Monday
There is nothing more poignant, or grippingly voyeuristic, than a brass-tacks estate sale after the death of a legend. At Doyle Auctions on the east side of Manhattan this week, the personal effects of Stephen Sondheim, who died in 2021, aged 91, went under the hammer, providing superfans with an opportunity to bid on his gloomy furniture and collection of old crossword puzzles. There hasn’t been such excitement in the auction world since Joan Didion’s paperclips flew out the door at Stair Galleries two years ago for a cool $1,300.
As ever in these contexts, the more trivial the item, the more feverish the bidding. Would you like to eat lettuce from the same well-crafted wooden bowl from which Stephen Sondheim ate lettuce? Well, someone would, and they paid $1,000 (£790) for it.
How about some sweet, S-themed trinkets from Sondheim’s desk? Worth $9,600, as it turned out. Or some glass paperweights, which the composer used, doubtless, to stop freshly composed pages from Follies or A Little Night Music from flying away in the breeze? A hypothesis worth $2,432.
And then we get to the mystical end of things – those items heavy with the spirit of genius. Sondheim’s thesaurus and dictionary, which he talked about a lot when discussing the creation of his rhyme schemes, went for a staggering $25,600. His two annotated volumes of TS Eliot poems fetched $12,160. And the mother lode: a pack of Sondheim’s old pencils. Buy these – as someone did for $4,160 – and the Tony is practically yours!
Tuesday
It is a little-known fact about the British reputation abroad that, scorned for our dentistry, we are considered world leaders in the field of feet. It makes sense, once you think about it, seemingly of a piece with clammier elements of the national character. Of course the country in which people ignore orthodontics gets in a palaver about the state of its bunions.
I only learned about this on a trip to see my podiatrist in midtown this week. He was subjecting me to an experimental treatment, championed in Britain and lately imported to the US, which involves beaming microwaves into the softest part of the foot – a technology for which he was fully admiring of my pioneer compatriots. “You’ll hate me for four seconds,” he said, “and then it’ll be over.”
I don’t like people touching my feet. If I were in the CIA, all the enemy would have to do to make me talk would be to threaten me with a foot massage. “Jesus,” I said as the thing started to heat up. “Shit, shit, shit. You are joking.” The thing got hotter and hotter, until it felt like a red hot poker. “This is worse than my epidural. This is worse than eye surgery.” And still it got worse, until I screamed, very loudly: “Christ on a bike!” And it was over.
“Christ on a bike?” said the podiatrist, mildly. “Is that an English expression?”
“Sorry,” I said meekly and, nursing a sense I had let not only myself but my country down, went to apologise to the receptionist and the people in the waiting room.
Wednesday
You see a lot of dogs in prams in Manhattan, and I can never figure out what’s going on. Isn’t the point of walking a dog, to walk the dog? I’m sure a few of them are recovering from surgery, and maybe the chihuahuas can’t go the distance. But what of the midsize dogs enjoying the ride while their owners wheel them around like large furry babies?
Damien “two prams” Hirst is part of this trend, pictured as he was this week in the Daily Mail with a pram for his baby and a pram for his dog. Hirst, 59, has a newborn with his partner, 30-year-old Sophie Cannell, and was pictured at a restaurant in Mayfair with what the newspaper described as a self-designed, diamond encrusted baby pram worth £50,000. It’s the other pram I’m interested in, however – the one containing the couple’s small dog. These prams, which come in three-wheeler off-road designs, some of them with rain covers, go for about £300.
After giving it some thought, I think I may have found the answer. On the phone with a friend while she walks her miniature dachshund, we can’t go 30 seconds without other dog walkers stopping her, the dog faffing about with his nose, the leash getting tangled around her legs, or toilet stops. I guess the dog stroller is for when the dog has been exercised and all the owner wants to do is get home without more interruptions than a toddler learning to walk.
Thursday
The heatwave hits New York just in time for the end of the school year, so that open-air graduation ceremonies this week must be moved from afternoon to evening schedules; cooling stations are opened in public buildings; and across the north-east, 99 million Americans are put under extreme heat advisories as temperatures soar towards 100F (37.8C).
The average New Yorker’s response to all this is to grumble and buy another iced coffee. For those of us to whom a weather-based drama is the best drama of all, however, it is the time of our lives. Every email I’ve sent today has mentioned the weather in jovial, calamitous terms. There is sweaty camaraderie on the street. It’s going to be even worse tomorrow and I’m not sure I can hold back from at least one, happy, “Hot enough for you?!”
Friday
The greatest weather drama on TV, of course, is Clarkson’s Farm, something to which I came late – I saw the first episode last week and have already binged through to season two – and couldn’t love more. The hedge contest! Gerald! Clarkson himself, who is charming, with a greater awareness of his own buffoonishness than we’ve seen before.
And then there are the villains. Many years ago I interviewed the late, great architect Will Alsop, some of whose least favourite words in the English language were “local authority planner”, a cohort he described with admirable restraint as people who “by and large don’t have a lot of vision”. Every no-can-do, zero-enterprise attitude that drags this country down is on display in Clarkson’s battles with the local authority. If it weren’t out of keeping with the spirit of the piece, I’d wish his Amazon millions be put to good use tying these people up with frivolous applications until doomsday.
