Life

Provence As soon as I opened my front door I could smell it. Along the path, flakes of white ash landed on my arms. Looking north beyond the cliff, I saw a rapidly increasing plume of brown-black smoke. Before long it filled a third of the sky. Not again. Ten years ago, almost to the day, the concrete shack I was renting in the woods a few miles from the village was almost engulfed. Jeremy was having a break and staying with me when a wildfire broke out in the valley below. The smoke and flames looked about a quarter of a mile away and firefighting Canadairs flew low overhead. Friends told us to leave but I refused. I’d left everything behind in Scotland 18 months before and couldn’t face doing so again. Jeremy asked if he’d have to knock me out and throw me over his shoulder.

Pascal attributed royalty’s employment of court jesters to the king’s desire to forget or ignore, for however brief a moment, the fact of his own mortality. Carl Trueman, in The Desecration of Man, suggests that today’s star athletes and entertainers owe their remuneration, exceeding by many times the annual salary of the US president, to the major role they play in helping postmodern and post-Christian people to do the same.

“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 The title page of an unpublished travel book caught my eye during a recent clear-out.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.

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.

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.