The allure of ace woollies. Rosebuds on tap. Inside the mind of a psychic podenco. And a massive secret, I'm not allowed to talk about...
"I hate this house...", the transcript of my dog's psychic reading. She's so chatty and full of advice. And some other less (actually very) important stuff.
I’ve got a huge job on, it’s terrifying me. Obviously I am writing this Substack in an attempt to kick the deadline even further down the missed road and up the ramp of sickening jeopardy.
Confronting this horrendous task requires a full week without anyone emailing me and hassling me about work; nightly proper sleep - not 100 score on the Oura ring text book great sleep just the sort of night you wake from going, “Huzzah, today I am not deranged by five hours of restless rest.” I need a week without breathless panic because I am about to or have gone over my overdraft limit. And a week without any single person acting disappointed in me personally or professionally or sending me passive aggressive texts and WhatsApps.
If my demands from the universe are not met, I will fail once more to achieve my goals.
(All these how to fail people, truly, they have no idea. I am failing. I am the anti-influencer. The self help binfluencer. All I need to make me a worster influencer on impressionable folk is to have a little link to a place you can buy heroin and really great cocaine - you know, the good stuff you can sleep on, the gear Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes were on before drugs were officially bad for you.)
Of course even if all my demands are met, that still leaves my busy regular troll and most enthusiastic critic, me, to be dealt with. How can I shut her up? I will need not to drink more than one tiny glass of wine a night, not to go to bed after midnight, not to walk the dogs off lead unless I know they will come back nor walk them on the lead because the pulling drives me mental - all things guaranteed to leave me clutching my cranium at the wretchedness of my own shambolic actions. I will need, too, not to procrastinate.
DOH! Failed!
So, in the spirit of making you all feel bad because it is your fault, here is my procrastination Substack. Just for you 🖤🚬
This week, instead of wailing about lucky Western white lady problems I thought I’d attempt a new and more positive and useful modus operandi. Here are three of the things that have captured my interest this week and that I believe are worth your attention too. (And, below the £35 jump, for the loyal freaks who like to dabble in the hard stuff behind the paywall, your fix today is what my dog said to me during a psychic reading and why I had to change the sheets afterwards.)
I GOT BOLLOCKED FOR WRITING THIS AND I HAVE TO APOLOGISE TO THE ELCELLA TEAM. I AM GOING TO TAKE THIS PRODUCT FOR SIX MONTHS TO SEE IF I CAN MANAGE MY ADHD BETTER AND REDUCE THE DOSE OF MY ADHD MEDS. I WILL REPORT BACK. MEANWHILE. Shhhhhhhhhhhh
”THE COLON HAS AN UNDERRATED CAPACITY FOR APPETITE CONTROL” - don’t worry you don’t have to start eating through your rectum to activate it
Two thirtysomething academics claim they have a natural drug-free alternative to Ozempic, Mounjaro, Rybelsus, Wegovy and Victoza et al. Research neuroscientists with specialisations in gut physiology and enteric neuroscience (meaning the nervous system found in the gut), Dr Rubina Aktar and Dr Madusha Peiris at St Mary’s College, University of London, describe their product as “Nature’s technology…acting on the same molecular pathway and with an efficacy that sits close to injectables”.*
*everything in quotes is either Peiris or Aktar unless otherwise stated*
A 12 week Elcella supplement programme costs about £550, while fat jabs cost between £100 to £300 privately. Fat jabs lose you on average 14-20% of body weight in 12 weeks. Elcella’s average is 7%. Bear in mind, this is a safe, sensible, health enhancing, food-based supplement: “An entirely natural food-based alternative to GLP1 fat jabs. Most weight loss solutions override your body. Elcella works with it.”
OK, big claims. A press release from their university, which financially backed their business, hails the discovery of a low-cost, drug-free treatment for obesity and world’s first appetite-suppressing nutraceutical. They hope it will become a follow on option for people when their NHS supply of GLP1 meds run out, and for people who aren’t sure how the hell they stop taking their fat jabs, which are very strong synthetic appetite hormone replacement therapies.
Because in case you hadn’t registered, we have a problem here. These appetite hormone mimicking drugs are addictive. The doses are ramped up as the body gets used to them. What happens when you can’t inject yourself with synthetic gut hormones any more?
How do you stop?
Do you stop?
Will you put on weight? Will the old struggles return?
Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and the rest mimic one or more of the gut hormones - usually the GLP-1 hormone - which are released in the gut after eating and effectively kill appetite dead. Elcella stimulates the release of the body’s own gut hormones GLP-1 and PYY. Aktar and Peiris have developed the product by studying human tissue only, no mouse studies, donated by colleagues and their patients in the medical school, they have also done three small and successful clinical trials in real people. Both of them lost 4.5kgs themselves, they tell me, without trying.
The medical synthetic GLP1 hangs around in the body for days, hence why fat jab people never eat a damn thing. The hormone messages are saying, “Your satiated”. Elcella stimulates the natural production of these gut hormones, which are then cleared via the body’s natural elimination processes. So while appetite is surpressed, the hormone systems associated with them is also being entrained, stimulated and performing the natural cycles of excretion all hormones should go through.
Gut hormones aren’t meant to hang around in your body for a long time, which is why raised levels of them cause side effects that your fat jabbing community will be well aware of. Lots of gastrointestinal issues, from the squits and nausea to constipation. I know people lose their hair, some people have issues with their teeth, let’s not dwell on the things that getting unnaturally weirdly swiftly thin do to skin and that cosmetic doctors tell me savagely disrupt fibroblast activation of collagen, elastin, and hyaluronic acid, hence requiring fillers to be injected deep in the dermis to bring it back to some kind of aesthetic normalcy. Having artificial gut hormones hanging around in the system can worsen inflammatory conditions. The Elcella lets the hormones come and go. Hormones, like the stock market, are designed to go up and down.
This is just my understanding of it, from talking to Aktar and Peiris. The fat jabs raise appetite hormones unnaturally high and work in a way the body never does. These drugs were developed for extreme circumstances, and to help people at a very high risk of death from T2 diabetes, but are now widely adopted for “weight management” and off licence for other things too, like addiction. Some people think the fat jabs are a wonderdrug, like people did heroin and cocaine back in the day. Others feel the same caution that was felt around the Covid jabs - no long term research data can prove they conclusively are safe.
For the most part, these fat jab prescriptions happen privately. Some recent data quoted 200,000 Brits get their jabs on the NHS, the other 1.4 million on them pay. Private medicine can make prescribing a consumer act rather than one of medical need and so all sorts have got their hands on it. Not just chubby folk, all kinds of people - large and small - are eager to eat less food. Some are far from obese, but a bit overweight perhaps, others are fairly slim. not. Among my wider circile of friends there is a contingent of slim women who can demand it from their private doctors, or who have sent their fat friends’ photographs as evidence they need it to dubious online prescribers.
Let’s be honest, the fat jabs are barely considered medicines. They’re more like a diet aid.
I know you know all this, and there are better people to explain this than me, but stick around. It could be useful.
About a year ago, a friend who had worked for a big European pharmaceutical company told me that there were issues with the fat jabs that were being suppressed by the pharma companies. And? “Cancer,” she said
I asked for some supporting evidence and she went quiet on me. I didn’t doubt she was sincere, frankly everything causes cancer and medications rarely come without side effects. These drugs were designed for managing insulin levels in T2 diabetics, not for weight loss. There have been hundreds of cases of acute pancreatitis in people who are on the fat jabs, potentially related to their genetic unsuitability for taking the drug. Pancreatitis is no joke. The government was concerned enough to put a call out for people to submit evidence to the MHRA yellow card biobank.
Given the second biggest cause of preventable cancer after smoking is obesity, and especially long term obesity, how much of a worry this is. The obesity will kill you before the pancreatitis. Probably.
Anyway, mustn’t scaremonger. I’ll be setting myself up as an adviser to RFK Jnr soon. Meds are bad! Big Pharma is evil! The AWOL whistleblower didn’t show me any supporting evidence so we will stick with the side effects we know about that aren’t dying.
The GLP1 jab side effect that makes no sense to me for long term weight loss was the issue of muscle wastage, which will be significant because when there’s not enough fuel for the body’s needs it won’t just burn fat, it’ll burn muscle too.
In middle age especially losing muscle is a terrible idea. Muscle is what keeps you upright in old age, and its the hungry engine room that will burn calories once you start eating again. Muscle is known as the organ of longevity. There’s a peptide for this now, that you take with your fat jab, which helps preserve muscle. But if as these two neuroscientists say, we can more gently encourage the body’s natural processes and effortlessly reduce our calorie intake 13% without having to stop eating entirely, then that’s a more sustainable long term plan.
We all know that person who got on the fat jabs and were no more than a bit overweight, nowhere near insulin resistant, and who certainly aren’t obese now. Those Ozempic face people with their lollipop heads and gaunt staring eyes and spindly diminished ribby, limby looks are hooked on their fat jabs because they love being thin. They never eat anything and for the first time in their lives they feel in control. They’re medically enabled anorexics really, aren’t they.
Nothing is as good as skinny feels, Kate Moss said. They know what that feels like now.
Anyhoo. Seems like the fat jab was magic, a gift from the metabolic doughnut god. But drugs aren’t magic. They’re drugs. I don’t say that to be judgy. I’m on my ADHD meds, I’m not toughing out my dopamine shortage. But I feel their side effects, raised heart rate, delayed sleep triggers, low appetite. I’ve worked hard to mitigate them. I don’t want to lose weight, I don’t want to not sleep, I don’t want my heart to beat hard unless I am running up a steep hill.
And that’s the reason I want to get on the Elcella. We know that the fat jab has broad benefits, including reducing ADHD symptoms and reducing cravings for alcohol by 50% and cigarettes too. People on the belly busting drugs tell me they shop less. The reward circuits stop driving your behaviour so much. I’d like some of all of the above please but without having to give up eating.
GLP1 and the other hunger hormones are associated with the hormones of not just blood sugar regulation (insulin) but also of addiction (dopamine and co) in the reward circuit. Everything’s linked, it’s why your body is a body and not a filing cabinet.
That we have actually do have a functioning ‘little brain’ and billions of neurons in our enteric nervous system in our guts is not disputed now. “Appetite control is not all in the mind as people were always told, it’s in the lower part of the gut where gut hormones - GLP1, GLP2 and PYY - are made.”
But its not just gut calling brain, it’s brain calling gut too. Depression, anxiety, addiction and general low motivation and mood can be seen and mitigated with improvements to gut function and the microbiome.
Tim Spector (who I also interviewed last week week for the release of his book Ferment) has done some preliminary studies on the impact of increasing fermented food intake on mood. Another experiment in nutritional psychiatry. My bloody brain, the wonky Brian, needs all the help it can get. Sauerkraut (two kinds), kombucha and kefir are fizzing away ‘cold cooking’ behind me as I type.
experiments in fermentation. The kefir I have nailed. I make it several times a week. Sauerkraut, getting there. Kombucha, complete rookie and suspect a fail this time
Regulating your appetite requires multiple hormones be singing in perfect harmony. It’s not just about GLP1. The brain requires two triggers for feelings of satiety: first, the I’m full message from the upper part of your gut, which comes thanks to cholecystokinin (CCK) and is fed back to the brain via the vagus nerve; and secondly the satiated message from the lower part of your gut where GLP1 is produced, which send the messaging hormones to the brain via the blood stream. “People with obesity have perpetually low gut hormones, even when they get thin,” what this means is that being thin is not the end of being a fat person, “Whether the cause of these low gut hormones are genetic or environmental, no one currently knows.”
One thing we can all do to help get our appetite hormones functioning well is to eat wholefoods, and crucially fibre that can pass through the gut undigested. ”If food doesn’t get down to this lower part of the gut - and UPFs don’t get this far because they are so easily broken down in the mouth, the stomach and higher up - these cells are not activated. UPFs don’t trigger satiety messaging hormones. We know that.
The Elcella docs tell me that, “The human gut has certain complex evolutionary mechanisms that respond to certain types of nutrients [none found in a Twix or your Big Mac], your gut can sense certain types of nutrients and that activates appetite reducing hormones as well as feeding the microbiome down there, which also creates certain crucial byproducts for appetite control.”Certain fats, if they can weather the journey from mouth to colon, will activate our appetite hormones. '“A group of certain medium chain and long chain fatty acids are very good at stimulating L cells to open and release gut hormones.”
We can find these fats in broccoli, walnuts, flaxseeds and those nettle-y looking leaves you get with your sashimi. Elcella has stuck these fatty acids, MCT oil, coconut oil and linseed oil, in a specially buffered capsule so that they’re released into the gut in just the right place.
The ingredients in their product are encased in a capsule that will only open when it passes the acid environment of the stomach (pH 4), small intestine (pH 5-6) and arrives in the relatively benign alkaline environment of the proximal colon (pH 7). It’s like a shot in the arm for those L-cells that release the hormones so far down the seven metre intestinal ride. These gut hormone actions go on right at the end of the gut so incredibly near your bum hole that the supplement would work just as well if you took it in a suppository, or “a la francais” (the French love taking medicine up their rectums). Perhaps the next GLP1 injection will actually come in the form of lube?
I am not a scientist but it makes sense to me. And I’m going to give it a try. Let’s see what Elcella “nature technology” can do for me. I’ll report back. GOd knows I’ve got enough bloody issues that need fixing. Meanwhile, keep eating your brassicas, keep eating fibre and healthy fats. And keep drinking waterRosebuds and other stuff in water - it’s become an act of rebellion to drink water from the tap and refuse to be terrorised by the threat of all the “nasties” in it.
Somerset has hard water. It doesn’t taste nice. It’s as bad as London water. Somerset has a lot of people who like to tell you the water is bad because of what “they” put in it.
*sighs*
I can’t be arsed to filter it, or do anything to it. There’s even some evidence that hard water is more protective of heart health so I’m not going to start crying because someone without any exams has told me there are “worms in the water”.
If I have a spare £200 I’m going to buy a nice aran jumper, see below. Any spare time I have is spent washing sheets with brown marks all over them (at best muddy paw prints, at worst - - don’t), walking dogs, looking for dogs or hoovering up dog carnage. I can’t be doing with tap water toil. I’m already fermenting stuff. I can’t do everything.
Want a hot tip from a wild crazy broke ass scum tap water drinking rebel? Put some kind of plant matter in a jug of water to distract you from the hard horrid water. My current favourite is dried rose buds. I also like cumin seeds or fennel seeds, though its best to pour a bit of boiling water on them to release the flavour. Rosebuds are better cold. Another good one is a couple of shaved off slices of fresh turmeric, fresh ginger and some slices of orange. I just top up from the tap all day. If you stick it in the fridge overnight in a jug, then in the morning you have this luscious fresh tasty tap water that may well be full of worms, fluoride and “nasties” but what the eye can’t see that doesn’t make you violently ill probably isn’t worth overthinking upon, God knows there’s enough to be scared of.
People get very upset about tap water. Sorry, I just don’t have time for this kind of chat. You can’t be neurotic about every damn thing and you can’t be seduced into every wellness fearmongering high cost antic being used to sell you alternatives to the thing that literally comes out the tap for free (-ish, my water bill just bounced). Sorry wellness fuckers, you can’t have ALL my money.Amy Powney x Finisterre It’s London fashion week, but I am not in London, or in fashion. I am weak, though, at meeting deadlines and resisting Amy Powney’s collab with Finisterre
Amy Powney was the designer that launched Mother of Pearl in 2006. She famously made a doco that described her attempt to make Mother of Pearl more sustainable, showing how grotesquely wasteful and “nonsense” the fashion churn is, really.
She left the system and MoP last year and set up her own label, Akyn, a truly sustainable brand that did not have to conform to the tyrannical wastefulness of our endlessly churning fashion cycle. Akyn has clothes for the considered, enduring wardrobe of the woman who doesn’t want to be endlessly reimagining her style under the diktats of fashion conglomerates and designers with a juvenile and misogynistic vision of womanhood. Akyn maintains some of her signature details like jackets embellished with giant pearls on the shoulders, but many of the fabrics are undyed, the pieces are made near the factory that makes the fabric to reduce carbon footprint, materials are recycled, responsibly made and the styles are enduring.
Powney is the exception that proves my friend Deb Bee’s (whose Bee & Sons makes gorgeous sustainable recycled cashmere knitwear) rule, “Most of these brands say they’re sustainable but they haven’t got a clue.”
A bit like Phoebe Philo, Powney’s Akyn pieces drop when they drop and are designed to last a lifetime. And, Akyn’s for women that live in cities and go to work and have something called “meetings”. Not for someone who works from home in Somerset. Not for me, any more.
MoP was always a great label and their pieces lasted and lasted, but you could see as time went on she was being pushed to use cheaper fabrics in a effort to make the label’s margins more appealing. I still have a few bits upstairs in my wardrobe.
I’ve been flogging some stuff on Vinted this week, much as I love clinging on to things for their sentimental value, it’s time to shift the stuff I don’t wear, or that doesn’t suit me any more or my lifestyle… or my geographical location anymore.
’Pon moving to Somerset I did one smart thing. I designed a sort of getting dressed equation, which would remove the requirement for any thinking about what to wear but ensure I did not surrender all hopes of a personal style.
It was not a precise formula, like Steve Jobs with his NB trainers, black Issy Miyake roll neck and Levis 501s. But the rules were such that I could survive with a capsule of about 15 items of clothing, and within that constraint still pull off a look that was professional and tidy (as my Mum would say) to suitable for going to the tip and dog walking.
that Amy Powney x Finisterre jumper
I did it to reduce decision fatigue and ensure that it would appear to others (whether they cared of not) that I had a degree of self-respect even though I strongly suspected I’d go splat emotionally when I arrived in my new rented home. The soothing and calming effect of this uncharacteristically sensible scheme was notable. I plan to do it again this winter.
Winter in the country, and especially if you are new in town, will be a lot of mud, a lot of dark, a lot of alone, a lot of hosing dogs down.
Since I stopped following my dressing equation, I’ve noticed my propensity for really terrible outcomes when I have no formula to help my wardrobe maths. I took the dogs out in a coral pink all-in-one shellsuit. “Oh, I haven’t worn this for a while,” I thought. (Yeah, there’s a reason for that.) What looked OK in a field at 6am on a Sunday in 2007 looked 100% tragic in a field behind Hauser + Wirth on a Sunday afternoon in 2025.
If I’m on a deadline and absorbed in other thoughts, or trying too hard to remember who I once was, while forgetting who I no longer am (what a weird sentence), I simply can’t be trusted not to dress like a mad woman. It was a truly terrible look, and it rustled. No fabric, save taffeta, should rustle. It was not taffeta needless to say. It is going up on Vinted pronto.
This winter’s equation is a + b = c, where a = oversized woolly, men’s shirt or nice vest; b = leather trousers or summer’s bottom equation, khaki; and c = wardrobe calm for me this winter.
My only purchases will be second hand rain long mac for obvious reasons, and another pair of leather trousers from Vinted or Vestiaire. New, all I’m allowed is an ace woolly (or two) that I will love to bits, wear to death and (stern note to self) not shrink. My rationale with woollies is that (if not shrunk) they last forever. I have a Saint Laurent cashmere roll neck I bought a few seasons after Hedi Slimane joined the company in 2012. The pence per wear on that jumper, which cost a significant sum, is knock out. Unlike the pence per wear on the coral pink boiler suit, which wasn’t even that expensive.
If you like wearing a woolly you also save on heating bills.
Only problem is I can never afford what I like these days. No longer does writing provide me with YSL income. I like Connolly jumpers, £530. And The Row’s turtlenecks, £1,200. I had one once, it was so so beautiful. And I shrunk it. I considered getting on the fat jab and getting jaborexic so I could carry on wearing it as a spindle doll the size of an Olsen and boasting to everyone that it was “boiled wool” - which wasn’t a lie, it just wasn’t intentional.
Boohoo, poor me. I set about thinking about the suffering in the world to jog on my fantasy knitwear reveries. Lovely knitware. Not for the likes of us chuck.
Or so I thought…
Amy Powney’s capsule collection for the Cornish lifestyle and cold water surfing brand, Finisterre, has about eight knitted pieces in it and I love all of them except one (a sort of spice coloured fine knit). They’re all timeless wardrobe staples but given Amy’s unquestioned skill and eye, also have a barely noticeable but crucial added structure that raise them above big sloppy jumper status. They look to me like they sit nicely without making it look like you’re an unpopular grunge kid in a shapeless skirt and sleeves that dangle come over the end of your arms. Nor like you are an influencer in an oh look it’s a daft fashion knit.
Ally Sheedy, centre, in The Breakfast Club
I don’t say that authoritatively. Maybe I do look like the Ally Sheedy in the Breakfast Club or perhaps I look like a school gate Cotswold Mum, what the gorgeous and funny Rosemary Ferguson and I used to call Gilet Woman - just add Chablis and Dubarry boots, stand back and light the Marlboro Touch.
Don’t make me dwell on it or I’ll panic. I just need to get through the winter without reverting to shellsuits.
Mixing wool with leather keeps the Granny vibes away and leather is insanely comfortable and warm. Leather doesn’t stand up to structured looks, it all goes a bit 80s Claude Montana, which is not what Bruton is ready for. Knitwear and leather, that’s my 25/26 winter style sorted.
a bit Claude Montana
Hormonal changes over the last few years radically increased my urge to wear knitwear but god-willing my bad jumper sex hormonal weird out days are behind me. I gave away the giant mud brown Chloé knee length Aran (my Friar Tuck outfit, as the ex called it), ditto the Icelandic jumper I thought looked edgy but actually looked perpetually Christmassy looking, it also swamped my body so that I looked like a sad little GLP1 pinhead inside it (see above for more on that lewk).
Powney has designed a dry robe that doesn’t make you look like a cold water swimming lady 
Finisterre’s Eyre. Everything you want from a jumper that looks like a fisherman would wear it.
Yes, I’ve put my winter wardrobe money on Amy Powney x Finisterre - sustainable, cool, enduringly stylish and surprisingly affordable. (Honourable mention must go to Finisterre’s Eyre knit, which is one of my most loved wardrobe staples - a navy roll neck that looks good with everything and especially leather. Good thing I bought two coz I shrunk one. If anyone has a ten year old or is themselves tinily jaborexic happy to gift you the shrinky dinked version.) Those wardrobe keepers usually cost a bomb. This little collection is just HEAVEN.
There are other bits and pieces in there, pleated ‘carot’ pants as the French call them, macs and coats and the first ever dry robe that doesn’t give off “punch me, my oversized batwing sleeve is knocking all the sugar sachets off the beach tea hut counter” vibes. It might even tempt me back in the water this winter. It’s about time. Everyone knows you aren’t menopausal, British and middle class if you aren’t girding your sorry dried up loins for chilly dipping come October time.
Manifest this! What a knit! I must go to my bed. Enough writing about sheep it’s time to sleep.
FAREWELL, and thanks for reading; unless you are hanging around for the after party that is.
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