The Week In Review With Raven Smith

ood news for all you crystal-bashing patchouli-loving Matthew-McConaughey-in-the-new-Harmony-Korine types: Mercury is out of retrograde. It’s time to pack up the planetary excuses and embrace your flawed character and emotional shortcomings. If you have small hands, build a wall in Mexico and stop the flow of avocados across the border. If you’re short, ascend like Adam Rippon’s pedestal to reach his boyfriend at the GLAAD awards. If you’re bored, fake a pregnancy like the Bieber-Baldwins. Don’t.

My Achilles’ heel is high-grade procrastination so this week’s column is bought to you after hours liking videos of muscular guys doing tricks-y yoga on the beach while I infinitely scroll Brexit news. After quite a fanfare three years ago, Brexit is less of a flourish with drums and trumpets, more a torture of indecision constantly dripping on our collective foreheads. Our political leaders are getting crabby, like when a colleague asks you to do something well within your job description. There is a cranky under-slept babies hum at Westminster and the weather’s bad. As April showers hit refresh on the season, hunker down until the clouds pass.

Like a text from your ex who wants a second chance BBC’s Fleabagis back. Not that the first series was a toxic lover, starting arguments in public and whittling your self-esteem to a nub. Quite the opposite. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s comedy is a forensic kneading of real emotions, noxious in-laws, body scrutiny, kamikaze-thinking in the wake of grief. Each scene is an airing of dirty laundry, but carefully observed as it wrings out the damp flannel of the human experience. The more puerile aspects are countered with blunt, face-slapping shocks that never play for laughs. As nuanced as it is on the nose, Fleabag see a gaslit woman violently fanning the flames of her own destruction and salvation. She’s found God in a sweary priest (is nothing sacred?) and my body squirmed inside out as he nearly infiltrated our fourth-walled garden. Hauling her emotional Fleabaggage between scenes, our protagonist gets her own back for every narrative where women exist to facilitate the male storyline. Yet we never fall into overly-woke sentiment. Observations are delivered brashly but speak to a microscopic understanding of the self and the hierarchy of human living — the hair monologue is case and point. I’ve had trouble working this particularly iconic line into the write-up so let’s just end with, “he gave me champagne before he ruined my life”.

I’m not a big spiritual thinker but I believe in a hell where you have to relive every time you've dropped a good slice of pizza or a cat or a baby. You recall the foulest moments of your life but they're made worse because you’re forced to wear nippy little denim panties. Y/Project’s denim knickers reek of never nude, though I guess the denim g-string (d-string?) is a form of artistic expression…? In all honesty, I’m wearing them right now under my Acne trousers. Knowing my luck, this is the day I end up unconscious in hospital and they cut off my slacks to reveal denim panties. What will the neighbours say? I often say "dress for the weather you want" but I can’t imagine it ever being hot enough for denim grundies.

It all got a bit Page 3 in the House of Commons this week as an army of politically badass strippers disrobed in the name of climate change. In the time-honoured tradition of attention-seekers, they took their tops off to interrupt parliament. Ed Miliband’s face launched a thousand shocked memes as we saw torsos for temperature rise, nipples for the ice caps, thighs for the skies. I wonder where Swampy is now he’s out of his post-adolescent idealistic phase? Does he use dual carriageways? Does he have an iPhone? Does he spray Lynx? Most lipstick contains fish scales. He’d have something to say about that.

Interns are so young these days that most of them don’t remember Jack Nicholson as the Joker. I’ve lost count of how many actors have taken on the role but the pack is out of jokers by now, surely? If the trailer for the new The Joker, with former gladiator Joaquin Phoenix is anything to go by, the key trends for fall are sunken eyes and hysterical, maniacal laughing. You’re never fully dressed without a lacerated face smile.