Monday
Along with death and divorce, moving makes up the trinity of what are supposed to be life’s most stressful experiences (assuming you don’t live on the Florida coast). On Monday, literally two and a half months after it left the US, my ship came in carrying among other things a large sectional sofa, a 200lb oak bookcase and 84 boxes of assorted personal effects, including an old colander with dried spaghetti stuck to the side and a tea strainer with a hole at the rim. The entire day was like a workshop on the consequences of poor decision-making.
Apart from the books, I hadn’t missed any of the stuff and had come to the conclusion I’d be fine if it wound up at the bottom of the ocean. Instead, three men hauled the shipment up three flights of stairs while I dithered in the kitchen, occasionally popping my head round the door to assuage my anxiety by saying things such as: “At least it’s not raining!” and “Your job is so hard!” I hate myself sometimes.
And while moving in is less stressful than moving out, it’s still brutal enough to make you wonder what exactly the problem is. Seeing all the things you invest meaning in out in the world, sad and undefended; wondering if your essential self is inextricably tied up in a bunch of 30-year-old birthday cards and some scraps of fabric you no longer fit into; the sinking feeling of never quite being able to out-run your stuff. Or maybe it’s just the stress of having large bodies crash into your walls, knocking chunks of plaster off at the corners. In New York, one of my movers had tried to counsel me while I watched everything go out the door. “It’s not life or death,” he said. “It’s just moving.” But I don’t think I agree.
Tuesday
Politicians running for office in the UK are often forced into photo opps in pubs, pulling pints like the world’s most ill-at-ease bartender. In the US on Tuesday, Kamala Harris cracked open a beer with Stephen Colbert on his CBS late show and it was hard to tell just how awkward it was. The show tapes in New York, so the studio audience was ecstatic, but Harris still occupies a strange zone between someone who is highly polished and charismatic and a person who struggles to seem anything but wooden in public appearances.
Unlike poor Rishi Sunak and his football gaffe around the Euros, in her of-the-people performance on Tuesday night, Harris sailed through the sports section, smartly ducking Colbert’s NFL question about Pennsylvania’s Steelers v Eagles with a pivot to her home town 49ers. But her response to Colbert’s chuckley invitation to swear about Donald Trump (“it starts with a W, there’s a letter in between, and the last letter’s F”) was sufficiently coy and self-satisfied to make one wonder about its utility beyond anyone-but-Trump-ers.
Wednesday
A scene straight from Hitchcock in a video taken in Washington state this week, where a woman who had, for years, been feeding the local raccoons woke up to find her house surrounded. A single raccoon is cute; 100 of them – bearing down on a house with hungry looks on their faces – is a horror movie, particularly when you discover that raccoons fall into that category of “cuddly looking animals that on a bad day could kill you”. The local sheriffs were called to disperse the hoard and issue the woman, whose name has not been released, with a stern advisory to quit encouraging them. It’s a lesson one hopes that might reach the lunatics who feed pigeons (and rats) in the city.
Thursday
As Hurricane Milton makes landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast, most of the coverage rightly focuses on the threat to human life. But two stories of volunteers staying behind to care for the animals delivers a much-needed antidote to stories of horrifying destruction. At the Turtle hospital in the Florida Keys, conservationists gently move the rescue facility’s cohort of giant turtles out of the tidal pools to stop them getting bashed. And at Tampa zoo, a team of 12 workers elect to ride out the storm to protect more than 1,000 animals from harm, chopping up weeks’ worth of food for them and, Old Testament-style, moving them into storm-proofed containers.
Meanwhile CNN anchor Anderson Cooper flies down from New York to put himself in harm’s way, gets hit in the face by flying debris while live on air, and mutters sheepishly, “Well, that wasn’t good, we’ll probably go inside shortly.” Bloody idiot.
Friday
It’s that jolly time of year again in which we are offered the opportunity to slash an artery while attempting to gut a pumpkin, station it on our sideboards until it fills the room with the smell of rotting veg, then watch it slowly collapse in on itself while leaking orange fluid. For some, this year, there may be a get-out in the form of a national pumpkin shortage, which has hit Britain due a combination of a cold wet spring, slugs, and an unmistakable gift from the gods to those of us who find seasonal craft projects more stressful than moving.
