.png)
1 week ago
12
Monday
Ideally, for diary purposes, it would be today, but we cannot allow simple chronological misfortune to allow yesterday to go unmarked. For 6 April 1990 was the day that married women became recognised by HMRC as beings – get this! – independent from their husbands, and started having their incomes taxed separately from their spouses’. Of course, many said the rot would set in and it’s true that just a few short years later rape in marriage became a crime, as people started to think that maybe wives’ bodies as well as their earnings were their own and things briefly started looking up all round.
The feminist story has, gosh, had its ups and down since, but I think it’s important to remember and celebrate the wins. Otherwise, you know, you might just lie down and cry instead.
Tuesday
Dire wolves are back, baby! And to answer your first question – no, apparently they weren’t just an invention of Game of Thrones but a real thing that became extinct 10,000 years ago. And now they are not. Sort of. The peerlessly excellently named company Colossal Biosciences Inc extracted dire wolf DNA from fossilised remains, whacked it into some grey wolf cells (stop me if I’m getting too technical) and, hey presto, three extremely muscular pups were born and are now being held at a secret 800-hectare (2,000-acre) facility in the northern US while someone, I guess, works out why they did this and what should happen next.
Of course a lot of experts claiming to know better than me and the good people of Colossal Biosciences about whacking fossilised DNA into living cells are saying that they are just slightly odd wolves and the headlines are ridiculous hype. All I know is they have nothing to do with a trade war with China and do not require me to try to understand tariffs, which seem a lot more complicated than DNA, and so I say dire wolves are back, it must be dragons next and let’s go!
Wednesday
Say what you like about Donald Trump but when he’s right, he’s right. Today he signed an executive order to “end the Obama-Biden war on water pressure” and “make America’s showers great again”. Apparently he has long been frustrated by the low pressure that makes it hard for him to wash his “beautiful hair”, and has always blamed it on federal water conservation standards.
I am on a book tour and staying in a variety of hotels around the country, so am currently prepared to support the leader of any movement towards the standardisation of showers at all. How are there so many ways to get water out of a tube and perforated overhead thingy and so many, many ways to adjust the temperature? And why are all of them baffling, non-instinctive and indecipherable without your glasses on, which you do not have, because you were – foolishly, it turns out – hoping to have a shower?
No, fair play to Trump. Global trade war or no global trade war – this is what the people want.
Thursday
You’ll never believe what I did today. Travelling from Edinburgh to London, I asked the train manager how much it cost to upgrade to first class and when I found out it was £45, I did it.
It was a heady joy. Not just the new, full complement of luxuriously padded seat but the feeling of striking out into new territory, of staking a claim to country untraversed by any Mangan before her. We don’t spend money unnecessarily, you see. And by “unnecessarily” I mean “on improving, making more comfortable or slightly less painful anything that can be endured without death as the most likely outcome”. We don’t get taxis. We don’t buy clothes until the previous ones fall apart. Ditto furniture. We lead uncomfortable, aesthetically displeasing lives because it is immoral to spend money on anything that might lead to happiness.
Around about Berwick, as I bit into my complimentary bacon butty, washed it down with a free coffee, stretched my legs across the copious space allocated to me and sighed with delight as the blood flowed freely through my veins again, I uncoupled myself from this thinking. From now on, it’s the sybaritic life for me.
Friday
Easter is nearly here, which is great, because Easter is the best. It’s in spring, when all the green shoots, daffodils, lambs and general suffusion of the air with life and hope can bestir even the most inert spirits to rise and take interest in existence again. It’s warm but not too warm. There’s chocolate in egg form, which is simply the best and tastiest way to eat chocolate. The school holiday is long enough to allow for some actual relaxation (unlike the skid to a halt and then immediate cranking back up that is stupid, stupid half-term) but short enough not to allow boredom and desperation to take over (summer holidays, which we haven’t needed since the last school-aged child stooked his last stook on the last family farm, I’m looking at you). And it doesn’t require frantic present-buying, turkey-cooking or attendance at a fireworks display. It is a calm, manageable holiday and I thank both Jesus and our pagan forefathers for this welcome, welcome gift.
