Monday
How long into the opening ceremony did you last? I got as far as the living statues of famous feminists rising out of the Seine before getting up and drifting away. There was entertainment value in watching the caravan of shivering, poncho-clad athletes being conveyed down the river in the rain. And the phrase, delivered deadpan by a BBC commentator: “There’s Andy Murray on a barge”, was a keeper. But for the most part France’s whimsical reinvention of the Olympic opening ceremony was as flat as a crepe.
Highlights of the Games so far: Princess Anne, lately recovered from being kicked in the head by a horse, handing out medals to the Team GB showjumpers and looking to my mind more regal than her older brother. The astonishing feats of Simone Biles, both in competition and on Instagram, clapping back at a former US gymnast who criticised her team by posting the critique – “lack of talent, lazy, olympic champions” – above a photo of the team celebrating gold on the podium.
And, of course, Tom Daley, nailing silver in the 10m synchro platform dive to cheers from the crowd while his husband, Dustin Lance Black, won gold in the impossibly niche man-does-more-childcare-than-his-spouse open event, and the world, beside itself, swooned.
Tuesday
Inspired more by the heat than the Olympics, we go to the kind of leisure centre that hasn’t changed or been cleaned since I was a child. The single cracked water slide; the barren changing rooms; the lockers with the pound coin operating system and the thick rubber wrist-band. “What is that smell?” asks one of my children, and there is only one answer. That smell, my darling, is 1987: chlorine, damp, a wadded up towel that’s been mouldering in a corner for the last seven months, and the air of verruca sock. In the pool, you get the unnerving sense you are moving through something slightly thicker than water.
At least the wave machine is broken. When I was a child, the urban legend was that a kid who got too close to the wall while the waves were on had her ear ripped off. The plunge pool at the bottom of the slide does, however, feature the customary leisure centre experience of scary undertow and monitored whirlpool. Nostalgic, I watch as a man and his son get sucked under, fight to resurface and, after a brief struggle to hang on to their lives and their trunks, emerge exhausted to get on with their day.
Wednesday
Persistently high interest rates in the UK and US have led to steep drops in house prices for the last 18 months, so spare a thought for Kanye West this week, who months after putting his Malibu beach property on the market, finally sold it at a whopping $14m discount.
In Ye’s case, to be fair, it wasn’t just a question of getting around a soft housing market. In the three years since buying the place, the former billionaire had gutted the property, ripping out bespoke features designed by the legendary Japanese architect Tadao Ando and removing not only the windows and doors but the plumbing and electricity; an act of vandalism so egregious the New Yorker devoted 20,000 words to it earlier this year.
After this episode, photos of the house, which Ye bought in 2021 for $57m, revealed a concrete bunker open to the elements without a single distinguishing feature, both a husk and an impressive monument to the destructive autocracy of fame (or something). As a result, someone snapped up the four “bedroom”, five “bathroom” oceanfront property for a $39m steal.
Thursday
My own house move this week consisted of a series of medium- and short-range poor choices that led to the shipment of 84 individual boxes and, on the day of the move, the shippers shaking their heads in dismay and informing me I would be coming in comfortably at three times the estimate.
I’ll know next time. But for now, I have the agony of revisiting my decision to ship, for example, a 10-year-old robot vacuum cleaner clogged with hair; a $20 popcorn maker; a pizza cutter; a set of flat-packed Ikea drawer inserts; endless cables I have no idea go with what; and a massive, L-shaped sofa I couldn’t bring myself to part with. As this beast, sheathed in bubble wrap, made its way out the door, I knew with sudden, terrible clarity that I’d made a mistake. The lead mover, a young man in his mid-20s, kindly shared his moving philosophy – “only take clothes” – before asking if I really, truly wanted to know the individual cost of lugging the sofa across the Atlantic. I did, I said, and now I wish I hadn’t. That was not a good number and I will have to live with the memory of it until, via several thousand small acts of self denial, I have worked off the guilt and shame.
Friday
If you’ve ever accused someone of having a “three-second fish memory” or used that phrase to impugn an actual fish, you need to think again. According to scientists at Macquarie University in Sydney, fish not only have good memories, with the ability to recognise other fish but, when put through repeat drills, can remember complex routes towards, for example, finding a hole in a net, with more acuity than the average human. Research undertaken by Prof Culum Brown, an expert, wonderfully, in “fish cognition”, has shown this week that fish are able to remember a given route even after an 11-month lag, which is more than most of us can manage without GPS.
The myth about fish memory, Brown said indignantly, was baseless, but it “kind of gives us an excuse to treat them poorly, because if we have a low opinion of their intelligence, then perhaps we can abuse them and get away with it”.
