Life

It’s a sweet little town, Arcachon. Clinging to the long French Atlantic coast, adorned with Victorian villas and pretty flowerbeds, it reminds me oddly of the English town of Bournemouth. By which I mean: Bournemouth before it was ruined. As such, it’s the kind of place that usually calls for a return visit. I am sure for many French people it is a holiday regular – “ahh, shall we do Arcachon again? Mais oui, we can try that new oyster cabin.” But right now I seriously wonder if anyone will want to return to Arcachon, ever.  The reasons are twofold. Firstly, the news is full of searing images: of people fleeing the wildfires on Cap Ferret, and being ferried, like wartime evacuees, across the bay to Arcachon after a summer of repeated heatwaves.

The US ambassador’s residence in Havana has a beautiful garden that steps down past a blue fountain to a hole in the hedge containing an eagle with spread wings. It’s a lovely place for a party. The trouble is, given the current state of relations between Cuba and the US, cocktails have become a continuation of politics by other means. The embassy invites people who disagree with Cuba’s communist government, and Cuba’s interior ministry stops them from coming. The eagle is pertinent. It once stood atop the monument to the USS Maine, a warship that blew up in Havana harbor in 1898, killing 266 sailors. It seems to have been a terrible accident, but the then-assistant navy secretary, Teddy Roosevelt, blamed Cuba’s then-colonial master, Spain.

I am currently six months pregnant with my second child, and it feels like a rather strange time to be so. Partly because these unexpectedly long spells of warm weather have rendered me umbilically tethered to a fan at all times, which has done terrible things to my electricity bills. Partly because every morning I seem to wake up to a new maternity scandal and must navigate between newsfeeds in which women trauma-dump their horrendous birth stories or hypnobirthing experts chanting that my “body was made to do this”.   Another reason I feel discombobulated is that I am pregnant with my second son, and yet everywhere I turn, there seems to be a preference for baby girls over baby boys.

I moved on from most of my father’s automotive prejudices. He refused to buy from the Japanese “who treated our prisoners so cruelly,” French and Italian cars would “always let you down in the end” and Fords were gaudy creations of “big-headed Americans.” Instead, it was Volkswagen (VW) I never trusted. Stupidly stuck in a bygone era, I couldn’t get over that infamous 1938 photograph of Adolf Hitler, smiling with childlike delight, leaning over a miniature Beetle. Beside him, in a smart civvy suit, SS Colonel Ferdinand Porsche gleefully shows off the prototype. The foundation of Volkswagen is the definitive portrait of a dictator and his sycophants. OK, it’s 88 years later and I don’t like hearing about people losing jobs, even at VW.

The World Cup’s new ball is the most technologically advanced ever, FIFA tells us. It has a 500Hz motion sensor chip, which lets VAR and analysts figure out precise positioning, speed and even the spin on the ball, for some weird reason. But former England goalkeeper Joe Hart says the Trionda ball is making life harder for goalkeepers trying to save shots. “It’s that kind of shoulder height,” he continued: As soon as [players] are not using the curling technique, as soon as that ball is not spinning, the goalkeepers are struggling.” Hart obviously has lots of experience in the area and was particularly known for his ability to deal with shots around the head and shoulders, but is he right?

Epic figures leave epic gaps when they retire. The generations that follow are doomed to be compared to past heroes by nostalgic fans. So it is with Roger Federer. Novak Djokovic might be the GOAT (greatest of all time, to use the phrase du jour) in terms of sheer numerical achievement. But tennis is art, not science. Ballet, not bookkeeping. For the aesthetes among us who drink in the sight of on-court grace like champagne, Federer will always be number one.  To answer why, you don’t need words, though heaven knows enough have been written about the grace of Rog. (David Foster Wallace famously called watching the Swiss savant "a religious experience"). Click on any clip and watch Fed glide on the court, near-supernatural in his poise.

Edward Gibbon was troubled by a swelling in his lower abdomen. I have the same condition. “Wow. That’s huge,” said my GP as he gazed at the affected area. “Huge?” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I wouldn’t know. It’s the only one I’ve ever seen.” My cyst has been expanding steadily for decades and I was told a few years ago that its intentions were peaceful. My new GP was trying to scare me, obviously. I don’t blame him. It’s dull work staring at sick bodies all day and he was trying to amuse himself with a spot of scaremongering. “You’ll need a scan within two weeks,” he added. “Cancerous perhaps?” I asked. He nodded with a sly grin.

There are a handful of obsessive mania-types I can get along with swimmingly. Kleptos, heavy-drinking dipsos and nymphos to name a few. But at monomaniacs, I draw the line. Give me anything, anyone, at a social occasion — but not a one-topic conversation.   Why is it that the fewer interests people have, the more boring they become? One wonders what history’s great Renaissance men would have made of today’s crypto bros or blockchain fanatics. I pick on blockchain because, as with so many problems benighting the world, technology is to blame. I’m no Luddite, but I hereby shame content algorithms in the strongest of biblical terms saying, Verily, ye have spawned dullards.

Here in the US, Memorial Day – which falls on the last Monday in May – is, officially, an occasion for mourning and honoring military personnel who have given their lives in service to this great country. Unofficially, it is an occasion for charred hot dogs, 24-packs of Bud Light and nationalistic merchandising usually confined to airport gift shops. In our household, however, Memorial Day marks something different entirely. It’s the day we make our annual pilgrimage into the heart of consumer capitalism: a Walmart in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. By now you might know that I live in Manhattan. You might, therefore, be wondering why exactly we’ve adopted this strange ritual, necessarily involving a rental car and gridlocked traffic on the George Washington Bridge.

“There’s a flat rat under the mat!” I shrieked, and wondered whether that was the sort of jaunty phrase that could be used for elocution lessons. I had lifted this mat by the main staircase to hoover the floor beneath it and there it was, a perfectly flat rat in the shape of a cartoon dead beast beneath this mat. I began laughing uncontrollably, because if you’ve ever seen a flat rat under a mat you will know that it is intrinsically funny, whatever your views on rats. You will laugh even if you don’t like rodents, or indeed if you like them way too much. Even if you are a member of the Rat Preservation Society, when you see one flattened paper-thin, stuck to your floorboards, I challenge you not to burst out laughing, while jumping up and down.

Is it gay to be a horse guy? According to my parents, the answer, hilariously, is “yes.” I never grew up riding in a very professional or competitive manner because, as I recently learned as an adult, my parents thought it was just too gay. Everyone knows the stereotype of a horse girl. My parents certainly did, after raising two girls in the horse-show world. Linked to social privilege, emotional intensity and a bit of naivety, the horse girl eventually shifts the obsession with her horse into her boyfriend and becomes the caricature of a high-maintenance clinger. I can see why my parents wanted to avoid that type of socialization for their only son. But the stereotype isn’t all true (my sisters turned out normal.