Monday
Without realising it, the Olympics provided a happy background to our lives and, on Monday, after Sunday night’s closing ceremony, the comedown is hard. The drama of the medals table aside, it was three weeks of constant low-key good cheer, drawing us into conversations with our kids about who could get up that wall fastest and who would call 999 if you ever attempted to do anything on the beam.
After the shaky opening ceremony, the overall sense of the Games has been that Paris was a hit, reinvigorating the Olympics via the brilliant and very French decision to art direct the sports in front of the city’s iconic landmarks, while giving all non-French speakers a tiny thrill of accomplishment every time they said “Stade de France” with a bit of an accent. According to NBC, viewing figures in the US were up 79% on Tokyo in the first half of the Games, and the BBC doubled its streaming figures.
The closing ceremony, while retaining all the whimsical French touches to which it is impossible to refer without doing Marcel Marceau hands, was more traditional than the opener, staged in front of 80,000 people in the Stade de France and culminating, after the interpretive dance, in Tom Cruise zipwiring in for the handover to Los Angeles 2028. Which was, of course, a pivot to Hollywood entertainment – not because of the stunt, but for the opportunity it presented us with to remark on the state of Cruise’s face: he looked like a Scooby Doo villain wearing a mask shortly to be peeled off from the chin.
Tuesday
Mark Zuckerberg has unveiled a 7ft statue of his wife, Priscilla Chan, made by the New York artist Daniel Arsham, in which she appears to be tethered to a tree with tinfoil. It is a striking piece and Zuckerberg, who commissioned it as a gift, has stated it was undertaken in the spirit of “bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife”. (The couple’s three kids all have Roman names: Maxima, August and Aurelia.)
It’s a lovely gesture and not at all an externalised expression of the inner 17-year-old Zuckerberg’s ongoing shock that he actually got someone to go out with, let alone marry him. On the subject of Rome, meanwhile, it is less the image of a loving Roman husband that Zuckerberg calls to mind, than the ancient empire’s transition from representative democracy to a centralised imperial authority with no checks and balances, run by a single, unelected man with complete and often whimsically exercised power.
Wednesday
In his dreams, perhaps, Zuckerberg is one of these two: Brad Pitt and George Clooney. The pair appeared together in an interview for GQ with a promotional bonhomie that can make one impatient for the magazine world’s last breath. If there is a less edifying spectacle than this pair chuntering alongside each other while promoting the movie Wolfs (per the studio: “The storyline follows two lone-wolf fixers who are assigned to the same job” – whether with hilarious or terrifying consequences, I’ll never find out).
The story of the interview has been Clooney pushing back against Quentin Tarantino, who said he wasn’t a movie star any m… – sorry, I got so bored then I had to stop typing. Of less interest to the interviewer, and to most interviewers encountering Pitt in the past five years, is the disastrous afterlife of his vanity-driven post-Katrina housing development in New Orleans, for which his non-profit agreed to pay victims a $20.5m settlement, or the various accusations made against him by his ex-wife, Angelina Jolie. Anyway, three cheers for the fun showbiz stories of Brad, George and Quentin!
Thursday
Oh, Liz Truss! Surely, there’s a first-rate Alan Ayckbourn-type farce to be produced under that title?! Or maybe a gently self-mocking BBC Two travel show called Truss’s Britain in which, every week, Truss turns up at a different public event to see what public humiliation awaits?
To which end: the former prime minister was in Beccles, Suffolk, this week, talking up Donald Trump on stage when, slowly, inexorably, a banner was lowered behind her featuring a lettuce with googly eyes and the words: “I crashed the economy”.
Everything about what happened next was perfection. Truss, as if in slow motion, craned around, mouth ajar, and slowly processed the insult while the man interviewing said defensively: “I’ve no idea where that’s come from”. It wasn’t the poster, I suspect, that finished Truss off, but the subsequent tittering from the audience indicating that, despite the nature of the occasion, she was not among friends. Like a supply teacher pushed past her very last nerve, Truss gathered her papers and stalked off stage, pausing just long enough to utter a characteristic inaccuracy: “That’s not funny.”
Friday
The queen liked Velamints! Of course she did, a woman of taste and discernment. Velamints, alongside Fry’s Chocolate Cream, are one of the great unsung confections never given their due. According to notes made by Elizabeth Evans, a veteran flight attendant who served the queen over decades in royal service on British Airways and whose memorabilia this week came to auction, she liked a martini on board, and insisted on a particular, sugar-free mint during takeoff.
That mint is the Velamint, developed in the US in the 1970s, icy and strong, that puts Fox’s Glacier Mints to shame. In our early teens, my friends and I bought Velamints at quantity for the taste, the sophistication we believed vested in the word “Velamint”, and the advisory on the packet – “excessive consumption may cause laxative effects” – which, naturally, we considered the funniest thing we had ever seen.
