Go substack yourself! | Claudia Savage-Gore

This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.

I mentioned, last month, my suspicion of Substack. In a few weeks I’ve gone from suspicion to scorn to unabashed rage. I’m expected to pay for this shit? To pay for several thousand words of verbal diarrhoea by every bloody book club member I’ve ever shared a school run with? No! And again, for all you extolling the joy of “saying no in midlife” — No!

Just this month I must have been sent over 50 “50 Things I’m grateful for at 50” lists, despite not subscribing. Adding insult to injury, I’m not 50! Not yet, anyway. Get the perimenopausal algorithm right, social media robots. Anyway. I see your 50 at 50, and raise you 15 Things Getting On My Nerves Now (besides people starting Substacks):

1. Hearing about the perimenopause. Nothing to add. NOTHING.
2. Hearing about random prep schools in random places closing because of VAT. Look, it’s not like the good schools are going down the tubes is it? I rest my case.
3. People evangelically telling me about White Mausu Black Bean Rayu as if they discovered it. Hello! I, Claudia, discovered it years ago.
4. People imploring me to “be kind to myself”. Never something I’ve struggled with, thanks. The problem is other people not being kind to ME.
5. Also, re: kindness — given that everyone flakes on every social engagement ever, is the problem really that we are a nation of selfless people-pleasers? I’d argue the opposite. But nobody LISTENS to me.
6. People referring to their house as their “forever home”. Always the people who execute a full renovation every ten years. Not bitter at all.
7. Actually the word “forever”, full stop. “Forever grateful”, “forever indebted”. Forever smug, maybe?
8. The fact that Hector’s teachers seem to have abdicated now that Common Entrance is over. Literally, it’s a Chromebook orgy there. When I need that screen time credit!
9. On that note, yes, I have seen Hugh Grant ranting about private schools and laptops. No, I couldn’t watch it all the way to the end. That’s what social media does for you. QED.
10. Ditto, Hugh Grant on water bottles. Except I, Claudia, once again, have been making this point ever since schools suddenly made water bottles mandatory post Covid. What was happening before, which they suddenly had to change? Were they passing one cup around the class? Children hate water anyway.
11. The phrase “fibre maxxing”. In case you don’t have tween girls on TikTok, this is the practice of “strategically maximizing your daily fibre intake” aka adding as many pulses and extortionate WholeFoods berries and cruciferous sprouts as possible to your diet. And then complaining that you’re bloated. What did you expect?
12. See point 8 — parents of only children getting sentimental about the end of prep school. “Can’t believe the time went so fast!”
13. People saying “to your point”, instead of “and another thing”. Also, people saying “that piece about” when they mean “that thing we were just talking about”.
14. Writer friends thinking AI is Armageddon. Sure, it must be annoying that your “job” can now be done fine (and faster) by a robot. But isn’t that the case for everyone, apart from footballers? And hasn’t it been the case since the industrial revolution? You’ll survive. Write a memoir. Chat GPT will have nothing on that.
15. P.S. writer friends: doesn’t your husband/trust fund cover the bills anyway? Sorry if I sound jaded, I just had to go to a book launch. Of a book that STARTED AS A SUBSTACK.