Life

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.

“Can I go now?” said the farmer I was talking to over my gate, and he looked so scared I felt a bit ashamed of myself. I had flagged him down as he went by in his rickety blue tractor that’s so old it looks like Noah used it to load hay on to the Ark. I told him I hadn’t seen him for a while. He usually waves or comes in for a chat. He has been our favorite neighbor since we moved to West Cork. As he owns the land above us where our water well is situated, that’s all to the good. We went out of our way to befriend him from the get-go, but after deluging him in home-baked fruitcakes and offers of dinner, for he lives alone, we realized he was our sort of person anyway.