Monday
One welcome hiatus during the pandemic was from the rat race of children’s birthday parties. It never reached Christina Crawford levels of pony and fairground rides in our corner of New York but, before March 2020, middle-class kids in my neighbourhood would routinely throw parties at venues that once catering, party bags and gratuities were factored in, comfortably hit a low three-figure amount in dollars per child.
Then came the pandemic and the trampoline parks shut down. No more events at American Girl Doll. Thank God, an end to Saturday afternoons at the Sugar Factory. Instead, birthdays slid back to where they were meant to be, outside in a park, even in snow. As long as there was singing and cake, the children were as happy in the playground as they’d been in the foam pit of the expensive soft play area. And with lower costs a head, the parties got bigger and less exclusive.
As with so many changed habits of that period, many of us said at the time, oh we’ll carry on doing it like this for ever. And, as in almost every other category, the conviction has started to slide.
On Sunday, a ninth birthday party at a venue in Times Square, billed as a children’s arcade but that may more accurately be described as a casino. Each child guest is issued a swipecard giving them access to unlimited video games and a capped amount for games with prizes, which include, amusingly, actual slot machines.
I love an arcade. We do the driving games and the zombie killing ones. We shoot hoops and play table hockey. My two win stuffed animals and are over the moon. Still, I find myself wincing. The spirit in which these sorts of parties are thrown is more transactional than the ones in the park, with an expected minimum spend on each gift. After it’s all over, parents tend to audit the haul and any shortfall is noted and not appreciated. You can sigh, but it’s as proscribed as Regency England; there’s no changing it. Back to business as usual. It’s how things are, always were, and ever will be.
Tuesday
Visuals from the Cambridges’ state visit to the Caribbean are still circulating as more come in from Prince Philip’s memorial. I don’t mean this entirely unkindly, but with each passing year, Prince William, once so reminiscent of Diana, edges closer in outline not to Charles or Peter Phillips, his oblong-shaped cousin, but to his late paternal grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh. Oof. Genes will out.
Coverage of the memorial extended to some mild tutting over Andrew, his mother’s favourite, re-upped to the frontline as the Queen’s escort into Westminster Abbey, but most of the opprobrium from the popular press was reserved, as usual, not for the alleged sex offender, but for the podcaster. Harry was, said the tabloids, “petulant” for not attending and you can imagine how that conversation went down in Montecito: they’re your family, you go. Faced with the prospect of sitting in a draughty hall full of sour-faced ghouls, one sympathises with Harry’s choice to stop at home.
One result of all this, oddly, is a surge in affection for Prince Edward, once the absolute runt of the litter but who, relative to the others these days, appears to be almost heroically blameless.
Wednesday
A man comes to fit the new dishwasher after many weeks of delay, and it triggers disproportionate stress on my part. I don’t know what this is. I’m not indecisive. I have a high tolerance for pressure. But home improvements undo me, in particular when there’s heavy lifting involved, plus electronics, and the potential for flooding. He’s come up from Coney Island and, three hours in, hasn’t managed to uninstall the old one. I hide in my room, pacing. There’s drilling. Then scraping. Then a terrible sound of something heavy being dragged across a floor.
The only thing that soothes me, apart from popping upstairs to my neighbour who has Valium, is to talk it out – and I have been talking about it a lot, lately. In a brief lull between construction sounds, I call a friend. “Do you have a moment?” I whisper.
There’s a nervous pause. I guess I’ve been overdoing it. “Is this about the dishwasher?” she says.
Thursday
Rebel Wilson, whose appearance two weeks ago at the Baftas seemed, quaintly, like the worst thing that could happen at an awards do, is selling her house in Sydney. (If you missed her opening act, Wilson told jokes about weight loss, JK Rowling, and Will Smith’s open marriage, which the New York Post summarised with the headline, “Just Not Funny”.) Clapping in the audience was the faint smatter you used to hear during the In Memoriam section for dead sound technicians no one had heard of.
Anyway, she’s selling her house on Instagram and it’s the most likable thing she’s done for a while. She’s even had a stab at the estate agent’s pitch. The elevator, she notes, is something that goes “up and down” while showing a view of the water. The location is a “brilliant street and suburb”, while the property itself has undergone a “meticulous renovation”. She refers interested parties with at least AU$9m to spend to her estate agent who, one hopes, given her 10 million followers and degree of hustle, is giving her a deal on commission.
Friday
A return of that old favourite, the PC Gone Mad panic, a rich seam in the ’90s and back, thanks to a pub in Devon rebranding ploughman’s lunch as ploughperson’s. Woke ham and cheese, then cancel culture came for the celery, everyone knows their proscribed rolls here (sorry). Landlords of the pub, the Tor, are either publicity geniuses, breathing new life into a clapped-out old genre or, more probably, have blindly stumbled into a minefield. In the best tradition of this kind of story, it turns out they rebranded the menu item two years ago and it only just come to light on social media. It was, they said sadly this week, “a lighthearted gesture and nod to our local farming community of men and women. We never intended to cause offence.”
As a friend points out, the real story about ploughman’s lunch has been missed for generations, which is the out-of-whack ratio of bread to cheese. In the case of Marmite or butter, one person’s bread-to-spread quotient is another’s red flag for psychopathy. Fine. But, in this hyper-polarised times, can we all agree on this one universal: in any lunch plate where you’re left with a hunk of unmitigated cheddar, something has gone savagely wrong.
