Weekend Dispatch #51

Hello, and welcome to the Weekend Dispatch.

Inside this week: Hot priests, maggot therapy, and the end of Skegness.

Let’s get to it.

We started the week with one of our most startling investigations to date.

Lily Isaacs spent a month inside an online school ran by 20-year-old Brit and his mum, where they peddle spurious advice to mothers trying make their kids beautiful.

As one reader wrote in, it's “totally f*cked up” (their asterisk, not ours). Which it is.

If you haven't read Lily's piece, you can do so here.

Since publication, Oscar Patel, the guru at the centre of the story, appears to have doubled down, posting a baffling video of children gnawing on bones to shape their jaws.

A glance at the supportive comments underneath suggests the number of mothers following his guidance may well be much larger than we thought.

We then headed to rural Romania, where Miles Ellingham conjured a beautifully tender portrait of the villagers of Glod — Borat's fictional Kazakhstani hometown, whose real residents were deceived into participating in the film as backward, inbred criminals.

That we published Miles's piece in the same week Sacha Baron Cohen's new film received a string of one-star reviews is merely a coincidence.

It's a Bank Holiday Sunday and the sun is out. Where would you like to spend it?

In many ways, Skegness is the purest expression of the British seaside holiday.

Yes, it has fallen on hard times: deprivation rates are bleak, and its glory days long gone. But it still has its Butlins, arcades, twinkling pier, and perfectly serviceable Wetherspoons.

Which makes it all the sadder that the town may not exist for much longer.

To prevent flooding, the Environment Agency currently replenishes thousands of tonnes of sand along the Lincolnshire coast each year at a cost of up to £15 million.

But it isn't enough. According to Lincolnshire County Council this week, 85% of its coastal defences will be unreliable by 2040 — meaning the entire town may have to be “migrated” inland.

Over in the US, this week also brought reports about the enduring popularity of... maggot therapy, in which larvae dissolve dead and infected tissue.

It raises lots of questions, chief among them: where do medicinal maggots come from?

And the answer is closer to home than you might expect.

While there are maggot factories across the world, the lab at the forefront of larval therapy is in Bridgend, south Wales.

There, greenbottle fly larvae are grown, disinfected, and packed into finely woven net pouches about the size of a teabag. They can then be placed on patients' wounds for four days.

BioMonde reportedly supplies more than 5,000 treatments to around 250 NHS hospitals every year, and up to 15,000 across the rest of Europe. Yum.

Next Friday marks the start of the Cotswolds Olimpicks — a wonderfully English event that predates the modern Olympic Games by almost three centuries.

The most fiercely contested discipline, as Dispatch readers will know, is the shin-kicking tournament. Which is exactly what it sounds like.

Last year, Mike Newby won the competition for the third time running. For a blow-by-blow account, read Jack Burke's report here.

In a very different kind of sporting competition, Peter Thiel's Enhanced Games will begin in Las Vegas today — a crooked version of the Olympics where doping is actively encouraged.

The event promises to showcase what athletes can achieve with the help of testosterone, GLP-1s and various peptides, with a $1 million bonus on offer to anyone who breaks a world record.

The official website, helpfully, also sells the drugs: testosterone injections start at $199 a month.

Whether the whole thing is sport or an elaborate PR stunt for the biotech industry remains an open question.

Thiel is a major investor in the company behind it. So, for what it's worth, is Donald Trump Jr.

A Polish lorry driver has been jailed after smuggling more than £7 million worth of cocaine into Essex, hidden inside a consignment of Kim Kardashian's Skims underwear. That is all.

In batshit AI news, Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader revealed this week that he tried to “procure an online AI girlfriend” — only for the chatbot to abruptly end the relationship when he pushed against its programming limits.

All of which sounds suspiciously like the plot of a Paul Schrader film.

But of course, he’s not alone.

Last month, Chandler Fritz reported from the first funeral held in America for an AI partner. It remains one of the strangest pieces we’ve published.

You can read it here.

In the perhaps the most disturbing story of the week, a woman in Coventry searching for her two missing cats discovered them dead in a nearby pond — along with the remains of 14 others.

Police are investigating. If you know anything, please get in touch.

This month marks 250 years since the founding of the Illuminati, and still not a peep from them.

Surely a celebration is due?

In the meantime, brush up on their history with Fin Carter's report from their hometown.

It's been a grim week to be a Southampton FC fan.

One game away from securing promotion back to the Premier League, the club has been thrown out of the play-offs and handed a four-point deduction for next season — all because an intern was sent to spy on Middlesbrough ahead of their play-off semi-final.

It is, at least, a well-established tradition.

In 2019, Leeds manager Marcelo Bielsa admitted to sending a spy to watch Derby County's training session — and rather than apologise, declared that he'd done it to every opponent he'd faced that season.

We’ve also heard some tawdry tales of sporting espionage in England’s lower leagues. If you know of any (that won’t get us sued!), you know what to do.

Glenn Walsh is a particularly British kind of hero.

After his triumph last Sunday, he has now entered and won the World Watercress-Eating Championship 18 times in a row.

The event takes place in Alresford, Hampshire each year, drawing up to 30 contestants tasked with speed-eating a 100g bag of the stuff.

This year, Glenn devoured his in 44.2 seconds.

A sterling achievement — not least because he can’t stand the taste of watercress.

Our thoughts are with any British mothers planning a trip to Rome this summer: the holy hunk on the cover of the city's infamous “Hot Priest Calendar” has been unmasked as a flight attendant from Verona.

"It was a joke," confessed Giovanni Galizia, 39, after being tracked down by La Repubblica.

He then offered a wonderfully philosophical defence: “It winks a bit at the dynamic between the sacred and the profane, because it is clear that seeing a world that is distant and in some ways so lofty as the ecclesiastical world with such a fresh-faced young man, creates a kind of dissonance.”

The Vatican is yet to comment.

Is this the end of Google?

At its annual conference on Thursday, the company announced a sweeping overhaul of Google Search, stripping out links to websites in favour of AI-generated answers.

As Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick put it, the move would be "the final nail in the coffin for digital media as we know it", wiping out the search traffic and ad revenue that most online publishers depend on to survive.

What does that mean for Dispatch?

Well, as an online magazine, it could impact our online discoverability.

But we're less worried than most, because we've never relied on ad revenue or algorithmic traffic as core parts of our business model.

Instead, we trust that our stories are interesting enough that readers want to share and pay for them.

If you agree, then do us a favour over the long weekend: follow us on social media (X and Instagram), forward a piece to a friend, or take out a discounted paid subscription.

Sports latest:

Later today, the Welsh Open Stoneskimming Championships will take place at the Abernant Lake near Llanwrtyd Wells.

Tomorrow, the Tetbury Woolsack Races will return to Gloucestershire.