Digested week: Naked glamping and the Gen Z stare

The Guardian

25-07-2025

Spare a thought, please, for all the participants returning from the fifth annual swingers' festival Swingathon (suggested tagline: 'Genitally bored? You don't have to be! But it's easier') in Allington, Lincolnshire, whose weekend event was beset by thunderstorms and heavy rain.
Why should this matter, I hear you ask. For humans long ago invented walls and roofs as sturdy proofs against this sort of thing. And you ask this, my friends, because you have, like me, naturally assumed that a swingers' event takes place indoors. But no. No, the Swingathon is a tent-based event. It is basically naked glamping. I'm going to give you a minute to try and think of a worse phrase in the English language. Not possible.
It is, however, the most perfect and succinct expression of the national psyche. Because it takes something deeply enjoyable (to those who like smooshing booty with strangers – as a misanthropic introvert this is not my thing, though I would still prefer it to small talk) and essentially caps the fun you can have, by importing camping into the mix. No, I don't care how luxurious the site. You're sleeping outside and there are no proper loos. End of. I applaud those whose libidos survived the tents and the downpour and wish those whose didn't better luck next year.
The school holidays have begun and in a desperate attempt to keep my 14-year-old off his computer by any means necessary, I have been doing the one thing he rates almost as highly as questing for gold and/or murderous mechanical spiders through a cod-medieval landscape/apocalyptic wasteland for 32 hours a day, and been playing board games with him. Playing board games with him and wondering where I hid the edibles that might make such an undertaking bearable, yes, but this still counts as absolutely top-notch parenting.
Then – a breakthrough. He plays cards at school, he tells me. What kind of cards? A game called poker – have I heard of it? Why, yes, son, yes I have. Show me what kind you play? Ah. OK, yes, I think I have the idea now. Shall we play for money? Great.
I am £3.50 up. This holiday is looking better by the moment.
News reaches us that a Sindy movie – perhaps inevitably, given the literal billion-dollar success of the Barbie blockbuster – is finally in development. I think we are about to embarrass ourselves hugely.
A Sindy movie? A Sindy movie? A Sindy movie that tries to compete with Barbie? Please, film people – please talk to some women of a certain age and understand the relationships here. Both between Sindy and Barbie, and between Sindy and her owners. Sindy was launched by British company Pedigree four years after Mattel took the doll market by storm with their pneumatic blonde. Sindy was … less pneumatic, had flatter feet and a slightly less pronounced waist. She was supposed to be more relatable, more girl-next-door than aspirational goddess. We hated her.
I mean, we played with her (I say we – I didn't. Artificial hair sends me screaming for the hills. I still gibber in fear at the bodiless monstrosity known as a Girl's World). We said and did all the right things when she was given to us as a birthday or Christmas present by well-meaning relatives. But we hated her. She was second best, an also-ran, a wannabe, the poor relation, forever defined and tainted by what she was not: Barbie. Who drove a pink Chevrolet. Sindy drove a clapped-out Austin Allegro, at least metaphorically.
Actually, you know, if they leaned into this, Sindy could be a great movie. Casting? Rosamund Pike as embittered adult Sindy, scraping a living from appearances at doll conventions and still with Paul – Tom Hiddleston – despite his erectile dysfunction, which only worsened after their desperate trip to the Swingathon this year. The Sindy doll house is falling to bits round them. Plot happens. They die. The end. I love it. A billion pounds as good as banked.
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Apparently it has a name. That flat, affectless yet contemptuous look so often visited upon customers while being served – if that is the right word – by youngsters in shops? That's the 'Gen Z stare' and suggestions about its cause are proliferating: it's a sign of the profound disconnection from humanity suffered by those reared amid technology generally and social media specifically; they can communicate online but the niceties of interaction in real life elude them; it's the fault of Covid and lockdown, stunting their development in their formative years. And so on.
Speaking as a member of Generation Come Off It, who is technically raising a Gen Z entity (born a year before cutoff point for entry) let me explain. The Gen Z stare is a textbook example of young people not being old enough yet to know or care about what good manners are and who still need whatever the closest thing is to a slap that you can allow yourself when they indulge in behaviours that are unacceptable if you wish to partake of civilised society.
And let me tell you, dear child who is staring at me as if I am shit on her shoe instead of answering my perfectly reasonable question about where I can find multipack knickers in this suddenly rearranged retail emporium, you do. An uncivilised society would be even worse than the one you disdain now. The fact that you live in a civilised society is what gives you the secure base from which to exercise your rudeness so freely. It's counterintuitive but it's true. Think about it. But take that look off your face and show me the knicker aisle before I slap you.
I have been inadvertently conducting a valuable experiment all this week. I recently bought a variety of secondhand items from eBay and they have been being delivered all week. The emails and texts arrive in their customary thousands, recording every stage of each one's journey before the telltale pause and … 'The courier was unable to deliver your parcel'. Followed by some polite variation on: 'You weren't in, derbrain. We'll try again whenever suits us'
The thing is – I was in all week. Every day, all the time. Staying in is what I do. I'm an Olympic gold-standard stayer-inner. I didn't go out until late evening at any point.
So I can record without fear nor favour that of the 11 deliveries I was expecting from four different couriers, three were achieved by two of them. A 27% success rate. Or, if you prefer, a 63% lying rate. Because I WAS IN. Whenever you called, I WAS IN.
I'm ordering more clothes to accrue further data. This is my hobby now, I think. I literally should get out more. Book a Swingathon 2026 ticket or something. But I think I'm happier like this.