This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Ah, autumn! How I treasure this time of year. Don’t worry. I’m not about to go off on a paean to freshly sharpened pencils, and the scent of Starbuck’s latest bonfire UPF milk monstrosity.
No, my joy is entirely familial — i.e. the novelty of silence and solitude after a VERY long hot summer. Boy did I need it.
How was your summer? Listen to mine, and weep.
Our safari holiday was massively derailed by Will leaving his supply of Mounjaro in the minibar in our first hotel, and only realising after the six-hour drive to the second hotel.
Not surprisingly his preferred meds-courier service Pharmacierge doesn’t operate in remote sub-Saharan Africa, so there was no chance of getting a new supply.
My comment that the food wasn’t up to much anyway, and he could surely manage without his wretched jabs for a while went down badly (unsympathetic). As did my suggestion that he could always try the old-fashioned holiday weight loss method of traveller’s diarrhoea.
And since the whole enterprise is still being kept secret from the children (to protect Will’s ego, though he claims it’s to avoid inflicting “body image issues”) we had to pretend he had left his passport in the hotel, whilst he spent 24 hours and hundreds of pounds in chauffeur fees going back to the first hotel to retrieve his drugs.
Cue me having to book a £1,000 dawn hot air balloon ride I didn’t even want
Only for Hector to find Daddy’s passport very clearly visible on top of his suitcase …
Before I could notify Will of this development he returned performing “massive relief” at having found his passport. Only for Hector to produce the real document.
Cue a very weird improvisation by Will, where he “confessed” that he had actually been out planning “a surprise”, which Hector had now rumbled. Cue me having to book a £1,000 dawn hot air balloon ride I didn’t even want, because Will couldn’t do so himself.
None of it fooled anybody. In fact, the girls convinced themselves that Daddy must be having an affair, because why would he have needed to vanish for a day to book a balloon ride?
They then staged a kind of intervention 6,000 feet above sea level, in the sodding balloon, so that he “would have nowhere to hide”.
I let him dig himself out of that one. And he STILL didn’t mention the Mounjaro! Which it turned out the first hotel had not kept refrigerated, and so was not even viable (Jesus wept).
By the time we landed I was considering an affair/divorce. Think about it — is there anything less sexy than a middle-aged man panicking about his weight loss jabs in a former famine region? You see? Full existential crisis territory.
And when I sent an SOS voice note to my most woke friend Saskia, expecting full support, she said I should check my skinny privilege and that I clearly have a huge “thin bias”. She’s probably on the jabs herself.
The remainder of the eight-week “holiday” was spent at Cowes week (shoot me now, I hate sailing so much) and ferrying the children to their various camps, since we’d bankrupted ourselves on the safari.
Which still allowed time for Hector to get concussed by a cricket ball, Minnie to contract glandular fever from some revolting teenager she’s been snogging at her intense French camp, and me to nearly murder Will’s father for implying Hector’s dyscalculia was due to my failure to drill him in times tables.
Meanwhile Lyra is still in sleuth mode hunting for evidence of Will’s affair, a notion of which — frankly — I’m in no hurry to disavow her. Roll on autumn.
