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11 hours ago
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Monday
As I read the headlines about Europe on fire, and imagine – or is it true? – I can smell smoke from the Suffolk wildfire encroaching on a nuclear power facility a county away from me, I’m remembering the wisdom of a friend who told me years ago that she wasn’t aiming to buy a house but a helicopter. “Because,” said Sarah, gesturing around us, “it’s going to be no good trying to get across flood waters or dusty plains or great drifts of virus-ridden corpses. You’re going to need to go up.”
However. I have noticed a trend emerging among the true oracles, the true bellwethers of society – our lady film stars. The likes of Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Garner are all taking up not with fellow stars but financiers – usually tech financiers – who are the very richest of the rich. And you know what this means. It means they do not have just helicopter money (even a lady film star has helicopter money) – they have bunker money.
The parameters have subtly shifted. The dream is not lifelong luxury in a mansion or two. It is survival in subterranean safety with whoever can fund it. I now have to decide between buying a helicopter or marrying a bunkerman. I hope I haven’t left it too late.
Tuesday
The sex toy retailer Pulse & Cocktails has taken over Little Chef. This is an unhappy sentence. But it is, alas, true. Or rather, it is true that Pulse & Cocktails has taken over the service station chain’s former venues to allow its customers more privacy.
I have many questions. One: have drivers to Kettering never heard of the internet? Two: is selling roadside gimp masks really more profitable than hash browns and American-style pancakes? Am I so detached from the national appetite? And, most importantly, three: what is going on with this name? Pulse & Cocktails? It’s terrible. Rhythmically awful and in its evocations, worse. “Pulse” suggests checking for one and unless this is a terrifically niche roadside sex shop (and again, I would point you to the financial viability issue with which we are already struggling in an interwebbed world), is not a fabulously sexy opener. And “cocktails” is meh.
Or it suggests you are throwing one in the face of the unresponsive body upon which you, for reasons best known to yourself, have designs. Or am I missing a pun? There should surely be a pun here. And no, the first syllable of “cocktails” is not enough. Answers, of a semantic nature only, on a postcard to the usual address please.
Wednesday
Train drivers are considering strike action over a lack of loo facilities. Now look. Up the working man and all that, but let’s extend that.
I am travelling by train a lot at the moment and I think it’s time customers got a turn. What is the equivalent of customers striking until we get not just working toilets but – and this is a vital detail – guaranteed working toilets?
As someone who needs to wee about every 12 minutes, each time I step on to a train, I also step into a vortex of anxiety and unknowns. And do you know what anxiety isn’t good for? Yes, exactly.
We can’t withhold our journeys – we need to get to places. We can’t withhold our fares because we’d get very arrested and still not get to our places. I’m on the verge of suggesting just protest-weeing where you sit if there isn’t a working convenience conveniently close by, but I think I’m edging too near niche Little Chef territory again, so we’ll stop here.
Thursday
A hiker in Montana’s Beartooth Mountains made a 10-mile, six-hour descent after being impaled through the chest by his walking pole, rather than call out the medical rescue team. “I’m pretty confident this is outside my chest wall,” 32-year-old David Cifaldi told the two friends he was crossing the Froze-to-Death Plateau (no, really) with on the way to Granite Peak of the 44in metal stick piercing his torso.
Now, Cifaldi is a nurse but “I’m pretty confident this 44in metal stick that entered under my left arm and came out of my back isn’t going to move and kill me so let’s tra-la-la down this ice-covered mountain to save everyone’s time and resources” is still a ballsy move. If this guy’s got bunker money too, I think he could be The One.
Friday
This week I have spent a lovely afternoon playing with and kissing the delectable face off a friend’s baby, picked nearly seven homegrown tomatoes from my garden and defrosted the fridge. Am I … Am I a tradwife now? On the one hand, I have quite enjoyed myself. On the other, I don’t believe in God, am too short for prairie dresses, and when I bake I kill people.
Tradwives obsess me. The convolutions of the thought processes involved. Celebrating traditional domesticity while monetising every moment of it in the most modern way possible. Doting on a brood of children who are being raised the old-fashioned way while being paraded on the internet.
Selling a vision of effortless ease and fulfilment while keeping a schedule that periodically puts you in bed with exhaustion (as the leader of the tradwife pack Hannah Neeleman once mentioned).
Ostentatiously deferring to your husband while building an empire that rests entirely on your work, talents and looks and would disappear overnight without you. Amazing. Women – not for the first time, I feel we really need to get together and talk about a few things.
Digested week in pictures
