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Monday
It’s the last week of school and, in our case, the last week of primary school, ever, which I thought wouldn’t be a big deal but now we’re here, I’m sliding off my axis about the cruel passage of time. It’s not about my children, who can’t wait to crack on, it’s about me, me, me.
No more WhatsApp groups, no more requests for volunteer service, and the big one, no more school gate. Light of the need to actually leave the house in the morning, I may, finally, be on the brink of formal entry into my Miss Havisham period and look forward to a future of thickening arteries and fresh air-free days.
The marking of the end has become more pronounced since I was at school, although it’s still a long way off the way they do it in the US, where graduation ceremonies are staged for every school year, starting with nursery and finishing with the end of high school.
No one needs to show up to a second-grade graduation, but at my children’s old school, I found the formality of the fifth-grade graduation ceremony quite moving. The fifth graders leaving elementary school wore ties and dresses and the songs were deliberately angled to kill us, and that was before the principal sang a number from Wicked, which even for a school ۲۰ blocks north of Times Square, was sufficiently jaunty to make me wonder why I was leaving at all.
In London things have been low key and lovely. Still, something about the universal agreement that this is a very large life transition can make one forget that our ۱۱-year-olds aren’t actually leaving home and will still need micromanaging through college and beyond.
A friend with a son in the second year of his degree texts to say her summer will be spent leaning over him to revise for his resits, which, in any other week might be a terrible vision of the future, but in this particular one, reassures me we’re at least a decade off done.
Tuesday
Ring the bells, hang out the bunting: Trump has been forced to pay up. On Tuesday, news broke that E Jean Carroll had received her $۵.۶m ($۶۰۰,۰۰۰ of which was interest payment), a sum held in escrow since the ۲۰۲۳ civil case in which the president was found liable for sexually abusing and subsequently defaming her. After the supreme court knocked back Trump’s move to appeal against the verdict, he was forced to pay out this week in what must be an experience so strange for him as to be practically unique: being held to account.
Trump and his legal team responded with a show of grace in the form of a public request for forgiveness, acknowledging the hurt caused and apologising for besmirching the office of the president and the US’s national life. Just kidding! Aaron Harison, a spokesperson for Trump’s personal lawyers, issued a statement in which he said: “The American people stand with President Trump as they demand an immediate end to all of the witch-hunts, including the Democrat-funded travesty of the Carroll hoaxes.”
E Jean Carroll’s lawyers, meanwhile, looked ahead from this victory towards the small remaining question of the $۸۳.۳m judgment awarded to Carroll after a separate defamation case, in ۲۰۲۴, and which we look forward to the courts resolving in her favour.
Wednesday
We’re going to the US next week and it’s a game of Russian roulette as to which calamity we’ll be struck down with first: legionnaires’ disease (at least ۲۸ people sick in Manhattan, possibly from bacteria in the cooling towers), the diarrhoea outbreak caused by cyclosporiasis, a parasitic infection spreading throughout the US via bagged lettuce and leafy greens (thousands of people sick in the midwest and hundreds in New York), or will we be smothered by huge toxic clouds wafting down the eastern seaboard from the wildfires raging in Canada?
News outlets sent reporters to stand outside Chop’t, a salad chain, in Manhattan’s midtown, to find out if lettuce was off the menu, but most New Yorkers exiting with their big bowls of greens said they’d take their chances. I won’t be among them; this is exactly the confirmation I’ve been in search of for years to justify my conviction that lettuce is a placeholder for food, not food itself. Spinach, fine, and I can manage kale if it’s smothered in dressing. But a bowl of lettuce for lunch is like a tiny sentence to hard labour. All that chewing and for what?
Thursday
I went in on Little House on the Prairie, the Netflix remake, this week and it’s like one of those digital fires you load on to your screen to create a nice ambience: lovely shots of big sky, long skirts and men sawing wood for log cabins, but I can’t imagine sitting through all eight episodes as anything other than a soothing background to the vacuuming.
In fact, the show has not had a relaxing journey from conception to screen since being sucked into the US culture wars by the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who warned Netflix not to “woke-ify” the story – by which, one imagines, she meant indicate that the US’s foundations were built on anything other than wholesome collaboration, grit, overnight oats and the enthusiastic embrace of traditional gender roles.
Tonally, the show is a soap, which lowers expectations in a way that probably helps it out, and by introducing a neighbouring Osage family it manages to feel marginally more in line with ۲۰۲۶ than either the ۱۹۷۰s version or the ۱۹۳۰s original.
Friday
The weather icons on forecasting apps are too vague, say campaigners from Britain’s top tourist attractions, which lose thousands in revenue every time the little raincloud graphic writes off a day as unsuitable for visitors. I am totally behind this drive, which this week announced a summit at Chester zoo to tackle the problem of a sometimes ۵۰% drop in visitors every time the rain cloud icon leads the weather summary.
Rain can be forecast for a ۱۵-minute spell at ۱۱pm, but users glancing at the weather app will come away with the impression that the whole day is a washout. I would argue there is as strong a psychological as a commercial argument for introducing more nuance into weather iconography – glancing ahead at the forecast, a solid week of tiny rainclouds is as efficient a way to tank a mood as anything.
