Monday
Where to start in a week so fraught with major events you could hardly draw breath for the news flashes? It started with Trump’s alleged contribution to Jeffrey Epstein’s “birthday book,” shared by the Democrats on social media on Monday and leading to the discovery of a name not widely recognised in the US but of intense interest in the UK – Peter Mandelson. The British ambassador to the US had proffered an undiplomatically warm birthday message to the late child sex offender financier, starting a press scramble that ended, on Thursday, with Keir Starmer firing him.
That was just the beginning. As Russian drones entered Polish airspace and were shot down by Nato jets, forecasts of a third world war gained pace and in the US, Charlie Kirk, a rightwing political activist, was assassinated in front of a crowd in Utah. Another firing followed: at MSNBC, the analyst Matthew Dowd was swiftly booted for suggesting that Kirk, who had a history of making racist and sexist remarks, had learned the hard way that, “hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions”. On the Christian right, meanwhile, Kirk instantly rose to the status of an American martyr.
If it was a week in which America looked, once again, like an increasingly dysfunctional and unhappy place and Europe slid towards darker days, it was left to Australia to cheer us, which it did with – what else? – the discovery of a new marsupial: a tiny, previously unknown relative of the kangaroo, a sort of mouse-wallaby hybrid species of “bettong”, identified by its fossil remains because, in keeping with the general state of the world and because we can’t have nice things, it turns out it is already extinct.
Tuesday
Also extinct (almost): that species of lovable eccentric billionaire who stays out of politics and spends his cash on decommissioned Soviet fighter jets and a luxury car collection. In other words, Larry Ellison, the 90s playboy and founder of Oracle with the lustrous, tan-coloured mane to make Elon Musk weep. At the turn of the millennium Ellison was the world’s richest man, long since eclipsed by the likes of Musk and Jeff Bezos, but like all things from the 90s he’s back with a vengeance and this week, after Oracle’s stock price soared, once again took the top spot.
Per the business pages, Oracle’s shares soared owing to a “rosy outlook for [the company’s] cloud infrastructure business and AI deals”. I’m more interested in revisiting the greatest hits of a billionaire whose biographer, Mike Wilson, once described as “a one-man amusement park, Larryland.” To wit: Ellison flying his Marchetti S.211 fighter plane in mock dog fights over the Pacific with his son, David; winning the Sydney to Hobart yacht race in 1998 with a young Lachlan Murdoch onboard; and my favourite Ellison flourish, what was said to be his favourite chat-up line of the 90s – “Can I buy you a car?”
‘This job would be fantastic if it was like this all the time.’ Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA
Wednesday
More news from Australia that is almost as charming as a marsupial: Russell Crowe (I know, he’s originally from New Zealand), gussied up in a Nazi uniform and gone the full Brando in the trailer for Nuremberg. Crowe plays Hermann Göring, who at the time of his capture apparently weighed 280 pounds and was described by an allied soldier who witnessed it as a “huge bulk”, an acting challenge to which Crowe appears to have magnificently risen. The forthcoming movie co-stars Rami Malek, Michael Shannon and Leo Woodall, but clearly this is Rusty’s picture. His German accent – “I vill have, as you say, my day I court” – is worth the ticket price alone and appears to be a combo of ‘Allo ‘Allo!’s Gestapo corps and, as Crowe once said of his accent in Gladiator, “Royal Shakespeare Company three pints after lunch.” Bravo!
Thursday
The huge bulk of Emily’s saggy old cat, Bagpuss, is coming back in a new film to make gen X cry. For those not born in the 20th century, Bagpuss was an old cloth cat with pink stripes and piercing blue eyes, who lived in a shop for lost and found items with his friends Professor Yaffle, Madeleine the doll and the mice on the mouse organ (“Heave! Heave!). News of the reboot this week sent me straight to YouTube to watch the opening sequence of Oliver Postgate’s TV show, broadcast in the mid- to late-70s on repeat and almost unbearably poignant, not least because it’s narrated in an accent that no longer exists.
Bagpuss (“The most important, the most beautiful, the most magical, saggy old cloth cat in the whole wide world”) is embedded in the earliest TV memories of those of us who were kids at the time and, having a moment at my screen, I called over my 10-year-old to share in the magic. She watched for 20 seconds, said, “Boring!”, patted me sympathetically on the arm and walked off. “Baggy and a bit loose at the seams,” I murmured in unison with Postgate, “but Emily loved him.”
Friday
Prince Harry met the king in London this week after an apparent estrangement of 19 months and, according to those monitoring the arrival and departure of the prince’s car, the audience lasted 54 minutes. But that’s a generous interpretation of the actual face time involved in the “private tea”, which, allowing for entrance and egress through Clarence House, settling in and waiting time, surely came out closer to half an hour. Did Harry whip out his phone and show his father photos of the two grandchildren he’s spent almost no time with? Did the king ask about Meghan? Was it all about money? Was there ever a more pitiful sight than, generation after generation, the royal family’s cold and strained filial relations?
