12 hours ago
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Monday
Just back from New York and – this is what you get for flying out of Newark – I’m stunned by the volume of Trump memorabilia for sale at the terminal. Actual Maga hats and T-shirts; old-timey baseball shirts with “Trump 47” on the front; a fridge magnet depicting Trump’s Iwo Jima moment, fist in the air behind the words “Fight! Fight! Fight!; and a Trump hoodie with the slogan “Take America Back”. It’s New Jersey but still, piles of Trump merch for sale so close to the city feels like finding a fur coat store next to the vegan pantry.
In New York itself, meanwhile, there is widespread and guilty determination by friends to turn away from the news because engagement is just so depressing. The question most asked of me is how are Americans regarded, in general and when they travel overseas? On that front, at least, I can reassure. As ever, it seems most people are too wrapped up in their own parochial dramas to give much thought to what, or who, any passing American they encounter might represent.
With one caveat: travelling on American passports, we clear immigration in Reykjavik en route to New York where the official demands paperwork I’ve never been asked for before and tells me brusquely: “The way things are done in America isn’t the way we do them in the rest of the world.” I’m so stung by this condescension I find myself huffing, Colonel Blimp-style: “I’m a British citizen!” Which startles us both, but probably me more than her.
Tuesday
That encounter in Iceland qualifies as a “micro-stress”, a small aggravation that, according to a recent survey of 2,000 people commissioned by psychologists, can over time take as serious a toll on one’s nerves as the big ones: death, divorce, moving house. In the survey, the top three micro-stresses were listed as being stuck in traffic, when a bin bag breaks (really?) and losing one’s keys.
I get this, but consider the flipside: the equalising force of micro-joys: the first (and second and third) coffee of the morning; finding the remote after you’ve lost it; or catching sight of the cat asleep on the sofa with its paws in the air – small pleasures and improvements that, unlike winning the lottery, say, trigger a governable amount of emotion. I often think contentment truly rests on banking enough of these small joys in a way that comfortably outweighs the big stuff.
Wednesday
It’s reported in this paper that Prince Harry had to wait six months for his children’s passports to be issued after he had a punt at sticking “HRH” in the honorifics field and listed their surnames as Sussex, in direct defiance of the queen’s ruling in 1960 that descendants without royal titles could not inherit the surname associated with their parents’ peerage.
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It’s brilliant of Harry, in a way, trying to slide the issue past the king via an innocent piece of paperwork submitted to a faceless government body. When the passports weren’t issued, Harry and Meghan, frustrated, put in a second application for 24-hour service and promptly had their meeting cancelled due to a “systems failure”, a piece of peerless counter passive-aggression by the king, with the added bonus of plausible deniability. There is, after all, simply no defeating British bureaucracy when it’s set to truculence.
These are Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet’s second set of surnames, their first having been Mountbatten-Windsor, while Harry and William both grew up with the name Wales. The main takeaway from this story, as a friend observes, is that “no one in that sodding family ever knows what their surname is”.
Thursday
From the land of move slow and frustrate things to the rapidly disintegrating Elon Musk who, in an even shorter timescale than anticipated, has turned on his benefactor, President Trump. Last week, Musk criticised Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill for swelling the deficit with that heavy-lifting word “disappointed”, and hedged with the coy qualifier “my personal opinion”.
Obviously that mildness couldn’t hold. By Tuesday this week, Musk’s assessment of the bill had advanced from disappointing to a “disgusting abomination”. By Thursday, Trump had retaliated on social media with threats to cut federal contracts to Tesla, provoking Musk to boast that “without me, Trump would’ve lost the election” and make a veiled accusation – not the first time he’s thrown “paedo” around when challenged – that Trump was mixed up with Jeffrey Epstein.
But while this was the moment we’d all been waiting for, watching the world’s two most powerful men, both of whom appear to be suffering from cognitive impairment of some kind, duke it out, was less cathartic than simply morbidly depressing.
Friday
An end-of-the-week treat, however, in the form of Dame Rosemary Squires, the founder of the Ambassador Theatre Group, saying the quiet part out loud: does anyone really want to sit through a play that lasts longer than three hours? Her observation was triggered by the opening of Stereophonic, lately transferred to London from New York, which goes on for three hours and 10 minutes.
A Little Life, the recent stage adaptation of the Hanya Yanagihara novel, ran to almost four hours, although, as an experience, preferable surely to reading the book. This week I saw the brilliant My Neighbour Totoro, which clocks in at two hours 40 and is fantastic, although still shy of the dream phrase “running time one hour 20 minutes”. Still, there are some weeks when all you’re fit for is Samuel Beckett’s reward to the very tired who attempt to go to the theatre in midweek: his play Breath, which comes in at a small, beautiful 35 seconds.
