Monday
Virus numbers are down in New York, while the positivity rate remains high – hovering at 8% – bringing new safety guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control. If you can’t find an N95-grade mask, says the CDC, try double-masking: putting a cloth mask over a disposable medical one, with a wire pin to close the gap over your nose.
It’s no hardship to wear a mask after a year of conditioning. It offers protection against the cold and permits one to scowl undetected in public. Two layers, however – or a single layer containing two filters – brings on panicky feelings of claustrophobia. It’s one thing to breathe through flimsy fabric that doubles up as a chin warmer, and another to feel the weight of multiple layers between you and every gasp of fresh air.
There’s no getting around it. Until everyone is vaccinated, masks remain, along with social distancing, the best break on transmission. But we’re getting tired, and sloppy, and mask etiquette is getting grosser. On the street, pale blue medical masks flutter against every fence and clog every drain. I catch my children surreptitiously blowing their noses in theirs – “Mum! There’s a booger in my mask!” – and on one occasion, my daughter sucking the fabric until I screamed at her to desist.
Meanwhile, entire friendships have been formed – in my case with the mums of my children’s new classmates – whose entire faces I’ve never seen, and who’ve never seen me or my kids unmasked. It’s a weird, weird side-effect of the pandemic that we couldn’t pick each other out in a line up.
Tuesday
It’s a fear up there with losing my wallet or leaving the stove on: that I’ll make a typo in the course of paying a bill online and transfer money I don’t have to someone I don’t know. So it was that on Tuesday it was possible, almost, to feel pity for Citibank, when a judge in Manhattan ruled against it in its struggle to recover – oops – $500m (£357m), wired in error to some dastardly hedge funds.
It could’ve been worse. The original sum accidentally sent over was a whopping $900m, but some of the hedge funds returned the money. All were creditors of the cosmetics giant Revlon, to whom Citibank agreed, in 2016, to act as a loan agent and in which capacity it was attempting to make a scheduled interest payment of a trifling $7.8m. Instead, by mistake, it sent the cohort of hedge-fund lenders $893m, the entire balance of the loan and a sum not due until 2023.
The banker in question, said Citibank, had made a processing error they blamed on complicated tech rather than what is known within banking as a “fat-finger mistake” – a clumsy mashing of the keys resulting in the wrong command going through. The hedge funds weren’t buying it, and excerpts of their glee in the aftermath of the error were read out in court. “I feel really bad for the person that fat-fingered a $900m payment,” joked a vice-president at one company. “How was work, today, honey? It was OK, except I accidentally sent $900m out to people who weren’t supposed to have it.”
What happened next was, in Citibank’s sober version, that attempts by the bank to recover the money “encountered resistance”, or as the hedge-funders said jokingly to each other in text messages at the time: “We have not paid the money back :)” Six months later, you can still hear the echoing high fives.
The US district judge Jesse Furman ruled on Tuesday that the wire transfers of 11 August 2020 were “final and complete transactions, not subject to revocation”, before calling the accident “a banking error of perhaps unprecedented nature and magnitude”. It was a stunning verdict. And while it’s true that, were I to overpay my Citibank mortgage by $900m, I wouldn’t fancy my chances of getting it back, I do wonder with vague sympathy about the fate of the guy with the fat fingers.
Wednesday
Every friend in every neighbourhood has noticed it, a tiny rip in the social fabric of New York represented by a huge increase in dog poop. It’s everywhere, volumes of the stuff. The snow always makes it worse – selfish owners not wanting to prolong their walks to pick up after their dogs – but this predates the winter storms, reaching back to last summer and beyond. It’s never been this bad in the city before.
It has, surely, to do with the pandemic. The ways in which we have all given up are generally confined to personal grooming, but for people with dogs, perhaps that defeat has extended to pet care. With civic authorities strained in other directions and the pandemic downsizing everything else to no big deal, it becomes a question of what, precisely, you can get away with.
A friend in Brooklyn spots a woman making off after her dog takes a massive shit outside his building, and opening a window, yells down: “Do you need a bag?” Seamlessly, she yells back: “Yes please! I forgot mine!” – and after he throws down a bag, she cleans up the mess. No breach of politeness occurs, nor is it acknowledged at any point that he’s caught her in the act of being an arsehole. “I wonder,” he says later, “if I should have been ruder?”
Thursday
Before Christmas, my dentist told me that tooth fractures were up, brought on by the stress of the pandemic. Now the New York Times throws its weight behind the issue to look into what’s going on with “bruxism” – the dental term for grinding and gritting that, it reports, is so severe in some patients they can grind down with a 250lb (113kg) force. There’s a discussion around whether or not mouth guards work or if counselling is the key, given that grinding is largely behavioural.
In most houses, I suspect, beyond the immediate needs of the patient, what’s required are good earplugs. Until the early hours when, without fail, my daughter sleepwalks into my room, I can hear her through the wall grinding her teeth. Then she lies down next to me and saws away peacefully for the rest of the night.
Friday
The trailer dropped this week for Cruella, the new live action Disney movie and origin story of Cruella de Vil, Dodie Smith’s villain from 101 Dalmatians. It follows in the footsteps of Wicked, which redeems the Wicked Witch of the West, Maleficent, which does the same for Sleeping Beauty’s wicked stepmother, and even Nurse Ratched, presently receiving sympathetic treatment in Ryan Murphy’s TV show of the same name. Untitled Lizzie Borden Project can’t be far off a green light.
I’m fond of the 1996 movie version of 101 Dalmatians, in which raccoons gambol through Hyde Park and – my children’s favourite bit – Hugh Laurie gets electrocuted climbing over a fence. Judging by the trailer, Emma Stone will be both more winsome and much posher than Glenn Close’s original Cruella, and what more heavenly diversion during lockdown’s darkest hour: a heroine in a fright wig brandishing an accent leftover from The Favourite, part Pennywise the Clown, part Edith Evans.
