The view from Washington DC

I came back from the UK to the USA, from the icy cold to the icy cold. The snow and ice have been so bad here that almost everyone is working from home, events have been widely cancelled (including our planned trip around the artworks of the White House – which I hope will soon be rescheduled under the new regime), and I have barely set foot outside the front door for days, though I do confess to a couple of trips to the local cocktail bar.

The DC authorities seem excellent at getting the sidewalks clear, but the treacherous piles of snow along the kerbside make it hard to cross the road even at the designated crossings. We seventy-year-olds, as I have been since January 1, just don’t risk it. I have taken to heart the good advice offered by a jovial medic at a party a few years ago. What, he was asked, was his best medical advice for the elderly? The reply was “Don’t fall over” (or “have a fall”, as they put it when you’re my age). Falls were almost always the beginning of a slippery slope, he insisted: break something, get taken into hospital, catch a hospital infection, and the rest is history! So, I am not taking chances on the ice. Happily, a visit to the cocktail bar doesn’t involve crossing the road.

The result is that I am watching DC news on the television, even when it is taking place only a few yards from where I am living. The funeral procession of President Carter (approaching British royal scale) passed by the bottom of our street and, to judge from the footage, was all the more haunting for the wintry weather, but all we actually saw in real life were piles of left-over crowd barriers dumped near our apartment – presumably waiting to be re-used for the inauguration on the 20^th .

We shall be missing that too, for different reasons. I have a great gig in New York on the 16^th and we decided to stay on there for a few days, rather than returning to bump into crowds of jubilant Trump supporters all round our usually peaceful neck of the woods. Fair enough, they won, and I can’t object to them being jubilant, but I just don’t think I need to bump into them.

But if the news from DC has a virtual quality, that is even more true of other news from the UK and US. Listening to the headlines “out of the time zone” (hearing the midday news at breakfast, I mean) always has a slightly distancing quality. But the current war of words in Westminster (with the additions of Trump and Musk in Mar-a-Lago), weird as it is anyway, sounds even stranger from a distance. Can we really be sitting in DC hearing an incoming US President not ruling out invading Greenland? Can we really be hearing a British front-bench politician talking about some immigrants having “frankly medieval attitudes towards women”. My instant rejoinder to that was it would be equally true to say that some men (no matter where they are from) have frankly medieval attitudes towards women – but, anyway, it’s probably a total misrepresentation of the Middle Ages.

Maybe when the snow melts we will all wake up and regain our senses.

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