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 Here’s an extract from my book, How Not to be a Supermodel. It’s taken from a chapter about model castings and the physical/sporting skills I lied about having in order to try and bag some work. Could I play the drums, for example? Sure:

Was I a pro-level ice-skater? Er, yes:

They were necessary little white lies, by the way, because I was in possession of virtually no physical skills whatsoever – I couldn’t jet-ski or surf, ride horses or even swim underwater – and had I not gone down the “fake it until you make it” route I’d have ruled out half of my job prospects.

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In this chapter I end up in some compromising – yet strangely zen – positions and completely lose any shred of dignity I thought I had.

And so, without further ado: an extract (abridged) from How Not to be a Supermodel.

Chapter 19, Our Experienced Yogi.

When it came to model castings, I was happy to give almost anything a go in the name of a hefty paycheque. There were plenty of skills that were in high demand, usually ones I didn’t possess. Not that it mattered, apparently.

‘Babe,’ my agent, Texana, would say, ‘can you ski? It’s for Breitling watches and you need to be able to slalom down into shot.’

‘I’ve never skied,’ I said, ‘no.’

‘Never?’

‘No.’

‘Babe, anyone can ski. Just tell them you used to ski as a kid, you’ll be fine.’

‘OK but when I get the job, surely I’ll then have to actually ski?’

‘We’ll deal with that if it comes to it.’

Or,

‘Hi darling,’ my other agent would say, ‘can you drive a scooter? . . .OK, but if push came to shove?’

The worst ‘sporting pretender’ casting I did was one for a newly launched women’s sportswear brand and their range of yoga garments. And the fault, this time, was entirely with me.

‘Babe, do you do yoga?’ Texana asked when I phoned to check in for the next day’s appointments.

‘Nope, but my mum teaches it.’

There was a pause.

‘OK babe, but . . . do you do yoga? It’s just that for this casting, you’ll have to go through a series of poses so you kind of need to know the lingo.’

‘Yeah, I can do the positions,’ I said, ‘the stretching up and the crossed legs. I can probably still do a headstand.’

‘Right . . .’ said Texana. ‘I just . . . I’m wary of having a repeat of the beer commercial situation.’

‘Where I did the Karate Kid moves?’

‘Oh my God, babe, what the hell. They said it was like watching someone drop acid and then try to fight themselves in a hall of mirrors.’

‘Huh,’ I said. ‘I’ll make sure I practise some yoga positions then.’

‘Poses, my babe,’ said Texana. ‘They’re called poses.’

‘Fear not,’ I said. ‘I’m limbering up as we speak. Going in for the warrior dog and the downward spiral.’

The yoga casting took place in a dance studio, beautifully bright with sunshine streaming in through two full-length windows, reflected from a wall of mirrors onto the wooden floor. The clients, three friendly women in their thirties or perhaps forties were seated behind a table that was piled with model portfolios. They looked very serene, hair loosely pulled into ballerina buns or flowing onto shoulders, all of them clothed in the sort of soft fabrics and gentle colours that make your own clothes look as though they’ve been stolen from an eighteenth-century vampire.

‘Lovely to meet you, Ruth,’ the first client said. ‘We’ve been desperate to book you for a campaign so it’s brilliant that this yoga range could be a good fit. You’ve got exactly the look that we want.’

‘We’ll start with the warrior pose,’ said client number two, putting on some spa music.

Warrior pose? What an earth was this? Couldn’t they just see me in the leggings and crop top and be satisfied with that? Surely on the shoot day someone could just arrange my legs and arms?

‘It’s important for us,’ said client number three, ‘that whoever we use genuinely practises yoga.’

Oh.

‘We really want the campaign to feel authentic and for the images to call out to our customers – we’re not just a brand using models who look good in our clothes, we’re a brand using models who will wear our clothing in real life. Actual sportswomen, athletes, mountaineers, and you, hopefully, as our experienced yogi.’

Wait. What?

‘Yogi?’

‘Let’s get started and see how the samples look,’ said client two. ‘I can’t wait to try the taupe harem pants on you.’

For warrior, I pretended to hold a spear in one hand and put the other on my hip. In fairness, it wasn’t a million miles away from the correct pose: I’d put my legs in a strong, wide-apart stance that looked relatively convincing, actually. Bending forward pose was pretty self-explanatory and, miraculously, I actually knew the bridge. It was when the other poses, the more abstract names, came along that the shit really hit the proverbial fan. Who would ever have thought that ‘mountain pose’ would be ‘standing up straight’? What mountain is tall and thin and not large and round, like a boulder? Which would obviously make more sense, explaining completely why a person would think that they should turn themselves into a big ball, hugging their knees and tucking their head between their legs . . .

‘OK,’ said client two, with just the slightest tremor of confusion in her voice, ‘let’s move on to the downward- facing dog.’

I mean, how would a dog face downwards? Isn’t it already mostly down-facing, due to the fact that it walks on four legs?

‘That’s more the cow pose,’ said client one, ‘but with four straight legs. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it like that but OK. Let’s now move into the child’s pose.’

Well. Even under such intense pressure my mind was spraying out ideas left right and centre, God bless it. It had sensed extreme career danger and had risen to the occasion, providing pose solutions to each and every prompt with only ever a second or two’s hesitation. It was as though I was on a weird version of Charades Mastermind, in which the presenter called out a random word and I had to work out which action might possibly – as in, a one in a thousand chance – be the correct match.

Never had my mind and body had to work so hard as one. And now, after the cow and the downward dog and a mountain pose and a boat pose (which I had been pretty pleased with, seeing as though I’d managed to use my arms as oars and one leg as a mast) I had one last challenge. The child’s pose.

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‘Do . . . you need any help?’ asked client three, as I stood quietly upon the mat, eyes closed, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. Buying time.

‘No,’ I said, eyes still closed, hands over my ears, because it just felt right, ‘I’m fine thanks, I’m doing some breathwork before I do the next position.’

What poses did children do? There was the foetal sleeping position, which didn’t seem stretchy enough to be a yoga pose and so was my least favoured option, and then I had thought about skipping. But you couldn’t hold a skipping pose, or skip in slow motion, unless you wanted to look like a complete fruitcake, so that one wasn’t likely either. Children liked to climb trees, but I’d done the tree pose with my branches stretched out and my toes wriggling into the floor like roots (nice touch!) and so what were the chances they’d get me to repeat myself? No, it would have to be my fourth choice and I was pretty confident about it because so far, they hadn’t asked me for either of my solid, tried-and-tested yoga moves. And I wasn’t mad keen on doing a headstand in front of them, and so I dropped down into the most childish pose of all, the position that all under-tens must adopt for hours in the schooling week, in a hall stinking of boiled vegetables: sitting cross-legged.

 Oooph. It has been a month of seemingly quite random online and in-person purchases but by God have these things tickled the collective fancy of my Instagram followers. From a pressure-relieving seat-pad to a face contour wand that creates instant cheekbones, here are the bits and pieces that people have gone wild for.

1 – The Gel Seat Pad.

I mean we should obviously go in with the sexiest item: this Gel Seat Cushion “for long sitting” has a special honeycomb design that helps to spread load and relieve pressure on the lower back, hips, sciatic nerve and – crucially – on the old fanjita. The undercarriage. Yes, friends, I bought a seat pad specifically to stop my thrupenny bits from going numb when writing at my desk for long periods of time.

I can hear you all now, screaming away, “you shouldn’t be sitting for that long at a time anyway!”. “My Apple Watch makes me get up and do jumping jacks every twenty minutes!!”. “GET A STANDING DESK!!!”.

Calm yourselves. If I wish to sit at my desk churning out words until my entire fanny loses all feeling then I will. And the new gel seat cushion allows me to go even longer than before. What an accolade to earn!

Jesting aside, the cushion is actually brilliant if you have lower back pain and find every single office chair uncomfortable. It doesn’t make it feel all soft and squidgy, as though you’re sinking into a sofa, it just sort of…supports. In a really forgiving way. It also allows air circulation between arse and chair, which is helpful, and you can pick up the cushion by its special handle (just a normal handle, but I’m in QVC mode) and take it to use in the car or at The Globe theatre. (If you know, you know.)

I bought mine from Amazon here* – it was £24.99

*denotes an ad-affiliate link. This means that a small percentage is earned with every purchase through the link.

2 – The World’s Best Earplugs

Look, I know this is subjective, but I have tried a lot of earplugs – I can almost safely say most of them on the market – and these are the ones that are still inside my ear come morning.

Most others are plucked out, blearily, at around 3am because they are so big that they are about to burst through the wall of my ear canal, or they are protruding too much and stopping me from sleeping on my side, or they are too rigid and giving me ear-burn.

Before this particular type of ear plug, the best I’d found were the Alpine Sleep Soft (yes, I have tried Loop and all the other ones that frequently pop up as suggestions) because the soft silicone plugs were easy to pull in and out (no rolling or twisting necessary), were small enough for my dainty ear canals (pretty sure most ear plugs are made to fit giants) and formed a brilliant noise-seal that cut out snoring but still allowed high pitched noises to penetrate.

(Alarms, foxes mating, owls screeching.)

After trying nearly every type of ear plug apart from the bespoke ones where you have to have a mould made of your ear canal (I’m just not that committed) the Alpine Sleep Soft were the very best. But then – then – along came the Alpine SleepDeep!

These are oval and seem to just fit that bit more snugly inside (you give them a good extra push with your thumbnails and they suction into place as though you’ve entered some sort of outer space satellite airlock) and they also come in two sizes. Which is key. I recommend the small, unless you have a very large head. Or large ear canals.

As mentioned, these are the only ear plugs I can put in at night and wake up still wearing in the morning. I think that they are quite phenomenal.

I bought mine here* – I bought the mixed pack with both sizes, but if you just want “small” then opt for the version labelled (confusingly) “50 pack”. That seems to be the small size on its own.

3 – The Braless Vest Top

Something of a cheat entry, because I covered this amazing vest top last week, but nonetheless one of the most popular recommendations of the month. This is a soft, beautifully-cut vest top that requires no underwear beneath it because it has it built in. I am a convert.

You can read the full rave about this top here, or buy the Uniqlo Ribbed Bra Top, £19.90 here*

4 – The Instant Cheekbones Wand

Some contouring online is an extreme sport, with people changing their entire bone structure and magically reshaping their noses via clever optical illusions. I can tell you that this looks impressive on film but totally unhinged when seen up close in real life, so don’t feel as though you’re missing a trick if you’ve not yet covered your entire face with stripes and squiggles of dark brown paint and buffed it all in to a dubious finish.

What I can suggest, if you want the aforementioned “supermodel cheekbone chisel” is a quick swipe of the e.l.f. Beauty Wand in Contour (I use medium/tan) directly beneath your real cheekbones and then a quick dust over with a fluffy brush to blend. The sponge applicator seems to apply the colour in a more forgiving way than a stick – less waxy, easier to buff in – and the shades are well thought-out, non-orangey and stick around until you wash your face off.

It’s a good way to dip your toe into the sculpting world if you don’t want to invest in a pricey contour product and I love that the plastic tube packaging is nicely lightweight – perfect for my on-the-go makeup bag.

I bought mine at Boots and it’s also online here* – it costs £9 and is every bit as good as the pricier products it’s up against.

I’ll bore you with a story: I have some really lovely Tiffany earrings. A present, years ago. Ten years? In all of that time I have tried and failed to wear these diamond studs for more than a few days at a time. The screw thread seems to just tear up the insides of my piercing holes when I try to feed the posts through and I end up with sore, swollen lobes every time that take days to go down again.

I made the executive decision to sell the earrings and buy myself some “new” ones (actually pre-loved, so new to me but not to the world) and this time I chose the standard “push on” backs. All well and good, and my ears massively appreciate them, the smooth posts just gliding on through, but I have to say that the lady in the jewellers put the fear of God into me about losing the earrings. She was all for the screw post for security.

I set to some serious research, which took me all of about eight minutes on the train home from London, and came across a potential solution: Lox lockable earring backs.

These clever backs allow the post of the earring to enter it, but then it locks in place so that you can’t slide the back off even if you apply Hulk Hogan levels of force. There’s just no budging it. Marvellous! To undo, you simply squeeze the prongs together (a little fiddly but nothing too frustrating) and off they slide.

So far, so very good. I’ve been wanging around with the backs, taking them on and off a few hundred times, still no sign of the LOX strength depleting.

It’s almost a tenner for two sets of lockable backs, which make these possibly the most expensive small things on the current market if you disregard MI5-level hidden spy cameras and nano-robots and the like, but by their very nature they should be hard to lose and so hopefully you’d only have to buy them once for each pair of fancy earrings…

I bought my LOX on Amazon here* – £9.99

I didn’t want to self-promote (or did, but thought I’d leave it until the very end!) but my most-purchased recommendation this month has actually been my new book, How Not to be a Supermodel. I cannot tell you how many messages I get every day from people who have finished the book and feel the need to tell me immediately how much they loved it. Or from people who have just started it and can’t put it down. Or who can’t stop laughing out loud in public.

Dozens and dozens of brilliant, heart-warming messages and mini-reviews, often with whole passages quoted back at me. It’s hugely enjoyable hearing how people are devouring it and then losing the book to their friends and family because they’ve banged on about it so much!

If you haven’t yet read it (or listened – the audiobook is available on Audible and Spotify and all of the usual places) then you can find it in your local bookshop or order online here*. I can promise you that if you even remotely like what you read here on Substack then you will love the book.