Monday
It’s very hard to find proper hot cross buns in New York without stumbling on a range of impostors. There are bread rolls with raisins. There are croissants in disguise. There are a range of what can only be classified as muffins. This year, after the closure of my one reliable go-to at Easter – a local Aussie bakery – I fall back on the French. A few days before Easter, the seasonal offerings at the French bakery loom large in the window and I let myself dream things will turn out all right.
OK, their hot cross buns are very, very large, an extravagance that feels, in the context of pastry, aggressively French and quite against the nature of a true hot cross bun: that is, a baked good with the density of something that has been left on the back seat of the car and sat upon by multiple children.
They’ve also made the classic American error of using white icing for the cross. I know, icing. It’s not a Belgian bun, for the love of God. Plus the finish is matte, which is quite wrong. The ideal hot cross bun, as we know, should have a glaze on it so fierce you can apply your makeup in the reflection.
Nevertheless, they are the best thing on offer this Easter and I buy six to cut open and toast. Well. The inside is so shocking I take a photo to send to friends. I’m not sure what happened, perhaps the baker panicked or gave up. Either way, I will never erase the image of a large heap of raisins, dumped in the centre like a pie filling, surrounded by a dome of pure air. No mixed peel. No aroma that, while looking forward to the citrus of summer, carries with it a last whisper of Christmas. They’re still buns, obviously, so I finish the lot in two days. But they’re not hot cross buns.
Tuesday
There is a new category of news story that sits, for popularity, just below that of passengers arguing about seats on a plane. It is this: cruise ship captains refusing to board guests who arrive even marginally late to the dock, leaving them and their wheelie suitcases stranded. They’re corkers, these stories, summoning as they do, for many of us, our worst fears about racing and failing to make an imminent departure.
This week it was the captain of a Norwegian cruise behemoth who refused to budge when eight passengers rocked up late after a day trip around São Tomé, an island off the coast of Gabon. Even after a coastguard took the group on launches to the side of the ship, the captain wasn’t having it. And so the ship sailed, taking all their gear, including bank cards, with it.
What happened next is the stuff of nightmares or an under-par Todd Phillips movie. The ship’s next stop, scheduled to be in the Gambia, seemed a doable scramble and the passengers hurried to meet it. But this, too, failed, when bad weather prevented the ship from docking. The desperate eight eventually caught up with the 92,000-tonne vessel in Senegal, six countries and a reported $5,000 spend later.
Under the delicious subhead “Costly Lesson”, two of the stranded passengers appeared in the Australian media to declare the experience “the worst of our lives”, although for my money they had it all wrong. The only thing worse, surely, than missing a cruise of that size would be arriving on time to successfully join it.
Wednesday
A New York screening of Scoop, the Netflix film based on Sam McAlister’s book about snagging Prince Andrew for his disastrous interview on Newsnight, delivers a small but real pleasure: that of watching British experience tailored for an American audience. The majority of American viewers, who will have never heard of Newsnight, may be inclined to believe the film’s suggestion that British newsrooms are places where editors make inspirational speeches, rather than a bunch of grumpy hacks wondering when they can break for the canteen.
Billie Piper is great as McAlister, Rufus Sewell is appropriately dim-witted as Andrew, and Gillian Anderson as Emily Maitlis steals the show. Yes, says Anderson when I ask her after the screening if she has ever run into Maitlis herself (they live not far from each other in west London). Shortly after filming, while walking in the park, she was nearly knocked sideways by Maitlis’s famous dog Moody. For a hot second, says Anderson, she thought of calling out to the woman she’d just depicted on screen. But on reflection – Maitlis has her own Prince Andrew-based project in the works and had no involvement with this production at all – sensibly thought better of it.
Thursday
Who would you most like to hear from on the subject of how to balance your life with your work? Is it Jeff Bezos, the world’s third richest man? Well, too bad, he has thoughts. Although they were made several years ago, Bezos’s considerations on the subject of how to be an effective human recirculated this week in response to the release of the Forbes billionaire list – with Bezos in at No 3, behind Elon Musk and ahead of Mark Zuckerberg – and truly, they are inspiration to all.
Briefly, Bezos believes the word “balance” is “debilitating” and should be replaced with the word “harmony”, or the phrase “work-life circle”. This is because, he says, if he’s happy at home he has “tremendous energy” at work, and if he’s happy at work it makes him happy at home. The role played by his estimated $194bn fortune in the release of this happiness isn’t discussed, but I’m sure those working in his warehouses are, while on their timed sprints to the loo, grateful to ponder the insight.
Friday
Hard on the heels of women’s football relaxing white uniform codes to alleviate period anxiety, the governing gymnastics body in New Zealand has revamped its dress code to allow women to wear shorts over leotards. Henceforth, gymnasts competing for Gymnastics New Zealand will be given a chance to opt out of the highly sexualised mandatory attire and won’t be penalised for “visible underwear” – a real thing, incredibly, carrying potential point deductions of up to 1.00. The rule change only holds for competitions in New Zealand, however. Everywhere else, female gymnasts remain stuck, alongside the beach volleyball players and the women’s tennis world, in the wasteland between Playboy and a 70s PE class.
