Confessions of an Ex-Influencer

One day I will write a memoir about my days as a micro-influencer. Until then, there's this post...

Yesterday afternoon, I spent an awkward 20 minutes sitting in a parked car in my own driveway, taking photos of myself in the slogan sweatshirt I’d had printed with the name of the fictional Highland town from my books.

And with that sentence, I think I’ve finally done it: I’ve reached peak cringe. My entire body is just one giant cringe right now. I am inside out from The Cringe.

Just to make things even worse, although it’s been a very long time since I tried to stage a photoshoot like that, it wasn’t the first time, either. Or even the worst time, for that matter. No, the worst time would probably be the time I was taking photos in an industrial estate, and someone called the police — the police, people — and reported Terry (my husband/photographer, for those of you just joining us…), for stalking me.

And the police turned up.

And questioned us.

And then we both died of shame, The End.

(Oh! Oh! I’ve also just remembered the time we were taking photos in what we thought was a nice country lane, but which turned out to be the extremely long driveway leading to someone’s house, and the person’s neighbour appeared and did a whole, “Gerrof ma land!” thing, even though we apologised profusely. And it wasn’t even his land, anyway. That man also threatened to call the police on us, so that was another fun thing that happened.)

That was in 2012, at the very height of my fashion blogging phase. It was the days of Pinterest, and Stylebook, and girls in brightly coloured tights taking photos of their outfits as if their lives depended on it. And then those outfit photos gradually migrated to Instagram, and, all of a sudden, there were a lot of people who’s lives may not have depended on their ability to colourblock and clash patterns, but whose livelihoods most definitely did.

Although I count myself as one of those people, in that, for many years, my entire income came from my blog (and, to a much lesser-extent, Instagram), I should probably say at this point that I was never really an “influencer” in the way that most people have come to understand that term. I never had a huge following on Instagram, for instance: my following has always come predominantly from my blog, so I was never Insta-famous, and I’d be surprised if I’d ever managed to actually influence anyone, either.

But I did try. Oh, how I tried. Here are some of the other things I did in the name of blogging/”influencing”: