anyway, the gate started to open and I was bellowing through the speakerphone - “STOP! DO NOT GO THROUGH THE GATE” and at the same time trying to put my trainers on, but the kids had stuffed my trainers with tissue paper as a joke (story for another time) and I could only get the very tips of my feet into them. So off I went through the door, on tip-toes, with the dog barking his head off, and then the dog managed to get out in front of me which added another layer of peril because it was quite likely he’d go and run behind the reversing Olive Tree Truck, so I had to launch myself down the driveway - gradient akin to that of Mount Manaslu - with my feet en pointe inside my Flipflop trainers, waving my arms in the air and screaming “STOP! STOP!”

And all without a bra on, whilst realising I’d forgotten to put the bins out for collection day and also suddenly remembering I had a dentist appointment at half past two.

But there I was, three minutes later, back at my desk, dog alive and safely under my feet, heart rate back down to a solid 48.

(Apparently this means I’m afflicted with something, the fact I have a default resting heart rate of around 48. But I spoke to the doctor and she said all is fine. She said, “many athletes have this sort of resting heart rate” and I have to say I swelled with pride, despite her clanging error. That is what you get for wearing cycling shorts and a baseball cap to a doctor’s appointment! Flattery! I should probably have corrected her, in that I am absolutely not an athlete, I just do my Peloton classes a few times a week, but I was feeling too good about it all, and concentrated on flexing my quads a bit so that I could really ham up the athlete look.)

Anyway, oh my God, I digress, what I’m trying to say is that my days seem to be peppered with these high-stress moments that send me hot and bothered all over. So who better to test a deodorant that goes beyond the underarms? That delivers all day odour protection and keeps things feeling fresh in places like the back and the feet? Between the boobs? Under the boobs? In between the thighs? (This area specifically seems to be a danger zone for me this year. It must be the cycling shorts!)

I mentioned in a previous post that the spray version of Dove Whole Body Deodorant had won permanent status in my bag (as a teen of the nineties, I am well au fait with the idea of an all-over spraying session, including feet, stomach and a quick spritz in the general direction of the Garden of Eden) but I have been lengthily and dutifully appraising the benefits of the stick and the cream version too.

What I like about the stick and cream is that they have a very soft, silky texture that doesn’t dry down to a tight film, or leave a gunky mess behind: it’s all very neat and lovely and above all gentle, more like applying skincare than anything else. A nice replacement for my usual trick, which is just spraying copious amounts of perfume over myself in the hope that it’ll tide me over until I get home again and into the shower!

They’re not meant to replace underarm deodorant - but then I wouldn’t really want to put underarm deodorant anywhere else on my body, because the texture feels weird (I did try it, to check) - but I do think it’s the more skincare-leaning alternative to what we did in the nineties, which was to spray whole entire cans of Impulse or Charlie Red over ourselves after PE to keep any odour in check.

I think for me that the spray version most easily fits into my routine - it has a similar “silky” feel to the cream and stick, which is unusual for a spray product and the fact that it’s no-contact means it’s easy to apply during the day for freshening top-ups. In the last two days alone, the Dove Whole Body Deodorant spray has seen me through an incident with a bat on the landing (the cat dropped one out of its mouth, Rich was away, I had to catch it in a cereal bowl and release it outside, stress level a solid 10/10), an unexpected encounter with some cows and an extreme driving event that saw me having to reverse alongside an open trench in the lane, where they were replacing pipes, with only about an inch of leeway either side of me because my car is as wide as a cross channel ferry, all whilst a huge tractor bore down on me from the front and my kids argued in the back about how glacé cherries were made. (They’re slowly simmered in syrup over a lengthy period of time.)

So there you have it. Dove Whole Body Deodorant spray, permanent fixture. It has very quickly become the product I think about when I’m going to be out for the day and I know there will be a point where I want to feel more fresh and comfortable. The skincare-led formula feels beautiful on the skin, really gentle, which I think is what keeps me coming back to it, actually, above all else.

Dove Whole Body Deodorant is now available at selected retailers (see here for more info) - my most-used scent is Raspberry and Rose, but all three fragrances are mild (I don’t find they particularly interfere with my perfume) and have that “clean” sort of smell that is comforting and light.

I know what you’re thinking: too much information! I’ll never be able to look at you the same way again! That’s OK. I’ve not been able to look at myself in the same way for over a decade now.

Now I don’t know whether you’ve ever had to self-administer an enema (it’s not the kind of question you tend to ask during polite conversation): a bit of cursory research on Instagram leads me to believe that for many hospitals and clinics it is something that is often done “in house”.

Indeed, this was not my first rodeo at the enema show: I’d had one about fifteen years ago before a colonoscopy at Whipps Cross hospital in East London. No sedation, no painkillers and an enema administered by a nurse with the biceps of a heavyweight champion and a touch so far from gentle that I struggled to walk straight for a week.

But at least Nurse Iron Grip removed an unfamiliar, slightly stressful step from what was already an unfamiliar and stressful day: having to do a home enema, which seemed rife with the possibility of serious misstep and/or death, had me feeling emotionally drained before I’d even reached the hospital.

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But anyway, there was a full-scale facial revolt that went on during the heat of the heat-iest wave of heatwave (it reached forty degrees on the stone steps at the front of the house), with more and more spots appearing on my face almost as I stared at it in the mirror.

I knew what it was though, because this has happened before: my skin, which loves all types of sunscreen for most of the year, hates chemical sunscreen when the weather is scorching.

If you have no idea what chemical sunscreen is, then it’s the type of SPF that is more the norm - the default type. If your SPF doesn’t say “mineral sunscreen” on the bottle, then it’s most likely a chemical one. They’re usually lighter in texture, absorb more easily and are virtually invisible once applied. Mineral sunscreens tends to be slightly thicker and will more often than not leave a white tint to the skin because of the filters they use, so only a fraction of the sunscreens you see on the shelves tend to be mineral ones.

Some people freak out over these terms, chemical and mineral, imagining that chemical sunscreens are made on an evil despot’s oil rig from things like battery acid, potassium chunks and melted-down litmus strips, and that mineral sunscreens are formulated by fairies at the bottom of the garden using hemp, grass seed and the juice of the baobab tree. But both are made up of chemicals.

Chemical sunscreens work (simplified version because I’m not qualified on the science, I mean I just wrote “juice of the baobab tree”) by absorbing the UV rays whereas mineral filters reflect the UV rays, using zinc oxide or titanium dioxide. (See! Chemicals!)

Anyway, when it gets really really hot my skin seems to break friends with chemical sunscreens. Maybe it’s because everything gets so clogged up (sunscreen is designed to stick around on your skin, so the normal cleansing job sometimes just won’t be enough) but I also think that, for me at least, it’s something to do with the particular ingredients in the chemical sunscreens. They become intolerable to my face. Weirdly not to the rest of my person (though I’ll extend “face” to cover chest as well) but on my visage I get flourishes of spots, sometimes some irritation and, quite often at the same time, really stinging eyes with formulas that previously didn’t sting me.

Weird!

But all is not lost. Here’s what I do - immediately - when my summertime face begins to fall apart.

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1. Ramp up my cleansing routine.

Usually I’m a “cleanse once in the evening because WHY would my face even be dirtying as I sleep?” sort of person, but in the summer, I really up the ante. I use a balm cleanser in the evening (this one from ELF is my current most-used, it’s a steal and has a luxe melting texture and removes mascara as well as everything else) but in the morning I use something splashy and light.

(This hot weather is the only time I will consider hanging my head over a sink and splishy-splashing it, I cannot abide the sensation of water running down my arms or neck, normally, but if it’s boiling outside it’s just about acceptable.)

I’ve been using the Medik8 Total Moisture Cleansing Gel in the mornings - it’s deep-cleansing and very refreshing and weirdly far more hydrating than it strictly should be for a product of this type. See also Yepoda Bubble Double, and for something less splashy (more creamy) but still light and fresh, try Inkey’s Cream-to-Milk Cleanser.

2. Introduce a BHA exfoliant.

This one is even more important than the first step. A BHA is a beta-hydroxy acid and it’s a type of exfoliant, but one that is oil-soluble, which means that it can get deep into the pores to keep them clear and unproblematic, making it an amazing solution (or part-solution) for people who experience breakouts and blemishes and blackheads.

I sweep the BHA liquid on after cleansing (thoroughly, balm and flannel!) in the evening, so that I know it’s getting to work overnight. Just tip a little onto a cotton pad and swoosh it over the face, making sure you get the side of the nose and the eyebrows (why the spots in the eyebrows? cruel nature!) and then follow with your usual routine, though I’d give heavy creams a miss.

I go: cleanse, LED mask, BHA, light oil-free moisturiser. Or if it’s my retinoid night (I alternate nights, sounds complicated but isn’t) then I might use the BHA the following morning instead. I don’t like to stack those together. Perhaps I’m too cautious with my skincare routine, but I always think it’s best to go easy and tackle one thing at a time! If you want my full skincare routine (obviously take these tweaks into account!) then it’s here.

BHA exfoliants I love and trust:

Paula’s Choice BHA 2% Liquid, here

Skin Rocks Control Acid, here

Medik8 Press & Clear, here

Ole Henriksen Detox Drops, here

3. Switch to Mineral SPF

Is this step even more important than step 2? Can’t decide. But it’s a crucial change, because I basically eliminate the entire cause of my woes in one fell swoop by switching from a chemical sunscreen to a mineral one. Why don’t I use a mineral one all year round? Because generally I find them less refined than the chemical ones, which are usually weightless, invisible and a joy to apply.

Mineral SPFs often feel slightly clunky by comparison, texture-wise, but they have some huge benefits. They won’t sting the eyes. They tend to create a good grippy makeup base. And, perhaps most importantly for the purpose of this post, they can be better for those who get spots or irritation. (The downside is that white cast they can leave, but I do think that some of the brands are getting more clever with mineral sunscreens and the way they are formulated.)

My favourite Mineral SPF of the season so far? Tatcha The Silk Sunscreen. The closest I’ve found to the texture of a silky, lightweight chemical sunscreen. Has added moisturisers and also niacinamide which would be a lovely ingredient to add into the mix anyway if you were having breakouts and redness and so on. Finish is not too matte (which I hate) but equally not shiny-oily feeling. This also seems to have far less of an opaque white cast than others I’ve tried, though obviously I’m relatively fair anyway so my findings here are of limited value.

Just perfect. Oooph, I love it. But not the price-tag, which is a whopping great £65, and unfortunately blows it out of the water for the majority of people. I feel as though some would pay that for a big-name night cream, but when it comes to sunscreen it’s more of a practical purchase rather than a luxury and the majority of people would absolutely balk at it. Does that sound silly? Am I wrong? I’d love this to be more accessible, it’s so beautifully done. Tatcha rarely make anything I don’t instantly fall for, when I think about it, it’s a problem!

(It’s here. I have no discount code other than the SpaceNK new customer one (pops up on the website) but do let me know in the comments if you see any!)

Not quite so silky, but equally not at all horrendously thick, we have Yepoda BFF SPF50. Sits really well under makeup, this one, and costs considerably less than the Tatcha at £24. (Here.) This also has a slight tint, which helps to counteract the white cast.

Cetaphil’s Mineral SPF50 is my newest discovery - grabbed for £11 a couple of weeks ago and tested almost daily since. It actually feels more fluid than either of the above options, in terms of consistency, and spreads quickly and easily over the skin. Does it feel quite so light and delicate once applied? Possibly not, but I think if you started out with the Cetaphil and hadn’t ever laid eyes on the Tatcha then you’d be pretty pleased with it.

I mean, I’ve used it over and over again when I could have been reaching for the others so I’d say that’s a good test. Had I hated it, or found it even slightly upsetting to use then I’d have resigned it to the outbox. No greasiness, gentle on the skin, affordable enough that you’d use it in the right quantities and happily reapply.

I got mine here for £11, I can see it’s usually around £16, still a brilliant price, if you ask me.

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So that’s my emergency protocol for when my summer skin won’t play ball. It’s pretty fast-working. You might ask, why the hell do you not just use mineral sunscreen for the entire summer and then you wouldn’t get these problems in the first place?

It’s a fair question. I suppose I get lulled into a false sense of security for months and months where my skin is flawless and the weather is warm and then BAM!

Maybe next year I’ll start my switches in spring…

Maybe you don’t want to read any of them: then we’re really in trouble.

I must say that I am not dreading the six week break as much as I normally would, because the kids are older now (9 and 11) and will actually amuse themselves pretty well for a good few hours a day, even with their one hour screen rule*.

(*Don’t come for me on the one hour screen rule. I’m not trying to be one of those smug uber-mums who hand-washes all the laundry using homemade soap, or sends the kids into school with a packed lunch consisting of Ottolenghi salad, a tub of pomegranate seeds and cutlery made from recycled bamboo. The one hour screen rule was something we introduced after we realised that for the first six or so years of the kids’ lives we had let them sit and watch Peppa Pig for at least 50% of their waking hours - it’s amazing they didn’t learn to oink instead of talk. We’re simply trying to relieve some of our own guilt. Rich is much more of a stickler for it than I am, I have to say - I’m much more swayed towards “having an easy life”.)

But then there’s always a tipping point, with the long holiday and the kids being at home, and it is always when I am knee deep in one work task and have just realised I’d forgotten another more important work task, and one of them will come in and say they’re bored (always the 9 year old) or hungry (also the 9 year old but often the 11 year old) and my whole carefully-built, overly-optimistic defensive wall of stress-management and time-keeping will just immediately crumble, like it’s been hit with a wrecking ball.

OK tell me which of these you’d like to see first:

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But no. I spent very little time walking in heels as a fashion model because I was terrible at it. I was the sort of model who excelled at being completely still, at being captured in that one moment in time looking outrageously cool or sultry or whatever it is I was being paid (or not) to be.

So I cannot really blame my feet issues (weird alignment, suspected plantar fasciitis that I have diagnosed via the AI section of Google, crappy weak ankles, etc) on the modelling career. True, I often used to walk 8-10 miles a day shuttling between castings, but there are many jobs where you clock up an insane number of steps each day. Postman. Nurse. Dog walker.

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Anyway, I did walk a lot when I was a model, but not in the way everyone thinks. No sashaying for me, because if I was forced to wear high heels and move in them I instantly adopted the gait of a newborn T-Rex - casting directors only made that mistake once! - but lots and lots of stomping the pavements in my Adidas Stan Smiths.

I’d go out on a limb here (lol) and say that the damage to my feet was directly caused in my late teen years. A time of my life when quite possibly my joints and bones were just about finishing their growing and fusing, yet I insisted on going out clubbing wearing six inch platform shoes with insubstantial buckles. And then often walked home with no shoes on at all.

(But you just said you had the gait of a newborn T-Rex? And you wore six inch platforms? Yes, I did, but it wasn’t so much of a problem when I was merely jigging my way around Odyssey at 2am holding a triple Archers and lemonade. The stakes tended to be higher when you were walking in front of a few hundred fashion people at - eg - Hugo Boss.)

And then, going back to the damage, I think that possibly years and years of squishing my feet into any sort of footwear I fancied, including pointy-ended things that folded all of my five toes on top of one another so that they formed a weird Quintruple Decker toe sandwich inside the shoe, didn’t do much good.

All this to say: I’ve been testing out special flip flops that offer a bit of extra sole-cushioning and foot support. Havaianas are sadly dead to me, as one singular hour in them the week before last rendered me immobile for almost two days, suffering lightening pains across my soles and an underlying but moderately severe overall ache that reminded me of the time I thought it would be a good idea to park my car on the outskirts of Birmingham and “walk into town”, to a) atone for my drinking sins and b) save myself the parking fee. (Student. Summer of ‘99.)

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Before we start on the flip flops, I must say that my Birkenstock Eva Arizonas (here online) are supremely comfortable and have a slightly moulded sole that is a million miles away from the totally flat sole of a classic flip-flop. But I have grown a bit weary of their chunky looks and practical aesthetic: what I wanted was a bit more skin on show. A little moment for my pedicure to shine. (Even though it’s a very old pedicure now and the nail polish is hanging off the ends of my toes unattractively, but the sentiment is there.)

I wanted the casual, careless, throw-on footwear of my youth, invoking memories of beach bars and riding around the streets of heatwave Paris on the backs of scooters (yikes) but I wanted this footwear to offer moral, emotional and physical support for my forty-five year-old feet.

First through the gate: FitFlop Flip Flops. They were my first port of call, seeing as though my most-worn trainers are FitFlop, my ballet flats are Fitflop and various other sandals and casual shoes. Surely their flip flops would be the best you could get?

I ordered the iQushion, crafted with special ergonomic technology, in my usual size -UK6. Colour: a lovely soft bronze. How dismayed I was to find that they were so small I couldn’t get my whole foot in! I reordered in a 7. Black. No bronze left. Still a little on the small size, but I thought it would be ridiculous to size up to an 8!

Now what I will say about the iQushion is that they are a cut above your usual flip flop. A properly engineered sole that bounces you along, clever shaping that supports the arch almost imperceptibly, and a lovely slender flip flop strap that looks chic and fashionable. The whole shoe (if you can call it that) feels more sleek and refined than its competitors. (Namely Archies, Croc, Oofos. Though perhaps not as sleek as Crocs, see below.)

What’s stopping the FitFlop iQushion from being the best overall supportive flip flop and allowing me to simply finish the review right here and go to bed?

The toe post.

Oh, the toe post. Now I’m sure after a few weeks I’d get used to it, but the completely vertical positioning of this post meant that it was permanently wedged right up into the space between my toes. A constant annoyance.

And I probably would have put up with it, or ridden it out, had I not on the same day slipped on a pair of Archies, the arch-supporting flip flop brand that must be spending 50% of their profits on re-marketing via the social media platforms.

Never have I seen so many adverts for one product (apart from maybe Celeste d’Or bras, and those reusable eco pan scourers) but let me tell you that they targeted me at precisely the right time.

I had been researching comfy sandals and flip flops for about a week when all of a sudden about sixteen thousand Archies ads landed in front of my eyes in the space of an hour. I must admit I was swayed mostly by the fact that Jennifer Aniston owns three pairs of them, because I love a bit of Rachel from Friends, but also the millions of reviews saying that these flip flops were the comfiest sandals on earth, bar none.

I clicked, I bought, I slipped them on, and boy were they instantly the absolute dream. Archies look almost exactly like Havaianas, or any standard flip-flops, except that they have a big lump moulded into the sole where the arch of the foot should be. It’s slightly weird, the sensation of the foot lump- it feels more like a foot mountain at first - but I imagine that the flatter your foot, or the more fallen the arch, the more you feel the mountain?

Apart from that weird feeling, it was immediate love. Something about the shaping of the sole seems to guide the foot into an optimum position, so that as you walk along your feet aren’t flapping around all over the shop, side to side, up and down, they’re firmly positioned on the sole, with the straps of the flip flop laying securely over the top and the toe post (which is slanted) comfortably in place.

After a week or so of Archies wear, I’m wondering how I ever coped with a totally flat flip flop sole. The idea of it is almost absurd, considering my foot limitations: walking around with two flaps of rubber on the bottoms of my feet, held on by toe scrunching and positive thoughts.

Oh - that’s another thing. No toe-scrunching required at all for the Archies. The foot settles in, the flip flop seems to mould to the foot, everything is solid and secure and comfy.

They’re the winner, for sure, though if FitFlop fixed the toe post (just slant it slightly!) it would be incredibly close, if not a draw. FitFlop with its narrower strap just looks sexier.

I know you’ll pipe up and say “OOFOS!” “Crocs!” but I have examined both, just to cover all bases, and the Oofos are too chunky for this particular brief. The Crocs, though very sleek and stylish-looking, don’t have quite as much arch support. (They would probably be my winner if I didn’t need the extra foot-shaping sole - I love the shape of them!)

So there we have it. Archies are currently saving the day, giving me something non-foot-destroying that’s sleeker and more minimalist to wear with my floaty dresses and linen trousers than the plastic Birkenstocks. Are flip flops ever going to be the podiatrist’s favourite shoe? I doubt it. But if you must (I must!) then these feel like a great option.

You can buy them direct from Archies here and from Amazon here. They’re £35 and there are loads of colours. I’m about to order the dark brown, because I went rogue and did bright pink for my review (I always seem to be drawn to plastic sandals in bubblegum pink!) and they look a bit juvenile with my nice, modern sundresses.

The Fitflop are here - I would definitely size up. I’d size up in the Archies, too, though I found Archies to be more generous.

One thing, before I go: quite a lot of people slipped into my Instagram DMs to say they find their flip flops very noisy. I didn’t really know what to say to this. You’re basically slapping two pieces of thick rubber at the floor with the entire force of your bodyweight, what can I tell you? You’re never going to take someone by surprise with these on…

I feel as though long locks are “in”, at the moment, don’t you? Everyone and their aunt seems to be sporting these impossibly long, straight swathes of hair and for a hot minute I thought to myself, I quite fancy those too. But then it turned out that lots of people I saw with this hair actually had extensions in, which seem to be really expensive and time-consuming and I can’t get past the fact that you can apparently feel the little knobbly bits near the roots where they attach the other person’s hair to your own hair, which would drive me mad.

(I once had eyelash extensions. Three times, actually. The first two times were great, really loved them, but on the third session they used slightly heftier lashes to get a fuller effect and oh my God. I picked and picked at those lashes, rolling them between my fingers until they plucked themselves off the lid, taking the host lash along with them. It became compulsive. I just couldn’t stand the feeling of the stuck-on-ness of it all. I plucked and rolled for twenty-four hours until the next afternoon I realised I only had twelve eyelashes left on one eye and fifteen on the other. I was virtually bald on both lids.

I made an emergency dash into the West End (I lived in London at the time) to find a salon, any salon, who did lash extensions (it wasn’t that common then) and ended up in Chinatown in a room above a restaurant, where a woman tutted at me as she removed the final, sad extensions.)

Anyway, I don’t think long hair is for me, full stop. Every time I have shorter hair I think that longer hair is for me, but then as it grows out I realise that I can’t stand it hanging around my face. That I hate it sitting on my bare skin if I’m wearing a sleeveless top, the way it tickles my back or my shoulders. And so when it’s longer, and by this I mean past the shoulder, I end up tying it up into a ponytail or a bun, and that is where it stays for approximately 98% of the time. Giving me the Worst Tension Headaches of all Time™.

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As soon as it gets hot, my intolerance of having any restrictive clothing touching me increases to absurd levels, so that my ideal garment would basically be a cotton sack with a hole cut into it for my head and two holes for the arms.

AD info: this post is a sponsored post with Dove. Links are affiliate links.

And it’s not the sweatiness, or stickiness of the situation that irks me: it’s almost entirely a sensory one. The roughness of a seam feels eighty times worse if the mercury is rising and tempers are flaring. An elasticated waistband? Absolutely not.

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Anyway, I have the sweatiness and stickiness issue completely covered thanks to (smooth segue here) Dove Whole Body Deodorant, which is a brand new range built for places for places beyond the underarms - in addition to regular deodorant. Think: gap between the boobs that becomes a sweat conduit as soon as temperatures creep above twenty-five degrees. Creases behind the underboob. Channels of pure humidity and clamminess that sit at the tops of the thighs. Let’s face it, these places are absolute carnage zones when the heat turns up.

So, Dove Whole Body Deodorant comes in three formats and three fragrances: the Whole Body Spray, Whole Body Stick and Whole Body Cream. Obviously my most-used so far has been the spray, because I am a child of the eighties and therefore a teen of the nineties and grew up spraying myself liberally with the popular body sprays of the time. Charlie Red, Dewberry, Impulse. This is not the same thing at all, it is the considered version, the mature version: beautiful scents (Raspberry & Rose, Lavender & Chamomile, Sea Mist & Peony) but with a formula that delivers all day odour protection as well as nourishing oils and (incredibly, considering all of this) a quick-dry finish that feels, to me, completely weightless.

And with the same brilliant satisfaction that only an all-over spray session can give. That instant veil of scent, the cooling sensation, the feeling of being immediately freshened and fresh - CAN HIGHLY RECOMMEND A CHEEKY MIDDAY SPRAY ON THE FEET AND BACK, thank me later - and the convenience of the no-touch application.

The Whole Body Stick and Whole Body Cream take things to another level again, feeling more like ultra-moisturising skincare, to me, than anything deodorising. Very clever and designed for chest, thighs and intimate areas, all tested to be gentle and suitable for the particular areas they’re meant to be applied in.

I’ll be back with another post and a deeper review on these, because I am currently working my way through all three formats and fragrances (most-used so far is Raspberry & Rose but it’s a close call) but I can tell you that they are already a brilliant addition to my bodycare line-up, and will be all year round. A deodorant that you can use all over, with added skincare so that it feels beautiful to apply and comfortable to wear? Yes please to feeling fresh and confident all day!

You can pick up Dove Whole Body at selected retailers - details here.

And so to this year’s heated, frantic search for clothes that won’t stick to me like a moist, clammy shower-curtain: I'm looking for a light-as-air dress that will feel like a silken sack but not look like one, ideally sleeveless and sexy, which I realise is a ridiculous request to send out there into the universe. And then I want some slightly smart, tailored shorts that won’t cut across my gut, or make me feel as though my undercarriage has been garrotted when I sit down, but they must not be linen because linen is the absolute work of the devil - I am convinced of it - when it comes to any sort of clothing that has to sit around the crotch. Being left with an explosion of creases and wrinkles that radiate outwards from your groin like a giant star is just not the look you want.

The last piece in my triumvirate of summer fashion figureheads is to be the lightweight jacket. Because for every one of the heatwave days, when we curse the fact we don’t have air con fitted, there are at least twelve-to-fifteen days of overcast mizzle, average temperature fifteen degrees, not cool enough for a jumper but too cool for just the cotton sack. I want something slouchy and undone, something I can throw on over a summer dress but also over the tracksuit I don’t own yet (can’t find one with the correct waistband height) or the soft-as-butter leggings I do own but can’t bring myself to wear, because they basically provide a full gynaecological map of my nethers to anyone who happens to glance down below my naval. (From behind, I may as well have been body-painted. They leave nothing to the imagination. I cannot fathom wearing them out in public.)

Here are my discoveries so far: mostly from Hush. I have to say that my hunt hasn’t been entirely successful - even looking at these pictures now, with the benefit of distance and hindsight, viewing myself as others might view me in the things I’ve been trying on, I’m not entirely sure they’re right.

1 The Shorts

These are Hush. The Cordi shorts. Nearly all of my favourite shorts have been from Hush and I’ve worn them all to fabric-death, where holes have appeared and seams have unravelled and waistbands have gone stretched and loose from years of washing. (Long-term readers and Instagram followers will remember the Green Shorts.)

I usually go for a cargo shape, with the shorts, but is this higher waistband and looser leg slightly smarter? Am I ready for this shape? They’re certainly very cool and comfy. I like that they are just about high waisted enough that they nip in at the right place and cover the area around my belly-button, which is so mashed-up from babies that it looks like the Sarlacc Pit, that horrible hole that Jabba the Hut threw his enemies into for a certain and disgustingly painful death.

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How do we feel about these Hush shorts? Are they getting consigned to the returns pile or do they look very useful? I’m erring towards the latter but could easily be convinced otherwise.

The Hush Cordi Cotton Shorts are here

2 The Dress

Onto the Hush Air Flow dress. Funny silky feel to the fabric on this one that doesn’t necessarily feel light, if anything it has a weight to it - it reminds me of the bias cut Ghost dresses of the nineties - but this does make it drape nicely and hang elegantly as you move.

Am I cock a hoop about it? I’m still searching for alternatives, put it that way.

Hush Air-Flow Dress is here online.

3 The Jacket

I actually think I may have found what I want, here - hurrah! An oversized jacket that is soft and drapey and comfortable but looks denim. For my entire life I have tried to be the sort of person who can wear a denim jacket, but as soon as I put one on I feel as though I’m wearing something that has been constructed from blue paper and cardboard. Did you ever make a robot costume out of a cardboard box when you were little? Wearing a denim jacket always feels a bit like that, to me.

This denim-ish jacket (we’re with Hush again, I did try on other brands but these were the best bits!) is not rigid. It is soft, almost so soft you’d want to sleep in it, and I like the detailing at the back and on the sleeves that stops it from just being a big slouchy blob of nothing, but: there’s the worry that despite all of this, it does still look like a big slouchy blob of nothing.

Thoughts?

The Robbie Jacket from Hush is here

Right, I’m off to do some squats in the sauna and see how Dove Whole Body Deodorant Stick fares. Hahaha….

Shop Dove Whole Body Deodorant now at selected retailers.

Stay with me on this.

My Dad died in the February of 2018. It was all pretty awful and sudden. He didn’t have much with him, when it happened, but somehow his little travel bag of belongings made its way back to me to be dealt with appropriately. Rich informed me (I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to look) that the bag contained a set of my Dad’s clothes, some notebooks, his passport and his glasses.

So I was too sad to look at these items at the time, and I was still too sad to take a look at them when we moved house two years later, and then eight years passed by and the little bag sat in the back shed, clothes neatly folded inside, waiting for me to decide what to do with them.

What is the appropriate way to deal with someone’s possessions when they are all you have of them, but at the same time the possessions are very mundane things that you can’t very well frame and hang on the wall, or have standing on the mantelpiece, or what have you?

‘Why have you got an Asics half-zip fleece jacket displayed on a mannequin in your hallway?’

‘Oh, it was my Dad’s.’

It felt wrong to throw the clothing items out, but also very weird to keep them. The well-worn shoes, the jeans, the Asics half-zip fleece. In the end, nature made the decision for me, by treating everything to a dose of damp and so, last week, when Rich was clearing out the back shed, he asked me whether it might be time to dispose of the garments - and, indeed, the travel bag itself, which had mildewed and musted.

The things I decided to keep?

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Please take a look at these before-and-after photos and be suitably shocked and impressed. The only difference between photos is that the second one was taken after I’d used my ZIIP Halo (at-home facial device that uses electrical currents to lift and tone as well as a myriad of other benefits).

There’s no camera trickery, no filtering, no subtly trying to frown for the before picture or smize for the “after” shot, this is just the effects of the ZIIP.

You can see that my face looks totally lifted in the second photo. In a way, I’m worried that these photos are too good. That nobody will believe me and will think that I’m just raising my eyebrows in the after photo, and putting on a smug expression, but I’m not! If I was raising my eyebrows then my forehead would runkle up into a concertina of horizontal lines - if I was frowning in the before photo, you’d see deep creases in the middle of my forehead.

If it looks as though all of my facial muscles are more alert and taut - more activated - in the after photo, that’s because they are! That’s exactly what the ZIIP Halo does. Gives the face the equivalent of a little gym session.

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Perhaps this is better evidence - I took a photo midway through my ZIIP-ing session, having done only one half of my face. You can clearly see the lift here, too - it’s maybe even more apparent when the result is right there next to the starter material.

Sorry if I sound too excited: years I’ve been working with ZIIP Halo and this is the first time I’ve truly managed to capture the brilliance of the instant visible lift-and-tone effects.

It’s surprisingly hard to capture on film, because although in real life the results are profound and obvious, it’s not like a makeup before-and-after, or someone’s fitness before-and-after, where your eye can easily spot the difference. No “little muscles to massive muscles”, or “unadorned lips to red”.

So forgive the over-enthusiastic start. I had intended to begin this post in a very serene and mature way, formally introducing the ZIIP Halo and its benefits, moving on to how it works (and whether it works!) before describing where it sits in my skincare routine and answering some frequently-asked questions. But I feel as though I’ve bolted straight out of the stable and onto the racecourse here, which isn’t even a saying but let’s go with it, because it’s blatantly obvious that the ZIIP Halo does work and I’ve sort of covered what it does without even trying!

Sigh.

But for those who would like a sensible breakdown, the ZIIP Halo uses electrical currents to help give a more lifted and sculpted appearance. It can help to reduce puffiness and improve general definition, but the main takeaway is that instantly it gives a tighter, more sculpted look.

With consistent use, a few times a week, there are loads of other benefits - ZIIP Halo say seventeen altogether - but people generally want to know more about the instant gratification aspect. Which is, for me at least, that it gives a pre-maquillage facial pick-me-up that makes me look at least ten times less worn out, and with short-term lifting effects that easily last as long as my makeup.

I use the ZIIP Halo before starting my morning skincare routine. I don’t really cleanse beforehand (just a quick swipe over with some micellar water) because I’m only going to slather my face in one of ZIIP’s conductive gels anyway, and I prefer to remove these after ZIIP-ing, so.

On that note: it is very important to use a good conductive gel - one that a) you like using and b) works properly. The reason I’ve stuck with the ZIIP gels is that all of the others I’ve tried (doggedly researching on behalf of readers!) have gone tacky very quickly and then dried midway through treatments. So I’ve found myself repeatedly reapplying, which is massively annoying and disruptive and definitely chops off some of the seconds that the ZIIP Halo could have been working on lifting and toning my skin.

(ZIIP do a few different gels now; they have the basic Electric Complex Gel, which is a lightweight conductive gel and the cheapest option, but they’ve also developed the range to include one that has ingredients to help clarify and calm the skin (the Clear gel) as well as options to help with glow (Crystal), support collagen (Golden) and intensely hydrate (Silver gel). I use the Electric Complex the most, I think, but the device now comes with a selection of different gels in the box, which is a brilliant way of trying them all and deciding which one you like best.)

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To use the ZIIP Halo, you apply a layer of gel to the skin (I usually find six pumps is enough for whole face and upper neck) and then turn the device on. You then slide the ZIIP firmly over the skin and the electrical currents cause the muscles to contract and relax, a bit like, as I said, a gym workout. But for the face.

Here’s where I think most people go wrong, though, when they have a ZIIP Halo: they just turn it on and start, moving it sort of aimlessly across the places they think they want to concentrate on. But the ZIIP actually has seventeen different treatment programmes. Seventeen. Everything from lymphatic drainage to the lifting and sculpting of specific areas (jowls, eyes, lips) and even a dedicated neck session.

How do you select your treatment? Through the (excellent) app. I like this - it keeps the ZIIP Halo device itself simple and minimalist, uncluttered - but I think a lot of people miss the app because it’s something you need to initially download and log in to.

I also think they maybe assume that the treatments on the app just show you where to glide the device, how to move it across your face, but each of the seventeen treatments has completely different waveforms that target different concerns! The app syncs with the device and tells it which waveforms to use. This, combined with a follow-along video guiding the particular placement and movement of the ZIIP Halo on the skin, creates a very specific treatment.

I really think you’re missing a trick if you don’t take the time (ten seconds?) to select a dedicated treatment before you start. I’m wondering whether this is why I got such good before-and-after photos this time around - usually I’m concentrating on the imagery, if I’m doing branded content, and so I just turn the ZIIP on and do an all-over session, but this time I did the Face Lift treatment (the strongest one available) and then I also did the Eyes treatment.

Probably why you can actually see my eyelids, for once!

Highly recommended the app, as you can probably tell. Don’t invest in such a great tool and then fail to access some of the best bits of it! Use it to its limits! And also don’t underestimate the power of consistent use - this isn’t designed to be an occasional pep-me-up, so build it into your skincare routine and aim for two or three times a week.

So: I ZIIP and then I do my skincare routine (see that here) and then straight in with makeup. It really couldn’t be easier and I think that this one singular step, the ZIIP-ing, makes the most immediate and obvious difference in my routine. It’s incredibly gratifying. As someone who is not interested in tweakments or injectables, it feels very exciting to get a perky lift to the facial features that is not only instant, with no downtime, but can be done at home, sitting on the sofa whilst Two Weeks in August is playing on iPlayer. (Oh my God, so much to say about that.)

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OK: some FAQs. These are the questions that pop into my DMs every time I mention the ZIIP Halo.

Does using the ZIIP Halo hurt?

Nope. You may feel muscle twitching as the current passes through it, but I find it weirdly pleasant, that sensation. If it feels prickly, like you’re getting a little electric shock, apply more gel! Sometimes I forget to do my eyebrows or the very edge of my face with my gel and I always get the prickles - lots of gel. That’s what conducts the current, so if there’s no gel, the current can’t pass through and the whole thing is sort of pointless. A bit like rubbing some spoon-backs across your face. Pleasantly cool, but there are better ways to spend ten minutes!

How often can you use ZIIP Halo?

I use it a few times a week, on days I’m going to be filming or out in public and don’t want to look like a medieval weaver who has borne seventeen children and rises before the cock crows to milk her cow and walk eight miles to market.

You can use it three to five times a week initially, to jump-start results, but after about six weeks it’s best to stick to a steady three times.

How long do the lifting results last with ZIIP Halo?

I find the most dramatic lifting and sculpting results seem to last for most of the day, though if I was going out for an evening event I’d do the ZIIP-ing nearer that time, rather than in the morning.

I do think that there’s a cumulative effect, too, long-term and those effects (smoothing, just general improvement in firmness) seem to stick around. Hard to tell, as I’ve never stopped using the ZIIP completely to find out what might happen!

How long does it take to use the ZIIP Halo?

If you just switch the device on and start, it’s pre-programmed with a four minute treatment. However, I’ll say it again: do not ignore the app! Treatments on there can last up to twelve minutes and many will give you a much more intense result.

Can I use the ZIIP Halo straight out of the box?

You can: make sure it’s charged, only using the dedicated charging cable provided in the box, and then it’s ready to go. Sorry to bang on about the app but I absolutely would use it from the off - don’t be impatient, it takes minutes to download and set up and you only have to do it once! - but if you really cannot wait, and want to copy some of the people online who use their ZIIPs in quite frankly the most bizarre ways, be my guest. It’s ready to go. Just switch it on, glide it across your be-gelled skin and when it vibrates slightly, you know you can take it off and glide it across another bit of face.

How do I know how slowly to move the ZIIP Halo?

Guess what’s your friend in this situation? You’ve got it! The app! HA! Honestly, the people at ZIIP are going to think I’ve lost the plot, but I am a big fan of the app. You’d never know.

If you’re app-less then reasonably firmly and slowly - the metal bits both need to be in full contact with your skin and then I like to pretend I’m very slowly pushing royal icing across the top of a cake.

I have never actually pushed royal icing across the top of a cake but I imagine it would feel like this.

Which is the best treatment for jowls?

Oh God. I hate the word jowls! It’s my most-hated word that’s anything to do with the beauty industry. But if you’re after jawline definition and a firming-up of the area around the mouth, the treatment you need is very handily named…Jowls. If it’s neck-tightening you’re after then - again - the treatment is sign-posted pretty well, it’s called Neck.

If you prefer an all-over treatment then plump for The Everything Facial, which combines different wavelengths, movements and pressures, but if you want to amp up the power for maximum lift, it’s the Face Lift you need to try.

Enjoy. Report back. There’s a whole world of discovery right there in the palm of your hand!

Any questions you’re desperate to ask that haven’t been covered here? Leave them in the comments. One of them should most definitely be: is there an app?

You can find the ZIIP Halo online here - use RUTHZIIP for 10% off

It’s a miracle I’m even alive! Let alone bringing you a monthly favourites post! Yes, readers, I can officially say that I survived the Great Somerset Lightening Storm of 2026. And I know that the whole of the UK witnessed the storm, pretty much, but I’m claiming it for us, here in the south west, because out of the 29,000 lightening strikes across the country, a whopping 18,540 of them were here!

At least 11,000 of those landed directly in front of my car, as I sat outside Magic in Motion dance school with the kids, waiting for the flash-flooding to subside and the torrents of water that were rushing down the hill to ease off.

Did you know that being in a car is one of the very safest places you can be, during a lightening storm? I know this because I frantically sat there Googling all about it as my terrified kids sat in the back seats, soaked through and shivering, mopping at their hair with a chamois leather and a McDonald’s napkin, the only two absorbent things I could find in the glovebox.

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(Had it been the glovebox - or car boot - of my late teens and early twenties, it would have contained almost anything and everything you could possibly need in order to survive any brand of apocalypse. Zombie, nuclear, ice age, other. I virtually lived in my car in those years and at any one time had two full sets of clothes, at least four pairs of shoes, bits of rope, approx a hundred plastic bags, cutlery, at least four packets of Marlboro lights, seven litres of Diet Coke, a towel, a duvet, coat hangers, tins of John West Tuna Light Lunch (shelf life 80 years), loose change down the sides of the seats and under the carpets to the tune of around thirty quid, three disposable lighters, a small, battery-powered alarm clock, a Collins Road Atlas and a six-disc CD multichanger filled with the newly-released album from Ministry of Sound, Now 43, Madonna’s Immaculate Collection, Mariah’s Number 1’s, something by Ma$e and the soundtrack to Rush Hour. (Was surprisingly good, at the time.)

Anyway, the car is one of the safest places to be in a lightening storm because - I quote Google - “a car with a metal frame and roof acts as a partial Faraday cage. The metal body safely conducts high-voltage electricity—like a lightning strike or downed power line—around the exterior and into the ground, leaving passengers inside safe, as long as they avoid touching exposed internal metal.”

Had we been in the aforementioned car of my late teens and early twenties, we’d have all been completely shafted because it had more exposed metal on the inside than any other material. (Cars were simpler then! We wound the windows up and down with a handle! Some of them didn’t even have seatbelts!) Had I instructed my nine year-old son not to touch any of the exposed metal in my car-of-the-past it would have taken him about fifteen seconds to lose willpower and poke an experimental finger towards the door frame.

But we weren’t in my car-of-the-past, we were in a state of comparative luxury, and even though I had no way to make fire or keep us warm or feed us if the world did start to end, I had a chamois leather and my in-built Porsche compass, which tells me which direction I’m facing and also how many feet I am - at any time! - above sea level. Excellent in a disaster situation.

The weather continues to be alarmingly weird, in the UK, with a heatwave so brutally hot (near enough forty degrees) that all of the schools around here have closed. People laugh at the British when they say that there’s a heatwave, and comment things like “try living in Fitchlington County, Arizona, we regularly have whole months where temperatures exceed 45!”

But the thing is, we have absolutely no strategy for when it gets hot, here in GB. Nobody has air con. We all rush out and buy fans as though it’s the first time we’ve ever seen sunlight. Why do we not already own a fan? It’s like we’re shocked that hot weather can even exist.

To be frank, we’re also really surprised when it rains a lot and when it floods, and also if it ever snows, or if there are high winds. We tend to fall apart at any weather event that isn’t just a bit drizzly, medium winds, temperature feels like eleven degrees.

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But here I am, writing to you from the inferno. Dog to the left of me, fat cat to to the right, stuck in the middle with you.

Onwards, friends, with the June Favourites.

Ad-info: no paid or sponsored content. Post contains affiliate links. The Tatcha Milk is a press sample sent with no obligation to feature.

The Speedo Hydrasuit Swimsuit.

Nothing has made me feel more instantly like a superhero/member of the Olympic Diving Team than this swimsuit. It’s the high neck! The zip up the back! The fact I can do breast stroke without my baps flying up and out! It’s just so professional-looking - wasted on me really, considering I flounder around in water like a demented seal.

It was love at first try. I just felt so confident in it. The Hydrasuit was thirty-two quid here, I sized up to a UK14 (36) because the cut was, how do I say this, athletic-leaning. No regrets, went to buy it again in navy but they had sold out so I wait, silently, finger paused over the refresh button. Navy would be lovely…

Boody Ribbed Crop Top

Boody have a sale on. Oh, the softest and comfiest bras that are breathable and won’t make you pool with sweat as soon as temperatures rise. I bought a load of them last week, including a little racerback bralette thing to wear beneath vest tops, but the Ribbed Crop has won its way into my favourite underthings of all time list.

It’s so soft. Surprising level of support. Not “sports bra” level, by any means, but much more than I’d expect from something that feels like a cloud is cradling your boobs. I bought it in three colours and only kept one, which was stupid, because I need to have these on rotation.

They are currently in the sale at an outrageously good price here - I wear a size small and am UK10-12, 32DD.

Tatcha Dewy Milk Moisturiser

You’ve heard of Tatcha Dewy Cream, perhaps, because it has cult status in the world of beauty aficionados for the way in which it pumps the skin with so much hydration it’s fit to burst and then leaves a lovely dewy effect, borderline “glazed doughnut”.

I have to concede that it’s a very beautiful face cream. (Though I get an almost identical effect from the Beauty Pie Rich M3 cream here.) But, until now, only really suitable for people with skin on the drier side. I always felt it would be a bit much for those with even a hint of oiliness - it would feel heavy on the skin, despite its lovely gel-cream texture.

WELL. I don’t know what sort of alchemy Tatcha have conjured up with this Dewy Milk Moisturiser, or who in the development team sold their soul to the devil, but it is absolutely exquisite. The same (if not better!) dewy finish, the same ultra-hydration, but in a texture that feels as light as any moisturising product I’ve ever tried.

It’s almost like one of those essences that I can’t be arsed with. (No thanks to an extra step that I then have to Google which order it goes in and whether it still works if I have used my Glycolic peel pads.) It’s that light.

BUY TATCHA DEWY

If you have oily skin - or even just prefer a barely-there texture with your moisturisers, especially in the summer - and you’ve always wanted to treat yourself to something Tatcha, and you have some Space NK rewards to use up (or are a first time customer so get that 15% discount) then I just don’t think you’d regret this. This and the Rice Wash would be my two picks from Tatcha that I think aren’t replicated by anyone else, in any shape or form.

(Though I will always continue to hunt for cheaper options of everything, if I possibly can. I do have high hopes for a Byoma product I’ve just ordered, but not sure it will be the same silky texture. Will report back.)

The Names

Huge trigger warning for Florence Knapp’s The Names, which tells three alternative stories of a family affected by the domestic abuse of the mother, Cora. The novel starts with the naming of a baby and, as Cora gets to the registry office, her naming decision. Go with the name the abusive husband (God, he’s drawn so well, so evilly, I wanted such bad things for him) had instructed her to go with, or choose her own name, thus retaining some sort of small power of her own.

It’s harrowing, I won’t bluster over that fact. There were many sad tears shed here, and I also experienced a deep residual anger that lasted for days and days, still hasn’t subsided, probably fuelled by some of the absolute horrors in the news involving violence against women and the way it is minimised and even ignored.

Now and then I read a novel and think THIS!, this should be on syllabuses for GCSE and A-level students. The Names is one of them. It so powerfully depicts how one person can prey on the vulnerabilities of another and reduce them to a whisper, a shadow of the person they were, and remove all of their ability to stand in the world independently. Whether its finances, or reputation. God, this has been going on for hundreds, thousands of years, and it’s still happening!

The Names is important and terrifying and brilliantly, brilliantly written. Massive recommends. I got mine here - at time of buying (and writing) it was less than half price.

Furry Birkenstocks

It feels weird going from The Names to something fluffy, I’m all riled up inside. But I missed being able to include these in last month’s favourites and nothing says “heatwave” like a pair of shearling sandals, so I’d hate to miss another weather-appropriate month.

I’ve wanted these for what feels like years. I just never felt I could justify the price. But then, IDIOT!, I’ve spent a lot more on things I’ve barely worn, and I wear my rubbery Birkenstocks every single day in the summer, so how could these furry ones ever be an error?

I know you’re thinking I’m mad. Furry stuff in the height of summer? But there’s something about the shearling that seems to keep my feet very comfortable in the heat! What is this trickery? Let’s Google:

“Genuine shearling is naturally temperature-regulating and breathable. It wicks moisture away and releases it into the air up to 7 times faster than synthetic fibers, meaning it can be comfortable on milder, breezy spring or summer days.”

That explains it, then. I also don’t get at all sweaty, unless I am sweating buckets and it’s all being trapped inside the furriness. Time will tell. If my dog starts licking them in a few weeks’ time I’ll know that the sweat has permeated the fibres forever.

I sized up one, as instructed by the sizing on the Birkenstock website, and bought these in the “Mocha” colourway. Kind of wish I’d gone lighter, because everyone in my family says I look like a caveman in them, but also, not really bothered. I think the dark brown is cool.

I bought mine here.

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Right: video version of the whole entire monthly favourites (and a bonus beauty favourite that you MUST watch the video to see in action) is here:

I saw this cake sitting on the shelf and thought that it had been left there by accident: someone has picked up their made-to-order masterpiece from elsewhere, I thought, possibly some sort of artisan patisserie, and they have come in here and rested it on the shelf while they peruse the labels on the various baked goods, trying to find out which variation of bagel has the most protein in it.

That was the scenario that instantly came to mind. That someone had mislaid their precious fondant-wrapped cargo. But no, when I moved the cake on the shelf to one side, I saw that there was an identical cake of wonder behind it. Two fabulous cakes! Both worthy of a spot on some sort of baking show - Is It Cake? or similar.

I tell you what, compared to the Colin the Caterpillar cakes and the Rainbow cakes and the Raspberry Ripple and Vanilla Sprinkle cakes, which all looked perfectly nice, this wonder cake - the Neopolitan Ice Cream Cake - looked like a work of art. An entire ice cream sundae, rendered completely convincingly from different types of icing, on top of a tri-colour base made to look like an upturned tub. Complete with two full scoops of icing gelato (slightly “melted” at the bottom to add to the authenticity) a swirl of whippy cream (again, icing), some flakes (real) and a drizzle of chocolate sauce, spilling enticingly over the edge.

Ooph.

Eighteen quid, the same price as the (lesser, in my opinion) rainbow and sprinkle and “vintage” birthday cakes. Steep for a supermarket buy, but way less than you’d pay if you had one made to the same specification. Little tip for you, if you’re ever looking for a cake for an eleven year-old’s birthday and have less than eight minutes to choose one because your car park ticket is about to expire and you have no battery on your phone to extend your stay.

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So yes, I could have written an entire post about this cake. What a buy! Needless to say the eleven year-old was thrilled and slightly overwhelmed, because Colin the Caterpillar is the default cake in our family and we rarely deviate. (They like arguing over who will eat the solid chocolate face. Loser gets the feet.)

But I have an even better find: this is best swimsuit I’ve ever owned. I’m almost sure of it. I knew it would be a goer when I saw the picture online but then, as I pulled it on and zipped it up (yes, a zip, stay with me) it felt as though I was almost donning some kind of superhero suit. Instant confidence. Everything felt secure and present and correct, in terms of where it should have been sitting (I’m talking tits and tum here), but also the cut managed to feel supremely sexy.

Which is surprising, considering it looks like the sort of thing an Olympic Diving Team might wear. Perhaps this is what they do wear…

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I have to say that since I published that post, about how my holiday to Port Isaac ticked all the boxes, I’ve had a slight change of heart about the whole thing. In that post (you can read it here if you need to get up to speed) I talked about why I thought this particular mini break worked so well and that, basically, it was because: a) we didn’t have to fly anywhere, b) we had visited the area many times before and so it was all completely familiar and c) we had gone into it with relatively low expectations.

WHAT AN EARTH HAS HAPPENED TO ME?

WHERE HAS MY SENSE OF ADVENTURE GONE?

IS THIS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN TRYING TO JUGGLE LIFE, KIDS AND MULTIPLE INCOME STREAMS FOR OVER A DECADE JUST COMPLETELY DRAINS YOU OF ALL LIFE FORCE AND ENTHUSIASM?

I don’t know why I’m shouting in caps. I suppose to underline how surprised I am in myself. Usually so keen to explore new places and to work out the best itinerary and research the ferry times and try to find flights on Easyjet that actually depart during the hours that normal humans are awake in. (04.25 from LGW, anyone? With a 2am check-in time? No? No takers?)

I feel as though my post about Port Isaac was one step away from buying a travel kettle and a couple of fold up chairs and spending the summer sat beneath a caravan awning. Not so much because of the mini break itself, which was really quite glorious, (watching Doc Martin for eight hours straight, eating lobster, watching the stormy sea out of the cottage windows), but because of the general air of beaten-down defeat that my post gives off.

I’ve realised since then, because I’ve spend approximately fifteen work days researching summer holidays abroad instead of meeting deadlines, that although it’s bliss to not have to travel anywhere by plane, or pay forty euros for a sun lounger on a packed beach where the family next to you are playing The Venga Bus Is Coming on repeat through their waterproof bluetooth beach speaker, it is still vaguely necessary - for me, at least - to stretch my legs a bit, geographically and experience something different once a year.

Say things like Kalimera! at the top of my voice and look very pleased with myself. Worry that I’ve used the Grazie instead of Gracias because I can never remember which one is Italian and which one is Spanish. (Ask me to curse in Spanish and I can give you four options, minimum (thank you Narcos!) but hand me the bill and I will not know how to show my gratitude appropriately.)

No lingual issues such as this in Port Isaac, no issues with sun loungers, either, you’d look an absolute tool if you rocked up at the harbour freshly Piz Buin-ed and carrying a deckchair. Though saying that, I’ve never actually been when the sun has been blazing - perhaps it turns into a Club Med style lounger-fest, amongst the coils of rope and bits of net and the flotsam and jetsam that’s washed in by the sea.

Have you been to Port Isaac? It’s very lovely. We’ve touched on this before, but to give you a sweeping overview, the sort of thing a seagull might get were it passing over the top but not stopping in for a chat, it’s a small, remote fishing village on a hugely picturesque section of the Cornish coast, a part that has dramatic cliffs and tiny bays and in general the sort of scenery that makes you want to down tools, buy a stone cottage and start a new life writing children’s books about ancient pirate treasure.

In Port Isaac there’s a harbour, surrounded by stone houses and cottages along impossibly narrow lanes and alleyways, and you can imagine that in the olden days it was very insular and cut off. I feel as though we very much romanticise rural and coastal living in the UK - I certainly have an idealised view of it, probably thanks to the insane cottagecore conditioning we had as kids in the eighties. Victoria Plum. Bramley Cottage. Sylvanian Families. Postman Pat, driving his little red van over those impossibly perfect humpback bridges. It’s no wonder I’ve always yearned for the country life, despite being scared of the dark and not that keen on livestock, big dogs or having to put my car into reverse. (I spend my life reversing along tiny lanes trying to get to a suitable passing point. Tractors will not reverse even if they are right next to a passing point. Lorries absolutely won’t reverse ever, which does make sense. Vans might reverse, if you’re lucky, but not often. So if you’re in a single track lane and there’s any one of these vehicles facing you, you’re shafted. Get used to having eyes in the back of your head and dealing with stress level spikes that are on a par with, I don’t know, skydiving strapped to an instructor who has just told you he often forgets to check the parachute lines, to keep things interesting.)

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Anyway I have a great love for Port Isaac and feel as though I know it inside out. This is because it’s the setting for one of my favourite TV series, Doc Martin, about a morose London surgeon with a blood phobia who has a traumatic career episode and flees from his job to start again somewhere smaller and easier.

We haven’t discussed this, I don’t think, Doc Martin is one of the reasons Rich and I ended up leaving London. I had never actually planned to live in London in the first place, but I moved there when I was a model (2001), and then I met Rich (2003) and he was a die-hard Londoner, and then the concept of being anywhere except London seemed alien and incomprehensible.

We both had work that was based in London and all of our friends were in London, the idea of being anywhere else was never mooted.

Until we started watching Doc Martin. If you haven’t given it a go then you must: it is proper comfort TV, except also absolutely brilliant, with funny acting and amazing comic timing but also some heart-wrenching bits.

And - be still my heart - the frequent panoramic camera shots of Port Isaac, sweeping across the bay and down into the harbour, and taking in all of the wonky little smuggler’s cottages and the tiny lanes… I had always wanted to live in the proper countryside when I was growing up - the whole “rose cottage” fantasy - but something about the easy way of life in the fictional version of Port Isaac made me want to immediately up sticks and get out of the city.

It didn’t help that we used to watch Doc Martin on my work computer, which was in the spare bedroom at the back of our place in Leytonstone, and just over the garden wall there used to be drug deals going on and people stopping their vans to have a wee against the fence and all sorts of other stuff. None of that did much for the “let’s stay in London” side of the argument, I’ll admit; but it was the easy, slow way of life in this fictional Cornish village that totally bewitched me.

I can’t believe it took almost twenty years for us to go and stay there! We visited, a lot, but I have to declare that sleeping there, watching the sun go down and Doc Martin’s house fade into the gloom across the other side of the bay, listening to the seagulls wheeling and screeching, we were living the absolute dream.

I found the cottage we stayed in at Boutique Retreats. They have a very curated selection of holiday cottages on their website, all with beautiful photography, and everything that came up for our selected dates, in North Cornwall, looked really lovely. But when I scrolled to a cottage called Mount Pleasant and realised that it was right there on the cliffs in Port Isaac, overlooking Doc Martin’s actual house, there wasn’t really a lot to mull over. Location perfection.

As a little crash pad it was perfect: dining room and small kitchen on the ground floor, sitting room on the first (to take in the exceptional views) and bedroom on the top.

We spent hours in the sitting room, watching episodes of Doc Martin back-to-back, a splendid rainy Saturday, but we also used the cottage as a base to go off here and there to get food, to wander around the village, to pop to the pub for a pint.

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Before I go off on a little tangent for paid subscribers, detailing everything I ate in Port Isaac and whether or not I regretted it, I want to give you my top three things that must be done if you’re visiting. I mean, MUST. I know I said I’d give you a full itinerary of the trip, but I’ve just realised that I’ve pretty much covered it with the Doc Martin Viewing Marathon, forays out of the cottage for food and these, my three top things:

1. Lobster at Fresh from the Sea.

This is a tiny cafe selling fresh seafood that has been caught that day, and hauled in just a couple of hundred metres away down at the harbour. You could not get fresher. The menu is short, but the lobster here needs no special adornment. Either have a half lobster with some salad and mayo and slices of buttered bread, or have it ready-made into a sandwich - same with the crab. Good God, I dream of this meal at least once a week in between visits. And I only really manage one visit a year. Which means 51 daydreams to work myself into a frenzy about it.

Check opening times here.

2. Port Isaac to Port Quin Circular Walk

To see Port Isaac properly, you must venture up to the top of the cliff behind Doc Martin’s house. This is good, because you can walk past Doc Martin’s house on the way, and shake your head at all of the people who rudely stand at the front door and pretend to knock on it, for photos, even though the people inside are blatantly trying to enjoy their holiday behind those venetian blinds. I suppose they must know what they are in for when they book…

Anyway. Hike up to the top and then continuez a droit to Port Quin for a good old leg stretch. Mind the cows on the clifftop fields. I have bad memories of those cows chasing us when Dexter the dog was a puppy. Would they be the same cows? Surely not. Evil cows. Don’t run over the edge of the cliffs to avoid them, as I almost did: death by cliff fall seemed much nicer than death by cow goring, at the time, but I’m pretty sure my ability to make sensible decisions was compromised due to stress.

3 Ice Cream at The Ice Cream Parlour

I like this spot because you can watch everyone walking down into the village and there’s a bench at the front of the parlour that is a) a sun trap and b) has the perfect people-watching angle. There’s just something very holiday maker-ish about it. Is the ice cream special ice cream you can’t get elsewhere in Cornwall? No. But a good array of flavours and it is creamy and superb - it’s difficult to be disappointed in it. I’m just saying that it’s the location and the bench you want to be reaching for. Get that bench. Get it.

So, that’s where we stayed and what we did, which seems very thin on the ground, now. But I’m not trying to say that Port Isaac gives you a full three-day non-stop action-packed time of it, if you’re sticking to the confines of the place, but it’s the wandering and dondering that is the beauty of it. And eating. Which I am now going to move on to.

All the things I ate in Port Isaac and whether I regretted them:

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She’s right. And I’ve generally been behind with my reading this year, mainly because Rich and I have been working our way through Narcos and Narcos Mexico on Netflix; first the story of Pablo Escobar, which is just superb (who knew there were so many inventive ways to die very painfully at the hands of a drug overlord!) and then the story of the Mexican drug cartels and all of their violent betrayals and dubious senses of loyalty. Honestly, I could write a thesis on Columbian cocaine and its Mexican distribution channels at this point. And I’ve learned a bit of Spanish, even if it’s mainly profanities and insults.

So yes, I’m only on book number twelve and we’re half way through the year. It’s a poor performance really, considering that usually I might rack up (lol) forty or fifty books in a normal year. An hour or two before bed, every night, and then whenever I manage to grab a moment’s peace. I suppose it doesn’t help that we’re currently doing up another cottage* (The Dorset Nest) so that it’s ready to be let out for holidays and so every spare second I have I’m scrolling through pages of lampshades, trying to find antique tables on eBay, squinting at fabric swatches and trying to imagine what they’d look like if they were two hundred times bigger, lined with thermal interlining and hanging from a curtain rail.

Anyway, I’ve ordered a load of books and here are five I’ll be devouring this summer - as well as three from last summer that I think everyone should read. I gave each of these 2025 reads a solid 10/10 and still think about them frequently. If you’re after something summer-defining and memorable to add to your list, that is where I would start.

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