The truth about J-Lo's ham bap and Sunak's Sambas
I dismember three celebrity stories of the week.
[Alt text: A white Adidas Samba with golden stripes and trim at heel, with ‘Sporty & rich’ written down the side.]
This week’s The truth about everything* is a MOOD RING: waspish mini essays on the world at large.
SUNAK SAMBA SHAME
Flags at Adidas were lowered to half-mast recently when demonic Mouseketeer prime minister Rishi Sunak was spotted in a pair of Sambas. Luckily, not only a pair of Sambas; above said classic trainers, Sunak was sporting his usual, strangely generic, almost Gattacan drag of crisp white shirt and navy ‘slacks’. I’ve never owned a pair of Sambas – should any pay pigs be watching, my favoured models are Rivalry, Centennial, and Super Court (RIP) – but I sympathised with dedicated Samba wearers who now felt compelled to launch their shoes into the nearest trash compactor rather than share any taste whatsoever with the Tories’ Auton-in-chief. And then I didn’t.
Because, if I may speak frankly, why do you care? Who, at the grand old age of whatever you are, are you trying to impress? Fair enough if you’re still at school and unwilling to arm the chorus line of bullies any further, but if you’re a grownup I’m afraid it’s not sharing a fondness for Sambas with the most unhinged prime minster since the last one that makes you uncool – it’s the fact you’re chasing cool at all. For it cannot be attained, it can only be assigned by others. Cool is a form of clique-building that appears more meritocratic than the traditional method of bullying people who aren’t like you – like class, race, or sexuality. You’ve got the right trainers, so you belong. I am not immune to having my head turned by trends and influences, but it’s so weird when you think about it, which is probably why we try not to.
It’s in retailers’ and influencers’ interests to have consumers desperately elbowing each other out of the way in the race for approval of an always changing, intangible jury made up of people who walk past you on the street. No matter how wonderful (and expensive, usually, funny that) your daywear drag, there’ll always be some commentator who thinks you look like a Morley’s Magnum Burger fished out of a bin and reheated over the glow of a cigarette.
Look, we have all been the person on the Tube who sees a much hotter person in the same shirt and realises they look like a warthog’s reflection in the back of the spoon, right? So imagine how the other person feels, seeing their carefully selected application for cool draped over the less exciting bones of an averagely unattractive stranger – quite gutted perhaps? And don’t you think they’re an asshole for thinking like that? You should.
Look, Sunak has so little else going for him, let him have his Sambas. When he’s consigned to history as the fifth in a series of the weirdest prime ministers ever – boiled ham in Burton tailoring; a haunted Tesco carrier in kitten heels; a plate of tripe jiggling on a brakeless gurney rolling down a cobbled hill; the conchiglie-brained wonder that is Liz motherf•cking Truss – the Sambas slander will be barely a footnote alongside his other disasters. So, please, wear your rather played-out, ‘I’m not like other dads’ footwear with pride. Be comfortable in your own skin, safe in the knowledge it’s one trait you’ll never share with the prime minister, who looks like he zips his on every day.
MOOD: Para llevar la samba, es necesito una poca de gracia
GAME SET DISPATCH
Nobody gets divorced like celebrities. Not for them the monotony of arguing over who gets custody of the Ikea flatpacks or wet Sunday afternoons in McDonald’s killing time with a distracted child watching Bluey on the phone their mother’s new boyfriend bought them. Other than box office bankability or streaming figures, a star’s entire worth relies on remaining permanently aspirational. Having a breakdown? Fine, but make it fashion. Gravely ill? Okay, but make it awareness. Divorcing? Super, now let’s make it spiritual.
Once upon a time, it was fashionable for celebrities to realise they’d made a huge mistake before even the wedding buffet sandwiches had begun to curl at the edges, but since lengthy matrimony became cool again, splitting up has had a rebrand. Gwyneth Paltrow led the way, as always, with her ‘conscious uncoupling’ from constantly perspiring Coldplay frontman Chris Martin. The woo-woo vocab was heavily mocked at the time, but is now as essential a part of our breakup lexicon as ‘situationship’ or ‘FWB’.
Isla Fisher and Sacha Baron Cohen broke news of their divorce last week in an Instagram story – which feels a bit like having an obituary distributed via fortune cookie – with a touching photo of the pair in what Heat magazine would call ‘happier times’, wearing tennis gear. The caption continued the theme: “After a long tennis match lasting over twenty years, we are finally putting our racquets down.” Makes you wonder what other photos they flicked through before settling on this particular analogy. Obviously, I wish them well and hope their children – aged 16, 13, and nine – enjoy as painless a transition to the aftertimes as possible. But while the caption goes on to make it clear the couple ‘jointly filed’ back in 2023 to end the marriage, the thing about tennis is unless it’s a quick knockabout in the courts in your local park, you don’t ‘put your racquets down’. Someone always wins, the loser a sweaty, broken mess who limps toward the net to shake your hand. And the same goes for divorce, usually. ‘Love all’ is just another way of saying ‘nil-nil’, after all – somebody has to score.
MOOD: New balls, please.
J-LO BASIC BODEGA SCANDAL
I’d been devastatingly unaware of the J-Lo ‘basic bodega order’ until I read about it in the latest issue of
, Emily Kirkpatrick’s amazing Substack. It was trending ages ago? I don’t care, I’m not interested in surfing the zeitgeist; I prefer to tread water (with my mouth open) in its rapidly disintegrating foamy wake. To catch you all up, a bodega is basically a corner shop in NYC – I can hear Americans’ latissimus dorsi contacting in horror at this generalisation, but let’s be real.In her latest movie, a strange biopic-cum-promotional-PowerPoint called This is Me Now: A Love Story, Jennifer Lopez reminisces over lunches she once loved back when she was still Jenny from the Block and not Mrs Jennifer Affleck the Second. Turns out, she is just as real as she’s always claimed, plumping for the kind of lunch your mum tentatively prepares for you as a bout of childhood diarrhoea starts to move on from waterfall phase. Ham and cheese roll, an orange drink (brand not specified so I’m guessing Asda’s own) and a bag of crisps. This rare insight into the mindset of a woman who has spent the last twenty-five years behaving like a killer robot’s idea of a real person was mercilessly mocked by the rest of the internet because that is what we clock in to do.
You’d think this commitment to the humble meal deal, whose hyper-refrigerated sterility has been terrorising British weekday lunches for the past three decades, would make Jennifer more relatable and likeable. But we don’t want celebrities to be just like us all the time; they need quirks and predilections that justify their place on the upper echelons of stardom while we remain on the ground floor, gazing up at the soles of their Louboutins. This is why I started drinking exclusively Earl Grey tea at the age of twelve and would pretend to be French when I met strangers, in case I was unfortunate enough to become famous when I was older and needed a charming backstory. Luckily it never happened. And just to further my lack of celebrity credentials, I actually support J-Lo’s ham and cheese depression bap, washed down with a lukewarm Orangina. Such a normcore lunch might be the enemy of aspiration, but life is not a movie with a captive audience; we must spend it pleasing ourselves and sometimes a basic jambon beurre from Pret once in a while is the balm you need.
MOOD: Why tf is everything in Pret £7.50? I have knuckles bigger than this sandwich.
MORE FROM ME:
One month until the release of my new novel LEADING MAN, so my dominant state right now is ‘mild terror’. So, instead of me waffling on, here are some lovely quotes about it from authors who sell more books than I do, so know what they’re talking about:
“The writing is rife with Justin's gorgeous trademark humour and I didn't stop laughing” – Lucy Vine
“This is the gay rom-com we’ve all been waiting for – I’ve never read better!” – Matt Cain
“Witty, relatable and with real depth. I devoured it.” –
“When I finished I wanted to give it a standing ovation” –
“Hilarious jokes, characters you desperately want to hang out with and an emotional depth that means you will never forget Leo’s story.” –
Also, this incredible review on NetGalley from an early reader: “This is easily one of the best books I have ever read.”
If you pre-order, you are basically telling booksellers and publishers that there is demand for books like LEADING MAN, so they can get me (or other writers like me) to write more of them. To pre-order, and for a full synopsis, go to your favourite retailer or:
PRE-ORDER AT WATERSTONES
PRE-ORDER ON AMAZON
PRE-ORDER AT BERT’S BOOKS
Speaking of, I’m doing an event at Bert’s Books in Swindon on 5th June alongside the aforementioned Matt Cain and we will be having a gay old time. Come! GET TICKETS
[Alt text: Graphic with the caption meet the authors Matt Cain and Justin Myers Wednesday 5th of June at 7 pm tickets £3. Bert’s Books 54 Godwin Court, Swindon, SN1 4BB. The graphic also shows the cover for Matt Cain's book One Love and my book Leading Man.]
Drop me a note if you’d like to book me for other events, especially – but not restricted to – Pride Month.
Oh I did enjoy this, for me to laugh at 9.50am is most unusual… I’m also being educated, most beneficial… A great piece…
OMG this is the first I've heard of SBC & Isla getting divorced 😭 (How did that pass me by? I live on the Internet!)