Laura Craik on giant moons, text addicts and ads with attitude

Current status: stressing about the moon.

As if there wasn’t enough to stress about. ‘OMG the sodding moon,’ my friend C emailed me recently. She’d had a bad night’s sleep, which apparently is to be expected when there’s a full blue supermoon — unless, of course, you’re spiritually and emotionally dead, as I must be, because I slept like a baby. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. What sort of woman isn’t attuned to the moon? According to the internet, I was supposed to have more energy, feel more connected to my partner and have more interest in sex due to the gravitational pull of the moon on the Earth. No, no and no. As the moon glowed blue in the black night sky, I was busy making a bookshelf with instructions in Chinese.

There are no full moons in February, which seems remiss. Given their well-known links to love, you’d think Mother Nature could have rustled one up for Valentine’s Day, an occasion that, frankly, needs all the help it can get. Maybe She wasn’t much arsed by a patriarchal construct involving scratchy red underwear and half a dozen roses bought from the nearest Tesco (in the pursuit of getting a shag from your long-term partner, every little helps). Does anyone bother with Valentine’s Day?

In London, you show your love in other ways — by doing the night feed, taking the dog for its midnight poo or getting up with the toddler to watch Baby Jake at 5am. Sleep is the most precious gift of love.

Unless you are Selena Gomez, in which case it’s ‘going to a bible study class’. Why is she accompanying Justin Bieber to a bible study class? Is he still going through his ‘I just honestly want to live like Jesus’ phase? Is it to repay him for the time he rented out the Staples Center just so she could watch Titanic? ‘Romance isn’t dead. Treat your lady right, fellas,’ he tweeted, failing to mention he’d been given the venue for free. Just treat her to a lie-in, Justin. That’s all any of us wants.

OFF message

I can tolerate most things in my yoga class — BO, the occasional fart — but I draw the line at texting. Why bother going? I’m not even talking a quick text at the beginning of class. She was on it for 40 minutes, tapping away while doing downward dog (not easy) until eventually the teacher asked her to turn her phone off, at which point — I kid you not — she shook her head and wiggled her finger. What’s the correct response? Annoyance at her selfishness, or sympathy at her addiction? Because she must be addicted, right?

A new book, How to Break up with Your Phone, comes out this week, detailing just how obsessed we all are with our smartphones. Millennials check theirs up to 150 times a day. People! Not on a yoga mat.

PAP’S THE WAY TO DO IT

Fave campaign of the season so far: Balenciaga spring 2018, featuring a series of supes (lol, remember when people called them ‘supes’ — so Nineties) including Stella Tennant and Alek Wek. I love that the pics are based on classic paparazzi tropes (and were shot by actual French paparazzi), with the models’ bodies contorted into those strange, flinching poses that didn’t really exist before celebrities started getting hounded by cameras, wielded as threateningly by professionals as casual passers-by.

What better way to shield your face than with a Balenciaga handbag? As the cash cows of every luxury brand, bags have dominated fashion ads for ages. Finally, an imaginative way of doing it.