Anne Hathaway disinformation campaign (2024)

As previously documented on this here Substack blog, I am in want of a nice photograph of myself, such elusive beast having evaded me since July 2019. I’m not attaching my last nice photo, but I would like you to believe that it exists.

This goal was notably not accomplished at a Fancy Event that I (rightly) dreaded going to.

I endured the discomfort and indignity of a strapless bra for over seven hours to end up with a mere two (2) pictures of the night, both of which were taken before we even left for the Fancy Venue and one of them is this:

I don’t look like this. I don’t know if I was doing something weird with my cheeks or what, but this is just not what my face looks like. To the extent that looking at it gives me a fair dose of pause. I’m looking at it again now and considering that maybe I don’t know myself at all. How accurate are any of our perceptions of the self, really? People often think things about me that I don’t believe to be true so maybe the me in my head really only exists there and I am in fact completely detached from the me that exists in reality? Also I appear to have rubbed the foundation off the end of my nose.

There is also this picture:

I do look like this! I think! Who knows really! I’d love to know what I’m reacting to here, but it could be quite literally anything — if the advent of the Zoom Age taught me anything it’s that I have ‘a very expressive face’ (because people would not stop telling me that for the whole first month of lockdown).

The Fancy Event was, as predicted, baws.1 It involved listening to a lot of speeches about things I don’t really care about, eating the smallest portions of food you can imagine, and, at one point, watching a video about people living with dementia and those who care for them which didn’t just hit close to home, it practically rammed down my front door. It costs about a hundred pounds to go to this Event (drinks not included) and I was placed at a table surrounded by people with whom I have painfully little to chat about. I can’t wait to do it all again next year!

Part of the Event involved putting some money in a charity envelope and then, if your envelope was pulled out of a raffle, you won a prize. Tragically, I won. I won a bottle of whisky which I don’t drink, but the worst of it was having to parade up to collect my prize — very much all eyes on me, not my favourite thing — while the emcee took it upon himself to absolutely rip into my boyfriend, making a series of jokes about how he was punching above his weight (flattered, though, really) and how I should dump him, which might have been funny and cute if I happened to have a boyfriend. I then had to make my way back to the table and spend the rest of the night sitting next to a man I barely know who, because of me, was just publicly violated in front of at least 400 people. Probably not just me who didn’t have the best night then.

There was, however, one redeeming moment of the Event which arguably made it all worthwhile. Allow me to take you back to October 2022…

I was on holiday in Spain, staying in a villa with a load of people, its own pool area and an outhouse with a gym in it. On the side of this mini-gym building there was an outdoor shower — risky! Or perhaps risqué? There were three showers in the house, but the one that I would have used didn’t have a shower curtain. Not wishing to flood the bathroom and receive a bad vrbo review, everyone who would have used that shower elected to shower outdoors. Due to the overwhelming presence of FOMO-prone people in that villa (could never be me, but to each their own), outdoor showers became a bit of a thing that everyone wanted to experience at least once because the shower spot had a view over the surrounding town and because, let’s face it, it’s just quite exciting to be naked outside.

Unfortunately — unfortunate both in the context of this story and in general — I am very, very shortsighted. I’m so shortsighted that anything further than the end of my nose is blurry to me and, as you will see from the above photos, I perhaps don’t have the world’s longest nose (never told a lie in my life, thank you very much). I have also had the potential consequences of getting water in my contact lenses absolutely drummed into me and I’ll spare you the details, but they’re horrifying enough that I will never again wear contacts around water. This meant that, from the outdoor shower, I couldn’t see what was happening in the surrounding town area. It did not, however, mean that people in the surrounding town area could not see what was happening in the outdoor shower.

As such, I spent a whole week having Blind Spanish Danger Showers. Where other people would turn away, move aside or grab a towel when they saw residents of nearby houses emerge, I did not have that option. Instead, I chose to adopt such a ludicrously fast showering technique you’d think I was house-sharing with Norman Bates.

Every night we’d all traipse down to the town, find a restaurant that could accommodate all fifteen of us, and have a lovely time having dinner and drinks and chatting. One such evening, a group of lads — I was going to say ‘men’ or ‘guys’ but ‘lads’ is a much more accurate descriptor — staggered over to our table and, absolutely steaming, announced that they ‘recognised us from the shower’ and maybe I’m being paranoid, but it felt like quite a lot of that was directed at me.

Good! Great! Perfect!

In retrospect maybe I had the wrong showering tactic. Ideally no one would see me in the shower at all — ever, frankly. But if someone was going to see me in the shower, as it transpired was the case, it perhaps would have be more flattering for me to have showered more in the manner of a herbal essences advert than in the manner of, say, my washing machine on its ‘speed cycle - 15 min’ setting.

The shower spectators were also Scottish and one of them was wearing a St Mirren football top. You know that way when you’re abroad and a particular familiar motif seems to appear all over the place? That was St Mirren for us that whole Spanish holiday. It was also Anne Hathaway. I jokingly offered ‘Genovia’ (the fictional country Anne Hathaway’s character rules over in the Princess Diaries) as an answer to a quiz question and the next question was about who played Fantine in the Les Mis film (Anne Hathaway). After this, both Anne Hathaway and St Mirren kept cropping up in conversation and in our peripheral vision until one day my friend said how funny would it be if it came out that Anne Hathaway supports St Mirren? We agreed that would be very funny, but alas never going to happen, and then we thought — let’s start the rumour anyway.

That friend and I don’t spend a great deal of time in the same circles so we agreed that, when we were home, each of us would start telling a couple of people that Anne Hathaway supports St Mirren, in a way that sounded like normal celebrity gossip. Gerard Butler supports Celtic; Rod Stewart and Lewis Capaldi support Celtic; Lana Del Rey and Snoop Dogg and the former president of Albania2 all support Celtic3 — why can’t Anne Hathaway support St Mirren?

So both of us told some people, all of whom I believe responded with a level of disbelief, and had a wee laugh between ourselves about it.

About 18 months after it last came up, I went to the Fancy Event. I met a girl I know in line for the ladies toilets and we were having a tipsy chat about nothing when she said to me, ‘Ooh, you’ll like this! Did you know Anne Hathaway supports St Mirren?’

I will indeed like this! It is the perfect intersection of three of my main interests — one: Scottish football; two: stars of The Devil Wears Prada; three: mischief of my own creation.

I can’t even tell you how gleeful I was to discover this rumour my friend and I started had travelled so far and wide and seemingly with no connection to anyone we originally told. Turns out spreading false gossip is great fun and results in an incredible sense of accomplishment. Thank god it took me until I was deep into my twenties to learn this or I could have been a very different person in high school.

I’ve been riding that high ever since (still going strong). I would take this opportunity to issue an apology to anyone who has been duped, fooled, misled or otherwise affected by my Anne Hathaway disinformation campaign, but I’m not sure an apology counts if your overwhelming emotion is rampant and unchecked smugness.