America

For this trip, I’ve had to divulge my social-media handles, blood group, shoe size etc, and have therefore assumed the brace position for being “processed” into the US, not least because I was once, under Joe Biden, incarcerated in a side room at JFK for having an apple in my hand luggage. The border protection officers show not the slightest interest in my sarky tweet about neocon Liz Truss Though, I might add, it was even worse under Bill Clinton. My baby boy was placed in a detention center on arrival at Dulles when we relocated to Washington, .C. Oliver, aged six months, was traveling separately from us with a

For years, I’ve had a fantasy of destroying my own life by following every piece of extreme self-improvement advice the internet offers. Not the wholesome stuff. I mean the industrial-strength protocols: starvation diets, rhinoplasty, Invisalign followed by double-jaw surgery, chemical peels that promise an entirely new layer of skin. Whatever surfaces in the algorithmic swamp. The appeal is the same as another, more respectable fantasy: the one where a doctor scans your chart, finds The Problem and hands you a pill. You swallow it and everything clicks. Your suffering had a single, nameable, diagnosable cause. The cure might give you rashes or IBS, but who cares? You finally know what’s

I heard on the wireless a reference to the growing number of small political parties getting funds from short money. I’m afraid I let it slide past me as one of the many things about money that I don’t understand. Short is an extremely productive element in English vocabulary. Short-haul journeys preceded by decades the invention of airplanes. The unlikely sounding shorthorn carrots have been with us since the 1830s. The Americans favor short hundredweights, which are only 100lb instead of the Imperial 112lb; worse, the standard ton is consequently a short ton of 2,000lb, a long way off the metric tonne, to which British tons approximate. The short-order cook