Life

Those sending their saliva to ancestry.com and 23andMe might want to heed the advice Dr. Zaius gives to Charlton Heston as the stranded astronaut sets off to stumble upon his destiny in Planet of the Apes: “Don’t look for it, Taylor. You may not like what you find.” Exhibit A: our friend Peter, descendant along the Quincy line in Massachusetts – you know, the folks who more or less invented New England. Peter took an early iteration of one of those DNA tests and was told, to his astonishment, that he was – according to Science! – significantly Norwegian. Muttering the Yankee equivalent of “WTF,” Peter threw himself into a full-bore exploration of this putative heritage.

I have a sideline in travel writing, so am lucky enough to have seen some very lovely beaches. Few are as spectacular as Cuba’s Varadero. There are others I prefer – Cossies in the Cocos (Keeling), if you happen to be passing, or the hidden beach at Achmelvich in Scotland, where I shivered between granite walls in my childhood summers. But if classic sun, sea and sand is your thing, Varadero’s 12-mile, palm-fringed spit is unbeatable. It took me years of living in Cuba to visit. I believed that Varadero was all about package tourism – socialist package tourism. Then I went and walked those infinite sands at dawn, the water as clear and intoxicating as absinthe, and got over myself. Now my family and I have moved here for a month.

If Donald Trump wants to make Canada the 51st state, I suspect it’s for the wrong reasons. I just got back from a family holiday. We started in Vancouver, then drove to Whistler, before flying to Calgary and taking the Trans-Canada Highway – past places with names like Bearspaw and Dead Man’s Flats – into the Canadian Rockies and Banff National Park. I was telling a friend about the trip a few days ago and actually welled up when I was describing the deep azure hue of Lake Louise; the vastness of the forests and the astonishing beauty of the wildlife – from chipmunks to grizzlies – that seems to co-exist peacefully with the comparatively tiny human population. It was nature on a scale that made human beings feel refreshingly incidental.

I spent years living in the UK buying and selling horses, but I didn’t know a thing about steeplechase until I moved to Maryland. Despite technically originating in 18th-century Ireland, the equestrian sport of steeplechase feels about as English as it gets. Riders race on thoroughbreds, barreling over tree-like jumps called timbers on long and wild tracks. Steeplechase combines every elite aspect of the horse world: racing, jumping, the rugged outdoorsmanship of foxhunting and the proud formality of English jockey silks. And with a season running through early spring and fall, the crowd of spectators is typically encased in tweed. Maryland, a state founded as a Catholic refuge, exists now as an inheritor of the English aristocracy – at least when it comes to the country life.

It’s a big week in my household. My London-born, New York City-raised eight-year-old is taking an initial tentative step into the glorious, promise-filled world of American capitalism: she’s setting up her first lemonade stand. If you’re not American, or you haven’t spent much time here, you may be wondering why I’m announcing this with the fanfare of an Ivy League acceptance letter. And sure, perhaps it’s evidence that I’m slowly morphing into the Type A Manhattan parent I so like to mock. But also: the lemonade stand occupies a somewhat mythical space in American culture. As well as a way for children to earn a few dollars during the summer holidays, it’s a rite of passage.

The City was once Freetown’s most storied hotel. It burned down in the early 2000s, a few weeks after British paratroopers fought off Revolutionary United Front rebels in a battle which helped bring an end to Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war. But the hotel had been on its uppers for a while before then. The Ferraris, a family of Swiss hoteliers, had long since abandoned it, and the City had become a brothel, where clients were serviced in dingy, candle-lit rooms. One correspondent who visited the site shortly after its destruction found a pile of rubble and a sign warning in Krio: “No piss ya.” Nowadays, there’s a scruffy Leonco gas station where the City once stood. On one side is Philton Guesthouse; on the other is Paty’s Beauty Salon.

I am cautiously optimistic about Britain’s new leader. For one thing, the fact that Andy Burnham went to Cambridge not Oxford, did not study PPE, is not a lawyer and did not grow up in Surrey makes him something of a diversity-hire among our more recent prime ministers. This gives us hope. It is a near-universal law of problem-solving that you cannot think your way out of problems using the same mindset that created them in the first place. One tip: government needs a marketing function. Rather than explaining itself to the public, it has endlessly sought to cadge publicity by ingratiating itself with the news media. As all journalists since Watergate are largely motivated by discrediting those in power, this is hopeless.

“Altogether Elsewhere.” The title page of an unpublished travel book caught my eye during a recent clear-out. The author, Matthew Leeming, was a character who deserved to be famous but somehow never made it. He was imaginative, witty, fearless and greedy – wonderfully greedy. He inherited his father’s ceramics company and ran it for years with great success. He loved being rich. “Money,” he used to say wistfully, “eases the pain of being alive.” To pique women’s interest, he claimed to be off-limits. ‘I’m training for the priesthood,’ he confided He invented businesses out of thin air. In Oxford he lived in a neighborhood called St. Clement’s and he created a summer school by printing a ream of luxury notepaper with an imposing letterhead: “St.