This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
I must be the only woman in West London not to have “devoured” All Fours, but here we are. Too late to bother now. And much as I’d sometimes like to “blow up” my life with Will and leave for a younger model (see recent school camping trip), I’m a realist.
For example, as long as I stay with Will, I always get to feel thin. And well dressed. And interesting. And athletic — ever since he buggered up his knee. Apparently he “definitely would have won” the father’s race, when “something just snapped”. Please God, erase the memory of him writhing on the grass in front of the entire school and parent body.
Anyway, I bring this up because I thought everyone was just reading All Fours. As in, living vicariously.
I assumed that nobody was actually following it. But I was wrong. In the last month, my friend Imogen has gallivanted off with her 30-year-old female personal trainer (I know!), and my other friend Natassia is now living with her interior designer (also female).
TBF I too could be reduced to a puddle of lust by said interior designer’s flat. It was in Architectural Digest, and when I saw the kitchen I totally got it.
I mean, I’d sleep with pretty much anyone to live there. Except maybe Imogen’s new PT lover (for context, she’s an ex-model with a YouTube fitness channel). Not sure the old Savage-Gore self-esteem could take that.
Maida Vale has gone full Portland, Oregon. Where do people find the energy?
And these are the relatively tame examples. In May, there was the Dordogne villa where three families from Lyra’s school spent half term and which turned into a kind of swinging situation … Not to mention the friend who was not up for the various kinky things her husband wanted to introduce but solved the problem by finding them both new partners. Taking emotional labour to a new level …
AND I’ve just discovered that our neighbours have an open marriage. Something I thought only happened in Esther Perel podcasts. But no, Maida Vale has gone full Portland, Oregon. Seriously, I don’t know where people find the energy. Come back, Will, and your anti-grinding mouth guard. All is forgiven.
Completely unrelated, where are we on microplastics? Lyra now sees any plastic container that crosses the threshold as a (literally) poisoned chalice, and I’d like it to stop.
Everything now has to be decanted into a glass, steel or ceramic vessel within seconds of the Ocado van driving off. Seriously, after every delivery it looks like she’s running some kind of insane production line anti-anxiety workshop.
Meanwhile, Minnie is in thrall to date stamps and won’t touch anything that she knows to have been opened more than 48 hours ago. Tricky, given her sister unboxes everything on arrival.
Also on the girls’ minds is the “Scandinavian hairline”. When they first began frantically Googling this I assumed it was some kind of Alexander Skarsgård obsession. Actually, it’s the practice of bleaching all the hair immediately around the face for a “sun kissed halo effect”.
I stupidly allowed them to attempt this at home, to avoid spending hundreds of pounds chez Daniel Hersheson’s, bleaching half an inch of hair. Only for Minnie to get so distracted by TikTok whilst the bleach was on that she FORGOT to wash it off.
Cue hairline being reduced to frazzled patch of chewing gum-textured hair and her bathroom smelling like an influencer’s funeral. She cried. I cried. We all cried.
As for Hector, he finished prep school. More crying, more next time.
