a conversation with the author and journalist Kate Spicer
"I’ve been trying to sort myself out for the last thirty years -- so I thought I'd write about what interests me, which is radical self-improvement which doesn’t cost any money."
A couple of years before Covid, I began losing my knack for parties. Some combination of motherhood, enforced writerly solitude combined with a grudging acceptance of my forever-status as a Foreigner In London combined to (occasionally if not always) render me mildly anxious when out and about. The appeal of large rooms full of crowded people drinking and roaring with laughter, faded in comparison to the pleasures of roaring fire and a few friends round a table at a quiet pub lunch.
Having said that, I still do go out once in a while — every night can’t be had at home with a bath and book. And on the rare occasions I do, Kate Spicer’s face is one I am always relieved to spot in a crowd — or around the table at a dinner or pressed in at the bar or twinkling mischievously from a dark corner. A freelance lifestyle writer by trade, she is funny, quirky and quick with a joke, one of those Londoners who seems to know everyone and everything, without being remotely smug or a worse, a “networker” type. To me Kate has always seemed to typify a rare and charming breed of London media magpie — the sort of writer who flits effortlessly and stylishly between worlds, absorbing the trends and soft news of the day with a gadfly’s lighthearted osmosis. Her features have appeared everywhere from The Sunday Times, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Daily Mail, Evening Standard, Vogue, Elle, Red to Noble Rot magazines. She’s made three acclaimed documentaries in the last ten years all of which still air internationally, including most recently Mission to Lars, described as ‘beautiful’ by the New York Times.
Her first book, a memoir, Lost Dog: A Love Story was a Sunday Times bestseller in 2019. I read it on holiday, in one long, luxurious gulp.
Her Substack, Sort Yourself Out! offers a refreshingly and much-needed look at wellness culture, which she describes as “a $4.5 trillion industry that promises answers for anxious times.” In her posts, Kate manages to be both an enthusiastic, well-versed consumer of tinctures and shamans but also a skeptical critic. “Wellness,” she points out, “is full of false prophets. What to keep and what to reject?” Paying subscribers are privy to her more intimate, soul-searching posts detailing her own wellness “journey” which we discuss in more detail below.
LM: Kate, we've been acquainted for while now through mutual friends in London but the first time I remember us actually talking properly was at a magic mushroom "retreat" ceremony organised by you and held at our friend Jonathan Downey's flat in Hackney during that very strange, surreal period in the spring of 2019 [sic] when the entire world had locked down and here in the UK were still washing our hands and singing "Happy Birthday.” Somehow you'd organised a high-priced Shaman to fly over from his commune in Northern Spain with his "assistant" (a beautiful young American hippy chick with plaits) and a bunch of us all listened to him give a long self-aggrandising speech about life story which ended in a bogus-sounding vision quest in the Mojave desert, after which we chose tarot cards from his deck (I got The Fool), then took huge doses of hallucinogens and writhed on the floor for several hours tripping while occasionally pausing to sip from a communal mug of CBD tea. It was fascinating, but decidedly not Covid friendly... do you feel any residual guilt about that (I'm not implying you should be, I'm just curious?)
KS: Well it was February 2020, and the showbiz shaman is married to the California assistant hippy chick1. He was passing through town on his way from Washington where he works with big companies because these kinds of spiritual metaphysical gurus are a thing now I believe. He’s incredibly expensive but he cut me a deal and later regretted it because he didn’t like the combination of deep East London and working with plant medicines, which is what they respectfully call plants with psychedelic properties in the spiritual wellness realms. He said they should be done in nature. I am not as cynical about him as you are. I think he has done the work, and is perhaps in tune with a side of life we are not. Doesn’t make him better than us, just makes him different. We did a combination of psilocybin in a mushroom chocolates and some San Pedro, a cactus with mescaline. It was difficult at first, I always find these psychedelics in therapeutic settings pretty painful and very much like ‘work’. But towards the end of what was probably a four hour trip or so, I actually had some fun for once. It wasn’t just lying in a soup made of the mulch in the darkest corners of my mind, I actually felt euphoric and hopeful.
Which brings me to whether I felt guilty or not. So, the night happened just before Covid hit full steam. I remember he passed round a glass of water we all had to share and me thinking, er, this isn’t right. Other than that, I wasn’t overly concerned about it. In the coming weeks though, I looked back and thought, that was mental. Was I mad to organise that. But, and this is going to upset some people, I also think the uplifting side of the ceremony was got me through the next few months of the first lockdown which I must be honest were very difficult for me in terms of my relationship. So I feel a little bit guilty, but equally, we weren’t at that stage breaking any laws and we were all grown ups able to make our own decisions.
I’ve done a few, not loads, but a few, plant medicine ceremonies and that was definitely one of, in fact I can say categorically, it was the second easiest I have ever done.
LM: Your memoir Lost Dog is just brilliant (I think I've told you that). Achingly funny and dark, biting, poignant. It centres around your madcap, slightly chaotic London social life and the sudden disappearance of your beloved first rescue dog Wolfy. It's a great framing device -- the search for a dog as metaphor for your own lost self. Can you explain the story of how the book came about?
KS: My dog Wolfy, who died this year in March, feels remarkably like the love of my life. I adopted him and he helped me sort my life out, get some routine into it, and just feel a very pure uncompromising uncomplicated and unconditional sort of love, which is pretty lovely. He ran away from my brother’s house when I was at a wedding and was missing for over a week. The hunt for him was just crazy and became a bit of a media thing. After he was found I was interviewed by Kay Burley on Sky News. The clip is on the Internet still. So a glamorous literary agent rang and asked me to write a sort of Cat Named Bob type story about it. I was much too slow and sent her a few pages and she just went ‘Meh’. As someone who makes her living from selling words I couldn’t face throwing it away so I kept writing and eventually I got myself another exciting glamorous literary agent and we sold the story to Penguin Random House and it did pretty well. Not Harry Potter well, but well enough. The search for Wolfy was a sort of madness of loss, I didn’t know it was possible to love an animal so deeply. But it is.
LM: In your book, you also spend a several pages making a brilliant case for West London, which I loved as a committed (if at times reluctant) westie. What do you think it is about West London that fucks so many other Londoners off (particular east London hipster types). Why do you think our part of town is so overlooked and misjudged? What are those other twats missing?
KS: Nowadays, since the fire at Grenfell Tower which is at the end of my road, a fire caused by corporate and governmental failings, in which countless people’s lives were changed forever and 72 lost their lives, I don’t find people hate on West London like they used to. Our mutual friend Jonathan is very rude about West London because it isn’t where exciting new things happen anymore. West London was supercool in the 70s, 80s, 90s, but now it is rather over populated with rich people and rents are SILLY so we don’t get the great new restaurants and cool little shops opening so much. But it is still a village, and very community driven, more than any other part of London I think. You can still have the superrich and the very not rich at all living cheek by jowl, which is wholesome. It’s a really lovely place, even if the crisps do cost a fiver for a 100g bag. I guess it means I eat less crisps.
LM: Your Substack, Sort Yourself Out!, is about wellness nominally, but in a funny self-critical decidedly non-smug and Goopy way. Why did you settle on wellness as a theme or niche (apart from the fact that it's HUGE and in a lot of cases the stuff that gets written about it is highly annoying)? What's your own wellness journey at the moment? I know you've tried a lot of stuff! What works for you and what doesn't?
KS: I’ve been trying to sort myself out for the last thirty years, I thought I’d use it as a basis for writing about stuff that interests me, which is radical self-improvement which doesn’t cost any money. Wellness can be very expensive, I kind of hate that free market economy governing people’s wellbeing. So I take a position on some silly costly antics. HIYA GWYNETH with your smells, tonics, shamans and infra red sauna shite. But also blather on about things that are actually worth thinking about. I’m not a very organised writer so mostly I just try to be entertaining
LM: You've recently started posting from a mysterious archive for paid subscribers only... you've been very mysterious about The File and I was so intrigued I immediately bought a subscription. Will I actually get my money's worth and get to be privy to your deepest secrets, rock bottom shame and hard-won epiphanies or are you having us all on? How low and how dark do you go?