The greater game | The Spectator

February in New York: where dreams come to die

I probably sound naive, but February always struck me as a month that should be full of hope – brimming with the type of optimism that comes from new beginnings. At least here in New York, though, it was grim. Everything feels more expensive. Everyone’s temper seems as short as the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them daylight hours. And then there’s the weather. The streets are flanked like an Arctic military checkpoint by car-sized mounds of calcified brown snow. The kind of snow that has visible layers, like a geological cross-section of urban neglect. The kind that has already gobbled up who knows how many small dogs. The wind is so ferocious, it makes that chemical skin peel you’ve been targeted for on Instagram look pleasant. New York does sleep. And thank goodness it does.

Ruaridh Nicoll

Life under blockade in Havana

Now, I’m here to write about life in Havana, about daiquiris, fishing and salsa. But it’s fair to say life in Cuba has been getting a bit intense. Not as tense as it is elsewhere, but we’re very definitely on the list of countries where the US wants regime change. Washington has cranked up its 64-year trade embargo on the island into an all-out oil blockade. Donald Trump said he is hoping to conduct a “friendly takeover” of the island. The Habanos cigar festival, which I had been planning to write about, has been “postponed.” So I find myself pushing aside my notes on the ever-higher prices of Behikes, instead scribbling the word, “siege” on my page. It all seems a little medieval.

Peter Watson

An ambassador is the American version of a nobleman

America is, famously and proudly, a republic. Everyone is equal before the law. No earls or dukes or even knights of the realm. And a good thing, too. Er… not so fast. As one of the magazines devoted to Palm Beach life recently pointed out, there is one honor available to citizens of the United States that is much coveted because, as with princes, dukes and earls, the honorific comes before the recipient’s full name – and, like nobility (but not in Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s case), it is conferred for life. That title is “ambassador.

Nicholas Farrell

My wild house parties with Rose Wylie

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I rang up my old best friend, Luke-John, for a chat a few days ago and to ask him about his mum, Rose Wylie. She is 91 and has just become the first ever female painter to be given a solo show at the Royal Academy. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, her house in the village of Newnham, near Faversham, became a safe haven for me, and I used to stay there a lot. Rose and her husband Roy, who was also an artist and died in 2014, were just so dead cool. Neither was well-known, and they had little money, but they were seriously intellectual, seriously stylish and seriously good-looking. He had been to Goldsmiths and then been a student of David Bomberg’s at the Borough Polytechnic, and was doing a PhD on him at the Royal College of Art.

Melissa Kite

My mother has become a hostile stranger

‘Do you know who I am?’ said the voice belonging to the lady who used to be my mother, crossly, at the end of the phone line. The truthful answer is no. Since the dementia took hold, a hostile stranger who doesn’t think much of me inhabits my mother’s mind and body. A hostile stranger who doesn’t think much of me inhabits my mother’s mind and body No matter what I do, no matter how many times I ring or visit her, this person who used to be my mother is always cross and disappointed. ‘Oh, you’re alive are you!’ the strange voice barks, before asking me what I’m up to, with a sarcastic edge. Whatever I tell her I’m doing, even if I say I’m lying down with a headache, she snaps back: ‘That’s nice for you. You enjoy!