Life

I wake up confused. Oh. This is really happening. I wasn’t dreaming that the entire world is on house arrest. It’s actually real. I’m disoriented. What day is it? What month is it? What is time anyway? I’ve lost all concept of it. Am I in Vegas? Oh that’s right, Vegas is closed. Today is going to be the day. The day I live my best quarantine life. I’ll practice guitar and spend an hour learning Arabic and bake sourdough bread and do some YouTube workouts. This is the 19th day in a row I’ve said that. Who am I kidding? I don’t even own a guitar. And where the hell am I gonna use Arabic other than when I’m binge-watching Jack Ryan? Again. I don’t trust the subtitles. I don’t trust anything anymore. Except the mirrors.

‘Nothing will ever be the same again.’ You hear a lot of that glibly categorical punditry around the COVID-19 outbreak. Already, the progress of a mindless virus through the human population is being touted as the herald of the reorganization of the world’s economic system and the end of neoliberalism, the harbinger of a world in which nurses and shelf-stackers are valued more highly than investment bankers. Well, we’ll see. There are, as has been often said, two great things of which we can always be certain: death and taxes. The former is currently enjoying a bit of a moment. But the latter, sooner or later, is going to make the sort of roaring comeback not seen since First Blood Part II.

Colombo In January, I promised a visiting Army reservist friend that we’d climb Adam’s Peak. That plan was scotched when I came down with dengue fever. But I’d climbed Adam’s Peak before (the first time, Christmas 2004, when the tsunami struck, probably saved my life) and there would always be another chance to do it, right? Things change. Like everyone else in town, I was already bored and irritable from the first week of our lockdown when I saw a burst of British news items on COVID-19 nixing Everest expeditions, pensioners trying to keep fit indoors and some chap figuring out how many stairs it took to ‘top’ the mountains of the British Isles. Challenge accepted.

Batavia, New York I’m motoring down Route 98 on my yearly trek to the triannual Alexander Gun Show, held in the Alexander volunteer fireman’s hall. I’m croaking, blissfully off-key, to the music of Gram Parsons, the Florida trustfund Harvardian (one semester) who countrified the Byrds and sought to bring together hippies and rednecks and truck drivers and churchgoers and groovy chicks under his Cosmic American Music banner. It’s a dream still worth dreaming.

A short flight from the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, the island of Langkawi is a wise choice for anyone seeking to shake off the woes of city life. Apart from the odd bit of tourist tackiness on roadside billboards, there’s no escaping the sheer, virtually unspoiled natural beauty of the place. Even my hotel, the Datai — which recently underwent a year-long, $60 million refurbishment — feels like a traditional rainforest villa. When I step out on to the veranda, I revel in the ancient jungle just beyond the sun loungers.

The last time I saw Paris, it was the early spring of 2017. A pallor hung over the city, the grands boulevards had lost their charm and downcast Parisians hurried about the streets with uncharacteristic alacrity. The day I arrived, a letter bomb exploded at the IMF’s headquarters on the Avenue d’Iéna, blocks away from where I was sitting on the terrace of a café on the Avenue Kléber. That the bomb turned out to be from Greek anarchists and not the usual Islamist suspects was little comfort; it had already ruined my café express. Two days later, a French-born Muslim took a female soldier hostage at Orly airport. A standoff ensued, with him holding a pistol to her head while her comrades aimed at his. ‘Put down your weapons!

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Portland, Oregon My pansexual cisgender nonbinary friend Chrysanthia (pronouns: she/her/they/thym) called to tell me she had some exciting news, and would I meet her for a coffee? Off I went, wondering what her announcement could be. As we cradled Espresso Loco’s hot and eco-friendly cups of locally sourced, organic Locolatte, Chrysanthia could contain her excitement no longer. She withdrew from her hemp satchel a used pregnancy test and thrust the urine-encrusted paddle into my face. Once my eyes had stopped stinging, I could see that it was positive. ‘OMG, are you serious?!’ I asked, my eyes filling with hot tears. ‘Yes!’ she cried ecstatically.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. The odds of becoming a cult figure improve with the speed of departure. Among musicians, Jimi, Jim, Janis, Kurt and Amy played their last notes at 27. By dying at 33 and later becoming the subject of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Eva Perón joined an even more exclusive club. ‘Half a million people kissed the coffin,’ says the Argentine novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez in Santa Evita (1995). ‘A million-and-a-half yellow roses, stocks from the Andes, white carnations, orchids from the Amazon, sweet peas from Lake Nahuel Huapi, and chrysanthemums sent by the emperor of Japan… were thrown from balconies.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Batavia, New York Shrouded in legend, Black Mountain College was an experimental school outside Asheville, North Carolina. For almost a quarter century (1933-57) it incubated, nurtured and disgorged the holy fools, ragged prophets and pretentious frauds of the American avant-garde and the (in some cases reactionary) counterculture: John Cage, Paul Goodman, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning and Buckminster Fuller, to name a few. Yet for my money, the most remarkable couple to pass through Black Mountain were Bill and Martha (Rittenhouse) Treichler, two farm kids, the former an Iowan, the latter a daughter of Maryland, who met and fell in love at Black Mountain during the 1948-49 school year.

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.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).

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.

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?

O America, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. As an Englishman, I loved the two years I lived in New York as a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph over a decade ago. But I’m afraid I never fell for the American cult of conspicuous consumption — even if at times I thoroughly indulged in its worst excesses. At a party at one of the New York Armories, a huge military building now given over to parties and exhibitions (I forget which one, due to overindulgence), I watched, goggle-eyed, as two brave young blondes frolicked in an ice-cold pool around a larger-than-lifesized ice sculpture of a pair of swans. At another party in SoHo, I made my way to the dance floor to find dozens of twentysomethings dancing around a Range Rover — the car company was sponsoring the event.