Monday
The schools reopened in New York today and a familiar dynamic got under way: huge relief at having the kids out of the house, immediately followed by a dim but persistent hunger to fetch them back home.
It never ceases to amaze me, this contradictory impulse one has in regards to one’s children. These are anxious times, but it was like this before Covid – parents, stressed out and late for work after drop-off, still, in spite of themselves, hanging on to the bars of the school gates for one last look, one last reassurance – OK, bye, bye, love you, bye! – as if seeing them off on evacuation trains in the 40s. It’s partly the barren visual: they look so small, lined up 6ft apart in the playground, bags big as jetpacks, turning in the bitter wind to trudge single file towards the school buildings.
It’s partly the guilt: at least one day in three, in our house, getting to school on time involves an amazing amount of shouting and crying.
And it’s partly what feels like basic programming. Wherever they are and whatever they’re doing, these people inevitably take up most of my hard drive. I walk home through the frigid air, annoyed that they’re only in school until 2pm, wishing I had more time, already missing them, before pausing to check the news on my phone. Rudy Giuliani has Covid.
Tuesday
Footage of Maggie Keenan, the first recipient in the world of the approved Covid vaccine, and William Shakespeare, the second, are on every front page in the US, bringing about rare feelings of national pride, not least in our ability not to take naming things seriously. Look at you, Britain! The splash in the New York Times! And not only Britain, but the NHS in particular. Suck it, private healthcare.
There is something very moving about history being made by these two defiantly ordinary, elderly people, as there is about the figure of May Parsons, the nurse who administered the vaccine and later addressed reporters with a combination of pride and instinctive deference to the team. To my surprise, however, it’s broader TV footage of the country’s vaccination programme, featuring exterior shots of the grand old London hospitals – St Thomas’, Guy’s – that breaks me and I spend the day catching sight of them and having small cries (but not in a weird Matt Hancock way).
Wednesday
I’ve been managing negative feelings about Reese Witherspoon for a while now. I’ve tried to overcome them. There is, I’ve told myself, nothing to be gained from having a go at this woman. She championed Cheryl Strayed’s book, Wild, which was great, and she made the movie, which was also great, and although I’ve found most of what she’s done since then highly irritating, come on, she’s not really that bad.
She is, though. Across social media this week, there she was, Witherspoon, posing in matching “holiday sweaters” with her daughter, Ava, smirking in that “I know, I am really cute, right?” way of hers while advertising the clothing brand that pissed off a lot of teachers earlier this year.
It’s unbecoming to dislike someone simply on the basis of style; on the other hand, she put Ava in a debutante ball in Paris, and picks a lot of books for her book club with titles like Where the Light Shines in and The Memory of Rainfall and Maud Goodbody Is Having a Bad Day, in which women are quirky with dark pasts but still find true love.
Whenever Witherspoon makes a new pick, she releases a photo of herself lounging about in an adult onesie, looking down at a book with a wry smile that says, “Ah, yes, all human life is here in these pages, plus how cute do I look in this onesie?!” And now with the sweaters.
I can’t take it any more and I text my friend Claudia. “I’m finally doing it. I’m going to say something about Witherspoon.”
“Oh, thank God,” she replies. There, I’ve said it.
Thursday
News of Nigella and the microwave reaches New York, to the bafflement of many Americans. On its website, New York magazine runs the story under the headline “Nigella Lawson’s pronunciation of ‘microwave’ is bloody bizarre” and for a second, I get my hopes up that she’s had some kind of exciting malfunction on the telly.
But no, nothing of the sort has occurred. On further investigation, it’s just the English habit of pronouncing words flamboyantly wrongly – like the chain All Bar One in its Italian form, Allbarony, and as I do every night when I call my kids to the table, or tahblah, as I call it, like my mother did before me. “Why do you call it that?” say my American children, blinking up at me without a hint of a smile. “Because it’s very hilarious and you need to get on board with it now or you’re no children of mine.”
Friday
There are rats in my local branch of Chipotle, which shouldn’t be news – of course there are rats in Chipotle – except one tried to bite a member of staff and like every other living thing in New York, they’ve developed a taste for avocado. Meanwhile, the temperature plunges to 29F (1.6C) and I inadvertently hit play on a clip of Don Jr shouting on Fox News. It’s a chilling end to the week.
There aren’t many consolations, but one is Ted Lasso, the good-hearted TV show on Apple, starring Jason Sudeikis as a goofy American football coach brought in to manage a fictional premier league side. After bingeing the first season, I find myself weeping for the second time this week, at the show’s sweetness and kindness and Sudeikis’s touching performance. He’s a male Lesley Knope – Amy Poehler’s wide-eyed heroine in Parks and Rec – and as I run to fetch the kids, I feel briefly elated. There we all are, 20-odd parents at the gate, waving, shouting, jostling to catch a first glimpse of them, like teenagers at the stage door. The relief never gets any smaller nor the impatience less fierce: they are where we left them, in one piece and ready to come home.
