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Monday
It’s the Met Gala in New York on Monday and as photos stream out from the red carpet, the people I find myself thinking about most are three prominent holdouts. The annual ball, which raises money for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum, has always summoned a strong turnout from the have-your-cake-and-eat-it community, notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a few years ago in her “tax-the-rich” dress. This year, that role was assumed by the actor Sarah Paulson, who wore a dollar bill covering her eyes in apparent reference to the “blindness” of the 1%, a protest she undertook while nobly taking one for the team by refusing to sit out the $100,000-a-head event.
Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, declined his invitation, unlike many mayors before him (Bill De Blasio – thrilled to be there; Eric Adams – couldn’t beetle up that red carpet fast enough). On the night, while the Kardashians and other influencers enjoyed the spotlight, Mamdani posted on the mayor’s official social media feed to pay tribute to “the garment, retail, and warehouse workers who keep the industry running”. The actor Zendaya also declined to attend, for work reasons she said. And there was criticism of the gala from the actor Taraji P Henson, who posted: “I am so confused by some ppl that are going. I am just like WTF ARE WE DOING?”
What indeed. This year’s guests, most of whom can be found at other times expatiating at length about one admirable cause or another, had no particular problem showing up to an event sponsored for the first time this year by Jeff Bezos. Per the gala’s mission, art must be celebrated – even as it provides a laundering service for billionaire supporters of the unhinged American president, who, among other things, has slashed funding to the National Endowment for the Arts. Still, the costumes were lovely.
Tuesday
You may recall President Obama breaking into Amazing Grace at a church in Charleston in 2015; an amazing political and human moment. By way of a follow-up and in a moment of bathos quite apt for the times, here’s Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, going the full Charles Aznavour this week by singing La Boheme at a state dinner in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, while Nikol Pashinyan, the Armenian prime minister, accompanies him on drums.
I’m a sucker for this kind of political theatre – up to and including, I’m ashamed to say, Donald Trump at the wheel of that big truck in 2017 and Tony Blair playing football. However staged these photo ops, they entail a small amount of vulnerability on the part of the politician and I’m always clenched for the gesture to fall flat. (The exception to this sensitivity of mine is Boris Johnson, whom it’s impossible to shame or embarrass and whose enthusiasms – remember the carry on about buses? – seem entirely made up).
Anyway, in Armenia this week, after the Aznavour classic, Macron performed a number by Yves Montan. What the French president – whose poll ratings in France make him even more unpopular than Keir Starmer in Britain – lacked in singing ability he made up for in sheepish grins and a facial expression beseeching us to give him a break, he’s really trying.
Wednesday
A lucrative rollout by one of this country’s strongest brands – its posh boarding schools – suffered a setback this week as news came in from Long Island that Harrow international school, which opened last September on a 170-acre campus in Greater New York, is slashing its fees in response to small pupil numbers. At present, the 20 children enrolled in the school are outnumbered by 23 teachers, to which end the $61,700 annual fees have been dropped for the next academic year to $50,544. This is a bargain by New York standards, where top schools in the city such as Dalton or Trinity charge almost $70,000 a year and fill every seat, with a wait list.
The difficulty, clearly, has been in convincing American parents that Harrow proper, the outer London school founded in the 16th century and alma mater to seven prime ministers, is the same in spirit as Harrow Long Island, founded in 2025 and now advertising aggressively on NPR for pupils (the very idea!). A word to the school’s British overseers: accent and history will take you only so far with this crowd before you trigger intense, who-do-you-take-me-for resistance and the stirring of ancient memories strongly connected to July 4th.
Thursday
An antidote to everything: Michael Frayn talking to Radio 4 on Thursday, a lovely 40-minute listen you can find on playback on BBC Sounds. At 92, he is retired from writing after “a seven-decade career”, as the interviewer somewhat gulpingly puts it, and still very much Michael Frayn.
Highlights include the story behind the writing of his novel Spies, which was based on Frayn’s childhood friendship with a boy who had a bullying father. While writing the novel, said Frayn, he had been worried his long-lost friend would read the book and be offended, until, by coincidence, a letter came in from him, asking if Frayn remembered their friendship, and reminding him he was the little boy “with the terrible father”.
Then there are Frayn’s translations of Chekhov (a crowded field, he said: “there can’t be many citizens who haven’t translated Chekhov”), which sought to correct the oversight that Chekhov wasn’t “a funny writer.”
And his memory of writing Towards the End of the Morning, his novel of Fleet Street, in which the central character, John Dyson, was based on the then leader page editor of the Observer, “a rather extravagant man” who would tell him on filing: “Oh, Michael, you write like a darling!” and who never recognised himself in the novel.
When asked if he was still writing, Frayn replied: “No. Sadly, it’s over.” But look at the riches we have!
Friday
We’re doing a bedroom makeover, which has required me to spend three straight hours disassembling two Ikea cabin beds, no second of which has been pleasant. The worst part was the sound of my naivety – surely, I thought, heading into the project, disassembly is just a case of turning the Allen keys back the other way – hitting reality in the form of the “cam lock”.
Do you know about cam locks? It’s a screw thing that you have to lie on the floor, among the dust bunnies, trying to get aligned with the arrow pointing up, so that the lock pops and you can separate the headboard from the sides. The thing won’t turn, obviously; it’s stuck. Whacking it with a hammer doesn’t do anything, nor does kicking it with your Crocs, which are too spongey to have an effect, and imploring it to move in a hissing, desperate voice just makes you feel very lonely in your task, and sad. I got there eventually, amid the sound of splintering MDF and a lot of swearing, and am now going to lie down for ever.
