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Speed-dating in Portland with Godfrey Elfwick

Portland, Oregon A polyamorous friend recently extolled the efficacy of speed dating. Relationship-wise, I’ve had a rather long dry spell, but I must stress that I’ve crossed this sexual Sahara entirely by choice. I actively embraced celibacy to holistically detox my chakras, because chastity, like meditating on an icon of Rashida Tlaib, clears the mind of toxicity. If you assume I haven’t had sexual contact with another human being for 17 months, two weeks and four days because I have failed to attract partners, you would be embarrassingly wrong. Your racist narrow-mindedness amuses me. So, whatever. Now that I have utterly destroyed your bigoted preconceptions, perhaps I can continue my story?

Benjamin Riley

Cape of many colors

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.

Kapil Komireddi

Palermo without borders

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.

Digby Dent

The evolution of Vermont

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Putney, Vermont Ahoy, polloi. While I am a fan of the Reformation, I take a circumspect view of change. This old salt has a soft spot for tradition, yes, but he was taught from an early age that the vagaries of life are best met by suppressing doubt and feeling with industriousness and booze. Mostly booze. Mine not to reason why. Nevertheless, I persisted. Things change, of course. For instance, I’ve taken up residence in Vermont for a few weeks with a gal pal I dated between wife number two and wife number three (who is also wife number one, but that’s a story for another time).

Life