Sean Thomas

I love American roadtrips. They are the ideal way to visit 96 per cent of the country, which is determinedly built (for good or ill) around the desires of the car driver. The brilliant roads, the endless motels, the hideous car lots that blight most of the cities (making parking a doddle, even if they ruin the actual towns), they all ensure that driving is easefully delightful. Even in the most nondescript hotel in the most ahistoric corner of America, you will happen upon the surreal, haunting legacy of slavery A roadtrip is also the best way to understand America, and my recent trip along and around the Mason-Dixon Line – the great geographical/political divide which once (still?

As famous capital cities of world-straddling superpowers go, Washington DC is somewhat disappointing. The grandiose urbanism is surely meant to resemble the boulevards of Paris, with the parks of London, but in reality the dreary post-modern/neo-classical bombast makes it looks like Tashkent married to Milton Keynes. A city that is planned to project power actually projects tedious, if reliable, stolidity.  But that, for my purposes, is the thing. Washington DC is nothing if not boring. And pompous. And self-consciously serious.

The beautiful Siwa Oasis in the far western deserts of Egypt is a remarkable place, for multiple reasons. It’s probably been inhabited, continuously, for 12,000 years. Alexander the Great came here to consult the already renowned Oracle of Amun-Ra in 332BC (some say he is buried here, as he loved Siwa so much). You can swim in Roman cisterns fed by one of the 300 natural springs – which also nourish thousands of date palms and olive groves. The locals have their own Berber language – Siwi – spoken nowhere else on earth.  But there’s one facet of Siwa’s history which is less talked about.

Recent births and deaths in my family have got me thinking about the family tree. A few years ago, we pieced together a remarkably discernible lineage that goes right back to William the Conqueror, or at least his alleged Anglo-Saxon concubine, and various Norman knights who used to own much of England. And it is this lineage that has made me realise: the hideous underprivilege and mistreatment of my ancestors entitles me to reparations. For centuries the Peverels taxed and brutalised their serfs, but then chose the wrong side in the odd war The story begins with that Anglo-Saxon woman Maud Ingelric. Many historians believe she was the mistress of William the Conqueror, and bore him a favoured son, William Peverel the Elder, my great-great-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-(etc)-grandfather.

I have a friend, let’s call her Ellie, who has a diverting side hustle: she sells erotic images of herself online: nude, semi-nude, basically nude but in roller-skates and smoking Cohiba cigars. That kind of thing. She does this on a site many people will know: OnlyFans, which has become the site for women (and it is mainly young women) who want to make money from exhibiting themselves for the sexual arousal of online subscribers. Ellie knows that some people might find her part-time job indecent or ill-advised, she doesn’t remotely care. As she says, it’s her body, her choice. It’s all adults, she has no kids or employers to be shamed or scandalised and, besides, half the modern world is sexting nudes for free whereas she is making nice ‘prosecco money’, as she puts it.

When I was a small boy, I had a favourite book: The Magic Faraway Tree, by Enid Blyton. Given that my own family life not was not untroubled, the story of how a bunch of regular kids travel, via this wonderful tree, to a sequence of fantastical places, where they meet lovable characters like the Saucepan Man, Moon-Face, and Silky the Fairy, seemed to embody a childish version of heaven. An escape, and a Utopia. Yesterday, many decades after reading Enid Blyton under the bedcovers, I encountered the opposite of the Magic Faraway Tree. A tree that is still faraway in time and conception (and growing evermore so), but a tree that is all too real, and very definitely not magical. The tree is in a quiet, sunstruck park, lost in a grimy exurb of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.