The Lucyverse

I often wonder what the world would be like if it was designed by women. Would we have invented golf? It feels like the sort of thing a man would do - standing around in a big field doing fuck all for hours on end and fiddling around with different shaped sticks and tiny balls. Even if we had invented it, we certainly wouldn’t have had the audacity to pretend that it was a very important way to spend time, or create an exclusive world of power, money and influence around it.

The Lucyverse is on tour in Màlaga, birthplace of Picasso and the destination of choice for rambunctious stag nights involving 36 Italian men dressed as traffic cones. It is so relentlessly sun-drenched that a local woman practically crawled into the lift with us complaining that it was ‘mucho hot.’ And if you’re wearing a traffic cone, I can imagine it would be mucho hotter, perhaps even very caliente indeed. The Lucyverse is a reader-supported publication.

It’s Friday! By the time you read this I will hopefully be on a beach in a pair of pequeño pantelones, soaking up the sun and eating crisps. Fingers crossed I won’t get dive-bombed by Spanish seagulls, but if I do, I’m hoping they’ll be the sophisticated European types who prefer boquerones and jazz. In Britain, seagulls are the Reform voters of the sky. The other day I saw one trying to open a packet of crackers by banging it relentlessly onto the roof of a car.

Kombucha. Everyone’s drinking it! Where are you on your kombucha journey? Personally, I’m clinging by my fingernails to the front door, desperate not to go, and screaming ‘DON’T MAKE ME DRINK VINEGAR!’ as passers by exchange looks of concern. Mmm, look at that appetising, er… drink. That reminds me, I really need to kill again and pickle a fresh spleen. My old one is looking a bit knackered. Like AI, kombucha has been normalised, even though nobody asked us whether we wanted it the first place.

When Bryan Adams sang ‘Everything I do, I do it for you’ he was actually referring to me buying the new viral M&S chocolate, strawberry and pistachio creme sandwich and eating it for your entertainment. It had to be done. I mean, no, it didn’t, but as we’ve already established this week, pistachio is now considered the height of fashion, a bit like when Victorians went bonkers over arsenic green and died.

You’re probably wondering why I’m always hanging around on Temu. I suppose it’s because the Lucyverse is an anti-capitalist public service, and we need to know our enemy. But it’s also because it never, ever disappoints. You think you’re looking at an ordinary object, and then it slowly turns into a surrealist dreamscape that Luis Buñuel might have rejected for being muy loco.

THING: Pistachio flavoured everything I thought pistachios would have had their day by now. After all, the state-sanctioned success of Dubai chocolate ultimately failed to distract everyone from the fact that Dubai is a corrupt new build estate in the middle of the desert, full of low-flying drones, Russian escorts and honest, hard-working ‘businessmen’ like Katie Price’s new husband, Lee Andrews. But even so, this sweet primordial green ooze has continued to trickle down into the mainstream.

It’s Friday! And as we ease ourselves into the weekend, let’s spare a thought for the dads. I thoroughly enjoy giving men a hard time (you could say it’s a hobby of mine) but when I look at the gifts on offer for Father’s Day it makes me feel almost sorry for them. The stereotype of the mother as someone with no needs or desires beyond a Wowcher for a shit afternoon tea is offensive enough, but have you seen what men get? My God.

Surprise! It’s WTF Wednesday! This is a kind of WTF Friday/Temuescent Thursday mash-up, in that I found it on Temu and it made me - a woman with an out-of-control algorithm that currently makes it look like I’m a racist squid fancier - say ‘WTF?’ That’s not easy at this stage of my ‘career’. I’ve now seen so much crap that an LED talking lampshade made out of human skin wouldn’t even raise a nonchalant shrug.

How are you getting on? If you’re not a trillionaire or a football fan who enjoys staying up until 5am, you might be struggling a bit this summer. But take heart. You’re definitely not struggling as much as food manufacturers, who are trying to capitalise on World Cup fever and coming up with ideas that should be relegated to the Specsavers League along with Fort William FC and the Wetwang Wanderers. Football and food are awkward partners, really, because there’s a limit to what you can do.