I have a masochistic thing for How to Spend It, the Financial Times magazine that assists you in unloading all that pesky, burdensome cash. It rebranded as “HTSI” last year, presumably in the spirit of “quiet luxury”, which made it sound like some abstruse financial product, a high-yield, index-linked, short-term treasury bond, or whatever. None of those words means anything to me, which is probably why I am a mere rubbernecker in the HTSI universe.
It’s a place where your preferred fragrance is “an olfactory visualisation of brute concrete” and your living room features “a site-specific art installation, featuring the words from my poems inscribed in gold leaf on the walls and played over speakers in a recording voiced by Iggy Pop (like one recent interviewee, the artist Stefan Brüggemann, who sounds like a riot). Is the whole mag a site‑specific art installation? I will never be rich enough to find out.
The latest person to showcase their exquisitely expensive taste is guest editor Kate Moss, who shared 32 things she can’t live without. Moss’s tight-lipped discretion has loosened recently, because she has a wellness brand to promote, which is fun, because we are almost exactly the same age and there is something fascinating about celebrity twins. I pored over the list, clucking lustfully at Hermès yak blankets, ivory silk pyjamas and peacock cashmere socks, and my main takeaway is: Kate Moss gardens now.
She said as much on Desert Island Discs last year, but this list confirmed it, featuring a lovely watering can (dark green, copper trim), boots “to walk the dogs, do the gardening” and gardening tools. OK, they are €1,523 (£1,300) walnut and “saddle-stitched” leather gardening tools, but I am delighted to discover that even Moss likes a nice secateur.
Ah, the passage of time. One day it’s cocaine, Pete Doherty and getting a police escort for calling an easyJet pilot a “basic bitch”, the next it’s looking over the Sarah Raven catalogue and calling a trip to the garden centre for peat-free potting compost and a poke around the hardy perennials a “treat”.
I love it when ravers become boring. The conversion needs to feel authentic – they can’t just be cosplaying a normie – but when it does, there is nothing better. Recently, I have enjoyed Zoë Ball’s sequel to that famous wedding day Jack Daniel’s, cowboy hat and fag shot: her veg plot planning notes and colour-coded seed storage tubs. Ball’s erstwhile carnage-wreaking companion Sara Cox is now Instagramming her sunflower seedlings. Former hard partier Rupert Everett prefers gardening to sex, apparently, and Damon Albarn monitors his local wader population.
Every generation has them: the 60s rock gods turned trout farmers and detectorists, stamp collectors and model rail enthusiasts. It’s inevitable, I suppose: either you die, or you get really into slip-casting pots and making chutney. Maybe it won’t be a thing when gen Z celebs reach middle age, since they already crochet up a storm and love their plants, but so far, we have always had a good swathe of enfants terribles becoming sensible grownups.
Why is it so pleasing? You could be disappointed to discover your edgy idols’ clay feet are now ensconced in arch-supportive German slippers as they browse auction sites for rare Welsh blanket patterns, or contribute to fly fishing forums. But I love the great twofold levelling it represents. First, there is almost no advantage to being rich with staff for this stuff. Sure, you can buy fancier secateurs, but the fundamental joy of quiet, pottering hobbies is doing everything yourself: literally getting your hands dirty. Second, it lets those of us who never partied for 34 hours straight or filled baths with champagne (surely a nightmare for your pH balance?), and felt a bit lame about it, feel a thrilling sense of kinship with the ones who did.
Actually, it’s more than that – there might also be a smidgen of superiority, because we can already graft maples, or tell an arctic from a roseate tern. Truly, the fact that cosy, uncool enthusiasms come for even the notoriously racy is a gift – and one money can’t buy.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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