Lionel Shriver

Check out these hyperventilating headlines from last week: ‘What the Fed’s largest interest rate hike in decades means for you’ (PBS.org). ‘Federal Reserve interest rate hike opens new era for economy’ (Washington Post). ‘The Fed delivers biggest rate hike in decades to fight inflation’ (National Public Radio). ‘Fed goes for inflation’s jugular with 75bps rate hike’ (Schwab). While it’s true that the US Federal Reserve has not hiked its funds rate by 0.75 percentage points in one go since 1994, the figure prominently missing from those bug-eyed bulletins, and bizarrely unmentioned in all the television news coverage of this ostensibly bold move that I encountered, is what the Fed raised its interest rate to: a miserable 1.

On my 2 p.m. arrival for a week-long work trip to South Africa a fortnight ago, an immigration agent flapped my passport while inquiring as to the purpose of my visit. ‘To appear in the Franschhoek Literary Festival’ clearly meant nothing to this woman, but hey, lit fests aren’t exactly Glastonbury. I only grew, shall we say, concerned when she announced that because my passport lacked two sequential completely clean pages, she was denying me entry to the country. ‘You’re kidding me,’ I said – quietly; I didn’t shout. Yet this reflex expression of disbelief was all it would take for the entire team of Cape Town’s gatekeepers to blackball me as a reprobate with a bad attitude. ‘You think I am joking you?

Before we start, let’s firmly establish my long-standing affection for the United Kingdom. Why, some of my best friends are British. Yet at the risk of overgeneralisation, recent events have exemplified a few shortcomings in the otherwise sterling national character. Nitpicking pettiness. We’ve whole front pages dedicated to the Labour leader’s carryout curry one evening during lockdown; to between which hours (8.40 p.m. to 10 p.m.) the offending curry was consumed (Keir Starmer’s failure to reveal if it was lamb korma or chicken vindaloo is deeply troubling); and to which other eateries were then still open. Thanks to this rigorous coverage, we all know that Starmer’s hotel was serving food outdoors until 9 p.m.

Two articles last weekend made me feel sorry for American young people. We in the anti-woke brigade can be awfully hard on kids. But having been born in the 20th century turns out to have been a stroke of good fortune. On Sunday, the New York Times ran a feature about soaring mental illness in American teenagers. Between 2007 and 2018, suicide rates among people aged ten to 24 rose by 60 per cent. Between 2015 and 2019, prescriptions for antidepressants for teenagers rose 38 per cent. Between 2009 and 2019, emergency room visits for self-inflicted injuries among people aged ten to 19 doubled for both sexes; for girls, they more than doubled.

Joe Biden announced in November: ‘Transgender people are some of the bravest Americans I know.’ When Conservative MP Jamie Wallis came out as trans last month, Boris Johnson hailed the revelation as having taken ‘an immense amount of courage’. Mr Wallis says that he was subjected to sexual violence after having ‘hooked up’ with another man in the autumn, which raises the question of whether the parliamentarian might be plain old gay. But then, nowadays being gay is dull. In fact, homosexuality having become a big snooze is one of this century’s healthiest turns of the cultural wheel. ‘There’s something you should know’ – freighted pause – ‘I’m gay.’ OK, fine.

Spring commonly augers a quickening warmth, but for Britons this year the season coincides with a chilling marker: a 54 per cent rise in the energy price cap, bringing the average annual bill to nearly £2,000. By the next increase this autumn, that average will soar to £3,000. Thus what was, until recently, my annoying eccentricity could soon become standard practice: refusal to switch on the heating. Our gas-fired combi boiler functions pretty much as a water heater only. Above our thermometer downstairs I’ve taped a snipped-out Evening Standard headline, ‘Couple die in freezing home’. The joke wore off long ago. My husband is a moderate, civilised person. This perverse policy of turning the thermostat not down but off is all my fault.

In the spring of 2020, I advanced an abnormally hopeful proposition: that one blessing that might arise from a pandemic with otherwise few redeeming features was a cultural sobering-up. Maybe we’d regain a sense of perspective about the trivial non-problems of identity politics once finally faced with a proper problem. Boy, was I wrong. Instead, what proved a relatively mild disease, in the big, smallpoxian picture, fostered an even greater frenzy of ineffectual pettiness – park benches wrapped with police tape, government edicts about Scotch eggs, fisticuffs in supermarkets over thin, gap-prone facial napkins.