This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
So Will is on Ozempic. Two years behind everyone else, but hey. And despite having actually wanted him to lose weight, I find myself strangely furious.
First, I wasn’t expecting him to GO ON about it so much. I thought that was the point of doing it with drugs! Instead of becoming all evangelical about gluten-free or only eating within a twenty-minute window of 3pm or chewing endlessly. Just quietly jab yourself. Job done.
But no. All I hear about now, is how very not hungry Will is — how much he isn’t craving a drink, how he’s happy to just have lunch and move on. How he’s basically fine. Does this need voicing? Really? Isn’t an absence of a difficulty a solution? And therefore not a worthy conversation topic!
Second — possibly more pressingly, it turns out I’m not fundamentally OK with him being thin. Aesthetically, yes. But psychologically — total headfuck / identity crisis.
I didn’t realise how much I needed thinness to be MINE. My domain. Always has been, and deep down always will be (because I didn’t cheat).
I consoled myself that someone — not sure who — said Ozempic was like nouveau riche, and being old school skinny was like the upper class.
I liked that. Will didn’t because he likes to think he’s posher than me. Never mind that you have to be posh in the first place just to pay for the jabs.
Also, big argument about what to tell the children. Minnie will return from boarding school to find her father has shrunk and will have questions. The other two have already noticed and are now asking why he doesn’t always have a hand in their Easter Egg hoard.
Will wants to tell them he’s just been “playing tennis”. I want to tell them the truth — aren’t we always told to be honest with children? Will said that this would give them unhealthy messages about weight.
When I pressed him, he said in a lofty voice they would learn “to place undue importance on body image”.
And then added, in a less lofty voice, that he didn’t want them to learn to rely on “quick fixes”. I said why didn’t he actually play tennis, then? And he slept in the spare room.
Because nobody could eat, I was left with a heist’s worth of Neal’s Yard cheese
My other gripe with Ozempic is that we had a dinner party the other day, and, because nobody could eat more than their gazpacho, I was left with a heist’s worth of Neal’s Yard cheese. Literally, well over a hundred quid’s worth of Comté.
The other outcome of said dinner party was a particularly dull debate about Substack. I say debate, but actually I was the only one to see Substack for what it is — the meh-factor of blogging, with the nauseating “#bekind” part of Instagram.
But mostly there was a lot of holding forth about whether big names are hounding little-known lyrical voices out of “a space” they have created. Honestly, I actually miss Twitter at this point.
In other news we just got back from half term in Corfu, where we had the unbelievable bad luck to be in the next door villa to a mother from Hector’s school I especially dread encountering — and that’s just for five minutes at parents’ evenings.
For the first few days I had to entirely avoid our pool when they were in their garden, because the hedge between the two was so low. This entailed a lot of weird spying, which then led me to overhear the most furious holiday row ever between her and her husband. After that I liked her much more and could swim.
