Where is the cute England merch, please?

Here’s a free idea for someone: make some cool, retro-inspired graphic tees for female England football supporters. Personally, I don’t really want to be wearing official merch. It’s too shiny and, well, athletic looking (plus that shit is expensive!) I want something cute and unfussy but no one seems to make anything.

What’s on offer, instead, is the sartorial equivalent of the British birthday card aisle, if you know what I mean (“It’s cumming home”, “Tits out when England score”, and numerous lewd slogans about wanting Jude Bellingham to put it in). Elsewhere there are shirts that play into the stereotype that wimmin don’t know anything about football (I’ve seen tees reading “No idea who’s winning, just hope they’re all having fun xoxo” and “Extra time, extra wine”). Others are just straight up hideous. I don’t know exactly what I’m after, just something that doesn’t make me want to die inside.

I’ve scoured various sites, Etsy and Rokit for cool shirts but nothing. I ended up getting a vintage, basic white tee with the Three Lions logo from eBay to wear for Saturday’s World Cup game against Norway. I know Idea don’t typically embrace sports, but someone like them would really make a killing with the right design. Maybe for Euro '28? Do I have to do it myself?

Last Saturday I was walking past Hackney Town Hall, where Charli XCX and I got married (not to each other), and gasped when I saw three women attending a wedding wearing the exact same dress. Fascinated, I slowed down and investigated further. It was Realisation Par’s The Cora dress (in Mirage), a fab summer wedding guest frock, it has to be said. On closer inspection, I noticed that actually two women were attending the same wedding, while the other was in a separate wedding party waiting to go in. Still, The Cora, which was released in March and comes in another two patterns (Tortoiseshell and Genie), seems to be a hit for 2026 summer nuptials.

I suffered an embarrassing flip-flop blow-out on the way to my son’s swimming lesson, meaning I had to hobble around the streets of London, awkwardly trying to walk on the ball of my foot with one flip-flop strap before I gave up and just rawdogged the filthy ground until the shops opened at 11am. It was slim pickings where I was so I shuffled into a Sports Direct and bought some £20 Adidas pool slides to get home in. I’ve actually been wearing them quite a bit since (in the latest episode of the podcast An Excellent Fit, super stylish HTSI editor Jo Ellison talks about her love of an ugly shoe so I’m going with that). Wonderfully comfortable and great for nursery drop offs, supermarket runs, and Pilates. PS. Watching your child learn to swim (we started a month ago) might be the most adorable thing in the world.

Want some beautiful colourful beads that don’t cost over £100 and can be worn in three different ways? Look no further than Bad Juju London’s Glow Drops. They come in numerous colourways and can be worn long around the neck, doubled up as a sort of choker, or wrapped around the wrist as a bracelet. I was kindly gifted their Halo one - green onyx beads with corrugated brass accents and a hand-blown Murano glass drop - and I’m smitten with them. Will be wearing all summer.

I absolutely loved The Invite, Olivia Wilde’s sex comedy about a resentful long-time married couple who invite their laid-back upstairs neighbours over for wine and cheese one evening. An Oscar Wilde quote kicks off proceedings: “One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry”, which nicely sets the tone. Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen’s Angela and Joe begin bickering in their first scene together and basically don’t stop, even when Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz’s passionate unmarried couple, Hawk and Pína, turn up. I won’t say much more so not to spoil the unpredictable plot but things get extremely heated. Not only is it absolutely hilarious (I was fully guffawing - quite rare for me) but it actually has something to say about modern relationships (that’ll be the influence of psychotherapist Esther Perel, a consultant on the film).

Urgh, why can’t they just make more movies like this? Sophisticated, intelligent, adult comedies in the ilk of Woody Allen and Mike Nichols. The performances are off the charts great, although Norton’s Hawk just about clinches my favourite character, and there is a fantastic score by Dev Hynes. And while the film is most definitely a riot, it unexpectedly takes a very moving turn. My only advice is to think carefully about who you go and watch it with. If things aren’t going well with your partner, this movie might highlight some home truths (but it could also ignite an overdue conversation) and it might be a little much for a first date. But you should most definitely watch it at the movies and laugh your head off along with the audience. Such fun.

Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling had me in a headlock. I feel a bit of a fool recommending this as it’s one of the bestselling books of the summer so I’m just here to say it really is that good. You probably know the story of this narrative non-fiction book by now - after 19-year-old Zac Brettler falls to his death from a luxury flat on the Thames, his parents discover he had been posing as a Russian oligarch’s son and they desperately want the truth about what really happened to him. It’s about corruption and greed, global wealth and identity. But also about parental love and grief. It’s a genuinely thrilling page-turner that never fails to be empathetic. And the scope of the book is huge; it takes in everything from London’s criminal underbelly, to the Russian money that flooded the capital following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, to the Asian immigrants expelled from Uganda by dictator Idi Amin in the seventies, to Brettler’s two grandfathers who escaped the Holocaust, deftly showing how all these things are connected to this mysterious death.

I would think carefully before picking up this book because you will likely not be able to put it down once you start; I finished it in less than 48 hours, I couldn’t think about anything else. I got annoyed when I had to pause to make dinner, bathe my son, go to sleep… Anyone would love this book but if you live in London it’s a must-read. You won’t look at your city in the same way again.

This year I decided to ‘get into’ Rachel Cusk, a previous literary blind spot of mine, because I know so many women who fawn over the Canadian-British author. I had a bit of a misstep in January when I went to pick up one of her most lauded novels, Outline, at Daunt Books in Marylebone but I couldn’t find it so I instead came away with her 1993 debut Saving Agnes, which, truth be told, didn’t quite land for me. I soon realised my previous mistake however; Outline, set in Athens, was in Daunt’s Greece section, rather than the fiction bookshelves, because the store organises its books by country. Daunt, you are so cute and confusing.

ANYWAY. Outline was a gorgeous book. A London-based writer goes to teach a creative writing workshop in Athens one hot summer and the book is essentially a series of conversations she has there. There is one with her seatmate on the plane, others with writers over dinner, a conversation among her writing class, and another with the woman who is taking over her apartment, among others. We are not really offered any details about our narrator, but, slowly, these conversations reveal a few facts about her: she is recently separated, she is a mother, she is trying to get a new mortgage. She is the titular outline and we have to draw our own conclusions about her. Everyone she speaks with is more fully realised, and we get to know these supporting characters through their conversations, usually about love, marriage, families and storytelling. It’s a dreamy book that I was completely enthralled by. I’m not sure I’ve been transported to another place so much through the writing before; I felt like I was in Athens, I could smell it. You don’t read this for the plot, there isn’t one. You read it for Cusk’s humour, strangeness, thrilling vignettes, and sheer audacity. I need to read the other two in the trilogy.

Hope you’re having a great week and c’mon England.