Monday
As if the residents of Los Angeles don’t have enough to worry about. A friend of mine who spent many years teaching at CalTech has just been diagnosed with sinister actinic keratosis, a pre-cancerous condition of the left ear, caused by sunburn picked up while driving around town with the window wound down. According to his doctor, it’s an increasingly common problem – up to half of all drivers may be affected, apparently – and is known locally as Van Gogh syndrome. Unless global warming gets a great deal worse, it’s not something that’s ever likely to affect us in the UK. But if it does, then it’s good to know we will get our very own, rather less alarmist, name for it. Dexter actinic keratosis. Classic British understatement.
Tuesday
I was so amazed that David Cameron had chosen PricewaterhouseCoopers – a firm that was only last year accused by the public accounts committee of misleading parliament and promoting tax avoidance on an industrial scale – for his first public engagement since the Panama Papers were published, that I totally failed to appreciate the gravity of the prime minister’s own precarious financial situation. As he emptied out his pockets in front of several hundred bewildered PwC employees in Birmingham to reveal he was in effect broke – “just a few coins and a property I rent out for peanuts” – I, like many others, assumed he must have some little nest egg tucked away somewhere. But after three or four further carefully worded clarifications, it seems that Dave’s family has been swindled out of its inheritance. Assuming his father wasn’t using his offshore company Blairmore – or More Blair, as Peter Mandelson might have named it – for purely charitable purposes (that really would be a world first), then his holdings must have gone somewhere when he died. A job for PwC.
Wednesday
Students at Columbia University in the US are protesting about plans to install a Henry Moore sculpture, the imaginatively named Reclining Figure 1969-70, outside their library. While many UK universities would kill to have such a seminal work on their campus, the New Yorkers are adamant that the 3.6-metre-long sculpture is just a “lumpy hulk of metal” and looks like “a dying praying mantis or a poorly formed pterodactyl”. If a Henry Moore doesn’t make the grade for the over-entitled students, then what would? Presumably Michelangelo’s David would also get the thumbs down on the grounds that it might make some male students feel a bit inadequate. Perhaps a compromise might be in order. Why doesn’t Columbia put the sculpture on show for a two-year trial period? If the students still don’t like it, they can always sell it for scrap. It wouldn’t be the first Henry Moore to be recycled: in 2009 police discovered that a bronze sculpture worth £3m, which had been stolen from the Henry Moore estate four years earlier, had been melted down and sold for £1,500 to an Essex scrap dealer.
Thursday
The first day of the US Masters. A red-letter day for golf enthusiasts and a source of bewilderment for the rest of us. Is there any other sport where spectators can be guaranteed to see so little of the action? Basically you have two choices: the first is to pick a pair of players and follow them round the course while listening to the cheers from one of the other holes when something exciting happens elsewhere. The second is to position yourself at one green for the entire day and watch each pair pass through in turn while listening to the cheers from one of the other holes when something exciting happens elsewhere. And yet tickets for the Masters are like gold dust. It’s much the same for the Grand National, where for the price of the entrance fee you get to be stuck in vast crowds while watching the horses jump three or four fences up close at best. I just don’t see the attraction. I’ll stick with my season ticket at White Hart Lane.
Friday
A huge sigh of relief. It turns out that Cameron hasn’t been swindled out of his inheritance. It was just that the four clarifications he had made earlier in the week about not benefiting from his father’s offshore trust weren’t quite as clear as they might have been. With this resolved, I took my wife to Italy for her birthday to see a rarely performed Pergolesi opera, La Serva Padrona. While I was in Rome, the pope published his Amoris Laetitia (Joys of Love) document, which again concluded that gay Catholics are “intrinsically disordered”. How sweet. No news on the pontiff’s Pecuniae Laetitia (Joys of Wonga), which might have been particularly useful in these troubled Panama Papers times. Probably just as well, as the Catholic church doesn’t have an unblemished record. Back in the 1970s and 80s, the Vatican bank was at the centre of numerous financial scandals, including links to the mafia, and its president, Archbishop Marcinkus, couldn’t leave the Vatican for fear of being arrested. God moves in mysterious ways.
Digested week, digested: Can pay, won’t pay
