The hop by plane from Dublin to Liverpool is so swift that one barely has a moment to peruse the duty-free catalogue, but last week it was long enough to fear that the entire political landscape might have altered by the time one hit passport control. But Wednesday was a good evening, I discovered, to be arriving in a city that, if it has no time for the Tory party, has even less for Boris Johnson.
I was there to interview the writer and raconteur Fran Lebowitz on stage at the Liverpool Philharmonic. Did the quintessential New Yorker have any advice for persuading a politician keen to hold on to office that the writing was very much on the gold-wallpapered wall? She issued a firm caveat that UK politics was not her forte, but counselled caution in believing it was all over too precipitately.
Better a witty fool…
The next morning I flew home to Ireland and headed for Bantry and the West Cork literary festival, where the opening event featured Zadie Smith and Nick Laird, who only ever do a husband-and-wife double act there. They both read pieces born of the pandemic and I wonder if I will ever hear something as compelling and devastating as Laird’s Up Late, an elegy for his father, who died of Covid last year, unable to be attended by his family. It was written, he explained, in the raw immediacy of grief and there is a particular part I cannot get out of my head: “and if you thought/ an understanding could be reached, you are wrong/ for it could not.”
Much has and will be said about the comportment of Andrea Jenkyns, MP and newly appointed minister in the education department, who flipped the bird at crowds as she entered Downing Street and shouted furiously at them as she departed. But it was her choice of outfit that most interested me: a dress in the most vibrant and vivid yellow.
Thoughts of Malvolio, the pompous steward from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, had already been in my mind and now I thought of the trick played on him by the play’s comic cast, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek.
They convince him that the beautiful Olivia is in love with him and, to win her favour further, he might parade around in cross-gartered yellow stockings. When finally the deception is uncovered, Malvolio quits the scene with one of the play’s most quoted lines: “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.”
The difficulty, last week, was trying to work out who was Malvolio, who Sir Toby Belch and where, when and from which direction the revenge might strike.
Anyone for seconds?
Photograph: Rebecca Fulton/10 Downing Street/AFP/Getty Images
Like Carrie Johnson, I was a pandemic bride. Our ceremony, after many years of living over the brush, was consequently tiny, semi-secret (for which read: so hastily organised that there was no time to tell anyone) and enormously glamorous.
Nothing epitomised its style so much as my pre-wedding preparations: having suffered an ocular migraine on the morning in question, I realised en route that I had eaten nothing and was starving. The bridal entourage (best woman, giver-away, best dog, all crammed into a beribboned Mini Cooper) screeched to a halt in the McDonald’s drive-thru on the Kilkenny ring road and I can confirm that there is no better stomach settler than a cheeseburger and salty fries.
The groom, who had a bit of toast at home, has never forgiven me. But the one thing that never occurred to me was that, a year later, I might mount a vast second wedding. Elaborate and agonised table plans, mushrooming guest lists, the endless donning of breath-crushing shapewear when you don’t have to: are these people crackers? On second thoughts, don’t answer that.
• Alex Clark writes for the Observer and the Guardian
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