This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Adventures in Soho
Free-flowing cocktails are a dangerous thing. One minute, I was having a delightfully civilised time at a friend’s fiftieth birthday party in a chic Soho bar, with a ticket booked on the last train home to Bath. The next, I was being woken up by a call from an unknown number to discover I was in another friend’s spare room, somewhere in South London, feeling not dissimilar to a wrung-out sponge.
The call was from our taxi driver of the previous night. After dancing (and drinking) ‘til chucking out time, my friend and I had spilled into the street barely capable of hailing a ride. When we finally got picked up, my friend promptly fell asleep in the cab — and left her phone there. Somehow, she’d had the wherewithal to use her laptop to set an emergency message on her handset with my number, hence the driver ringing me.
Whilst I blearily negotiated with him, I could hear my friend talking in her living room. I caught the words “Keir Starmer”. When I snuck a look, I saw that she’d woken up, done full hair and makeup and was giving an impressively coherent interview to BBC Breakfast from her desk, with a smart top thrown over her pyjamas. Truly inspirational professionalism, I thought, as I emailed an editor to turn down a commission and skulked back to bed.
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Did I learn any lessons from this? Only one: book a hotel if I’m planning on having a good time. So a couple of weeks later, I was back in Soho for another fiftieth celebration. This time I was at a karaoke bar, cheerfully knocking back shots and knocking out the bangers, wearing fishnets and bunny ears, with no intention of leaving early.
Karaoke is a serious business. For weeks, everyone in the group had been adding songs to a master playlist — meaning that, for weeks, I’d been using every car journey I had to practice for the big night. Eighties hit “You Spin Me Round” by Dead or Alive became my white whale. My husband visibly flinched at my efforts to force my feeble soprano into range with singer Pete Burns’s sexually aggressive baritone.
Then, driving home solo from Sainsbury’s one day, success. I walked in, announced to my husband that he was about to be “not happy but impressed” and regaled him with a word-perfect (and note-adjacent) rendition of the song. “I’m still working on the moves,” I said when I finished, causing a new look of horror to flit over his face. Thank God that what happens in a karaoke booth, stays in a karaoke booth.
Off-grid and on fire
After all that fun, time for a reset. For my husband’s birthday, I took him to Campwell Woods. Billed as an “off-grid retreat”, it’s a small hamlet of yurts and wooden cabins (all cosily provisioned with linens and towels), with a fully kitted out camp kitchen, hot showers and even a wood-fired sauna. All the pleasures of roughing it and very little of the actual rough.
It’s amazing how pleasant it is to do nothing at all: just listening to the blackcaps and wrens bawling their beaks off in the trees and watching the unfolding drama of a fire you’ve made yourself. Fire is very much the point of Campwell Woods: the founder’s mission statement includes lengthy encomiums on his own pleasure in burning things.
In the kitchen, a gas-powered hob is grudgingly offered as a last resort for those who cannot get into the fire-setting spirit. The notice next to it announces that this is a concession for “people who want something more familiar” and urges you to try one of the wood-powered options instead. And I promise I did try, but when you’re ready for a cup of tea, you can’t be expected to go about it the hard way — not even when you’re off-grid.
Driving home from Campwell on the narrow country lanes, we came nose to nose with a broad silver Bentley. We tucked ourselves into a passing place, but the Bentley squatted in the middle of the road, well clear of the hedge on the driver’s left: clearly, he expected us to squeeze through the gap, scratching up our Mini’s paintwork to spare his midlife-crisismobile. We declined, forcing him to reverse for half a mile and hopefully giving him time to reflect on the wisdom of buying a car so precious you daren’t let a leaf skim its surface.
Finding fault with my face
After almost three years, my teeth have finally been freed from their metal cages: my adult braces era is over. Well, almost over. My orthodontist turned me loose with fixed wires on the backs of my teeth and a set of retainers to wear initially nightly (for the first year) and later weekly, for the rest of my life. You could say that the price of teeth is eternal vigilance.
Obviously I’m anxious to make sure that my expensively rectified mouth stays in good shape, so when my regular dentist told me I was grinding my teeth and should consider Botox to relax my jaw, I dutifully made the appointment. Except, when I arrived for the consultation, my dental clinic’s injectables specialist didn’t seem to know why I was there. Instead, he launched straight into the aesthetics spiel, comparing my creases to his own clinically smoothed forehead.
Eventually, he ran out of faults to pick with my face, and I was able to interrupt: “There’s been a miscommunication. I’m here about bruxism.” And not, I added silently, because I’ve been medically diagnosed as haggard. To his credit, the injectables specialist did look embarrassed about the mix-up. Or at least, as embarrassed as it’s possible to look when you’ve paralysed most of your facial muscles.
