Monday
The Princess of Wales puts out a video describing the aftermath of her cancer treatment and it’s less the falseness of the production that makes it so hard to watch than its desperate awkwardness. Clambering on logs and nuzzling her husband, the vibe the makers of the video are clearly striving to hit is Happiness in Spite of Ill Health. Instead, what comes across is the terrible latent strain of having to turn a frightening and painful experience into the Boden catalogue.
As ever with press emanating from Kensington Palace, I find myself wondering if the video was made by its protagonist couple with half an eye on the view from Montecito. This is wildly presumptuous, but something about the sheer overblown nature of the shoot – the almost hysterically beatific visuals; the focus on the health of the marriage – seemed to me to hit a degree of intensity and lack of proportion unique to the point-scoring phase of a family feud.
As a piece of advertising, the video failed to some extent, as the blow-back from some other cancer survivors disinclined to visualise their recovery as an Arden-like utopia has been sizeable. Perversely, however, after watching it I did feel more sorry for the princess than ever, stuck in this bell jar of a life for which, to add insult to injury, she has to provide her own voiceover.
Tuesday
I join a gym in my new neighbourhood in London and am reminded of something Tina Brown used to say about Britain: it was, she said, impossible to live here because when you interact with British people you can “hear the rain in their voices”. It was an irritating remark then and remains so now. God knows, this is a can’t-do society much of the time and it’s true, you can often detect rain in the voices. But to borrow an image from Joan Didion, it is – crucially – an artificial rain.
For those of us who have moved from the US to Britain, the choice becomes one of, which would you rather: artificial rain or artificial sun? American upbeat energy can be as unbearable as its downcast British alternative, depending on your mood, but the point of both is to achieve a specific outcome, linked to the motivational effects of either performative pessimism or optimism. One is at liberty to take one’s pick.
In my gym in New York the buff trainer would exhort us to “Finish strong!” and “Hustle for the muscle!” We were reminded, constantly, to be the best we could be. In the British gym on Tuesday, the trainer gives brief instructions, mills about vaguely by mirrors, offers no further encouragement or correction, then towards the end of the session limply informs us: “OK, five minutes.” Ah, it’s good to be home.
Wednesday
Will the US presidential debate make any difference to the election outcome? The polls in the US, which tipped in Kamala Harris’s favour after her nomination, have narrowed again in spite of Trump’s terrible performance on Tuesday night and the decision remains on a knife-edge.
Increasingly, it seems to me, those voters claiming to be “on the fence” are Trump voters who don’t want to admit it. This is particularly true in the north-east, where there is a social price to pay for sympathising with Trump. To be on the fence when one of the options is a maniac who keeps going on about world war three is not, as the Red Cross discovered during the last world war, to achieve neutrality, but rather to find complicity via acquiescence. As the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, said in the hours after the debate this week, this is “a game of inches in the swing states” and as family fights and I-can’t-be-in-a-room-with-those-people divisions intensify, those on the fence should expect to get splinters.
Thursday
If you like the kind of news story that stays with you, summoning images you can never expunge, stand by: scientists in Japan have discovered that eels can escape after being swallowed by backing themselves out of the predator’s gills. Ugh. It’s like one of those urban legends about tapeworms crawling out of people’s eyes, mouth or ears, only in this case it’s true and there’s something about gills as an exit that is even more stomach-churning than its fictional variants.
Like a snuff version of Finding Nemo, and per the story in this paper, the swallowed eel backs itself “up the digestive tract of the predator fish towards its oesophagus”, before escaping through the gills, tail first.
Incredibly, the scientists reported that this manoeuvre does not harm the predator fish, though I think we can take it as read that it might at best startle them and at worst leave them with serious emotional damage.
Friday
A fun aspect of re-entry into Britain has been introducing my kids to the full range of British crisps. They’ve never seen anything like it. In Tesco, my daughter hares round the corner shrieking: “Guess what flavour they have?” I know exactly what she’s just seen. “Is it roast chicken?” It was roast chicken, with its subtle flavour of burnt Bovril. We’re not the only ones enjoying the classic flavours, as data by Ocado indicates a surge in the popularity of late-20th-century snacks. Sales of Frazzles, Nik Naks and Chipsticks are up by more than 40%, as are Skips, those small, cap-shaped snacks that, just before they melt on your tongue, give you the prickly sensation of a mild allergic reaction. Magic!
