Spectator Life

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. In the Entoto hills high above Addis Ababa, the lights of incoming Ethiopian Airlines planes are evenly spaced in the night sky. Behind me in an abandoned restaurant, the DJ cranks it up and the dance floor goes nuts. EDM (Electronic Dance Music), a style popularized at American festivals and raves, has landed in Ethiopia. I’ve been a dance music devotee since college. But when I first visited Ethiopia in 2000, I lost my heart to a different scene: mesinko-playing troubadours who mask political satire in witty innuendo, the hypnotic melodies of Ethio-jazz bands and the traditional shoulder-shaking of iskista dancers.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. On a wet November evening, Leoluca Orlando, the mayor of Palermo, sat in the front pew of a church on the city’s main thoroughfare. He, like the citizens proliferating behind him, was waiting for the concert to begin. The setting and the seating order had a provincial air, like something out of an Upamanyu Chatterjee novel. But Orlando, the man who squeezed the Sicilian mafia, has a cosmopolitan vision. Orlando has converted Palermo, a major gateway for the masses pouring out of Africa and the Middle East, into perhaps Europe’s least administratively hostile city to prospective settlers.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. The pretty, preppy town of Chatham, Massachusetts sits more or less at the elbow of Cape Cod, just after the swollen bicep of Hyannis and just before the Cape’s forearm tapers upward to Wellfleet’s freshly disembedded oysters, Truro’s schools of Subaru station wagons and Provincetown’s shallow-swimming shoals of gays. People who’ve never seen the Cape assume that it’s universally charming in an Olde Newe Englande sort of way: shingled houses and lobstermen, homely pubs with whaling paraphernalia on the walls and yellowed photos of Norman Mailer behind the bar. But, like any 340-square-mile place, it’s multifarious.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Malkef, northern Syria I’m sitting under an olive tree about a mile from the front with ‘Agir’, a Kurdish soldier from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The sharp cracks and dull rumbles of fighting make their way to us over dusty farmland; the shade protects us from the scorching mid-morning sun and omnipresent Turkish drones. Agir tells me how the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) can’t fight — at least, compared with the Islamic State (Isis). Agir fought Isis with American backing for years in Syria. Sometimes, he says, Isis soldiers would tie foam cushioning to their feet, sneak up to your position in the moonlight and slit your throat.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.New York City It’s the Sunday before Memorial Day outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the street is filling up with families. Navy servicemen and women stop for a friendly word and a photo. But a tragedy is happening here and there’s nothing anyone seems able to do about it. Elizabeth Rossi, a retired disabled Marine veteran in her early forties, runs a hot-dog stall outside the museum. She served in Operation Iraqi Freedom. ‘On my first day we were bombed; you never forget that,’ she says. Her father, Dan, also a disabled vet, runs the van next door. But they feel that they have been rejected by the city of New York and the world around them.

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Key West was originally called Cayo Hueso (Bone Island in Spanish) either for its bleached limestone rock or because the Calusa Indians used it as a burial ground. The first European here was Spain’s Ponce de León in 1521, on his spiritual quest for the Fountain of Youth. Lt Cmdr Matthew Perry planted the American flag on March 25, 1822. By the 1880s, Key West was the richest town in Florida. I first came on a Greyhound in November 1977. I knew no one. An American boyfriend in London had talked about breakfasting with fishermen, and of the Southern writer who was his mentor.

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. My old college roommate and I were sitting on a 180-pound wild male boar. Neither of us were habitual hoggers. It was our first rodeo. Florida Route 710, the Beeline Highway from Palm Beach to Indiantown, is a two-lane straight shot out of the tropics and into the scrub near Lake Okeechobee. In the Twenties, a Baltimore banker, S. Davies Warfield, built a railroad into central Florida from Palm Beach. Up went Indiantown’s gridded streets and houses, and the Mission Revival-style Seminole Inn, where Warfield’s niece Wallis Simpson stayed both before and after marrying Edward VIII. But Warfield’s plans were scuppered by two hurricanes and the Depression.