London's yummy mummies take a trip

The middle-class drug everyone takes in the capital (that little brown bottle is a tell-tale sign)

- JESSICA SALTER

After a few glasses of champagne (or rather, Lidl’s crémant) at a school mum’s Sunday afternoon drinks party, Melanie* found herself being covertly offered a little brown bottle. Her host urged her to drop a pipette’s worth onto her hand and lick. “It’s mushroom oil,” she was told.

“I’ve heard lots of people talking about taking mushroom oil, but this was the first time I’d done it,” the 37-year-old says. “It felt a bit weird taking drugs while the kids were all running around — but my friend assured me it was just a gentle buzz, a bit like being pissed, but without any hangover the next day.”

She’s now a convert — as are a growing tide of middle-class women, often battling early parenthood. “It’s all anyone talks about at the moment at school pick-up,” says Eleanor, 42, a successful PR who lives in west London. “It’s definitely exploded.” She said she started taking it in lockdown “to help me relax. Now all my friends do it.”

Olivia, a 38-year-old mother-of-three from northeast London, first tried it in the park one afternoon at a friend’s birthday, shortly after her youngest had just turned one. As she left the park, a friend offered her a drop of the golden-brown liquid to send her on her way. “I got home, put my son to bed, then spent the next hour gardening in a gloriously happy, lively state while my partner, who had also had a drop, pulled a three-course dinner out of seemingly nowhere. We had such a joyful energy and focus, which couldn’t have been more different to how I feel after a few glasses of wine.”

She asked her friend where to get it, and was directed towards a “local connection”, who turned out to be a local school mum. After a slightly awkward school gate chat, where she asked the mum to be her dealer, “we met a week later on the school-nursery run for the exchange”. She’s bought several more bottles from the same mum since, or from Telegram — one bottle tends to last a month or two and costs around £200.