Here’s a little sampling of my more personal writing.
“In this graveyard too, though the precise spot is not known - there is no ornate family grave, no headstone to read - lies Christopher Jones, a merchant sailor, who was buried in St Mary’s in 1622. A resident of Rotherhithe, Jones captained and part-owned a ship that he moored in the Thames, only a stone’s throw from St Mary’s. In 1620, Jones’s ship, an old wine vessel that had mainly seen service importing claret into England, was contracted to take 102 passengers, mostly English Dissenters, to North Virginia. Here in the shadow of St Mary’s, Christopher Jones unmoored his ship, the Mayflower, and began to sail it out towards Southampton. There he would be joined by the Dissenters whom he was to take to the other side of the world and leave them there so that they could start a new society.
Perhaps Jones struggled to understand these pious men and women. Perhaps he was threatened or bemused by their zealous belief that the parish of St Mary’s, Rotherhithe, where Jones had had his children baptized, and England, where he was to return to be with his family, were all irredemable in God’s eyes. Or perhaps he was simply happy to fulfil his contract to sail them out of the Old World and into the New, just as Henry Wilson would later sail Prince Lee Boo out of the New and into the Old.”
“First you notice, or, at least, I notice, the dogs. Twitchy, yappy, kitschy dogs in shades and cowboy hats making their way down Fifth Avenue. Most are in prams, but today’s all about one-upmanship so some poor mutts suffer even worst fates. Some terriers in a plastic, remote controlled pink Cadillac buzz past me, a small army of laughing children chasing after them. “Don’t pet them, they’re not in the mood,” shouts the owner as he simultaneously tries to steer a path through the crowd for the dogs and weave himself through the melee he’s causing. Unkindly, I think, with his yellow polyester shirt and what looks suspiciously like a toupee, that there’s something of a failed Reno cabaret act to him.”
“So on the floor of the Fresno Convention Center, along with four hundred other people, I took the naturalization oath. I swore to abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty even though I did so in the full knowledge that the diplomatic compromise of dual citizenship was allowed, and even though I was becoming American, I was still British, born and bred. I felt, as I made that oath, like a bigamist saying his second set of wedding vows in the full knowledge that his first wife was happily waiting for him at home.
And yet for all the indifference I may have felt at the ceremony, tomorrow, in casting my ballot, feels like the first act I am making solely as an American.
Americans like to talk about their nation’s exceptionalism, about its unique place in the world, and with that comes a degree of culpability; tomorrow I assume my share of that culpability. I will be part of America the beautiful, and of America the ugly. When America does things in the world that I don’t approve of, or that others don’t approve of, I can no longer play aloof, it is my government too now. A government that will have been formed in a process I, as an American, will have taken part in. This election, this fascinating, bizarrely compelling election has been viewed by me a lot in those terms, that this election - for me - ends in me being American.”
“Poor George, one week old and his life will be measured out in an endless procession of hospital openings, civic events, and all those bloody awful Royal Variety Performances. The French, by comparison, were merciful to their royalty: they just guillotined them.”
““Indulge,” Heathrow said. “Have an elderflower cordial and buy yourself a copy of Viz. Enjoy some comforts from home you normally never get to enjoy, because a few more minutes home and you’re going to start noticing how many British men have heads like soft boiled potatoes - and that’s going to make you self-conscious about your own head - and it own spuddiness - for the rest of the day.””
“Deplaning at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International you feel you have slunk back into the 1980s*. It’s the colors: the carpet in arrivals, the awnings of a juice kiosk, the clothes the snowbirds wear - all lomographically bright.
The snowbirds are down from the north escaping etiolation. “Winters here, summers up in Vermont,” one of them tells me. You see them jogging by the beach. Sometimes they’re topless, sometimes they’re in neon, and sometimes they’re jogging with a tray of cocktails. “Things are very different here than in Vermont,” he says.
*The 80s were undoubtedly the area’s pop-culture highpoint: The Golden Girls, Miami Vice, Police Academy Five. The more cynical Seattle-loving 90s were hard on the area. Sunshine was out, rain was in.”
“I live in contrarian California, that shadow state that runs parallel alongside the real California; it is a land not of good vibrations but of almond plantations, of farmers, not surfers. There is no legally drawn line that marks the boundary between real California and its shadow twin, no sign on the highway welcoming you and urging you to enjoy your stay (not that you would), but as you drive east, away from the coast and the excitement, and enter the Sacramento or San Joaquin Valley (I assume you’re just passing through on your way to Yosemite … or lost), you will viscerally feel the change.”