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Watching Keir Starmer with President Trump in Washington last week was a bit like watching an indulgent grandparent deal with a miscreant child. When the prime minister produced his invitation from King Charles – “This is unprecedented!” he said delightedly, of what will be Don’s second state visit to the UK – I half expected him to follow up with a Lego model of the White House, or a special Trump Pez dispenser and a year’s supply of cola-flavoured sweets for it.
Alas, I’m unable to be equally scornful of Elon Musk’s edict to federal employees that they tell him in an email of five things they accomplished in the last week. Oh yes, it’s silly. Who’ll look through these, and how will they check the enclosed bullet points aren’t the work of the office satirist? But as a compulsive list-maker myself, my outrage is on the muted side. Sheepishly, I shuffle my notebooks, their closely written pages so replete with determination, wild ambition and pathos, I come off like some tragic hybrid of Adrian Mole and Martha Stewart.
Oh, the striving. In terms of immediate action, I have three lists on the go at any one time: to do today; to do this week; to do at some point soon. But this is as nothing compared with my future achievement lists, of which I have dozens in play. These are floaty and nebulous, their headings along the lines of “ideas”, “thoughts” or (how embarrassing) “composers I should get into”. The most shaming of them is “things I want” (a painting by Ivon Hitchens or, failing that, a little bit of Chanel).
As for year end lists, they take many guises, from praise (what did I do that anyone liked?) to all the new novels I read (old novels don’t count). Protestant autodidact that I am, I simply cannot function without lists: several days ago, this column began as one – “poss items for Notebook” – and when it’s complete, it’ll be crossed off yet another.
The gas man cometh
Living for three weeks without a boiler in a cold snap is an exercise in gratitude as well as stoicism. When the man from British Gas finally arrives to save us, I forgive him even when he accidentally smashes a favourite vase. I could kiss our fiercely hot radiators now, and may yet build some kind of household shrine in their honour.
During this period of refrigeration, my fingers and toes began to burn and itch, which confused me at first. Perhaps our Captain Oates jokes were about to stop being funny. (“I’m just going outside, I may be some time,” we would say, on leaving the only heated room.)
But then I remembered: I’d been here before as a teenager. Kids, it was colder then, and our parents were more stingy with the thermostat. I had chilblains, a paradoxical Dickensian ailment that only becomes the more agonising when your extremities begin to warm up.
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Face values
To the National Portrait Gallery for an exhibition celebrating The Face magazine, which makes me mournful. Many of the faces on the walls – fashion designer Alexander McQueen, singer Steve Strange – are dead now, and while a few young people are milling around, blithely taking photos of photos, mostly the crowd is grey-haired and wearing trainers chosen for comfort rather than hipness.
I used to work with the late stylist Isabella Blow, and it’s always slightly guilt-inducing to stumble on her work. Back then, I was obsessed with her expenses, believing them to be bigger than my salary (I may not have been wrong). But here’s a dazzling photograph (Taste of Arsenic) by Sean Ellis that she helped to conjure. It pushes all thoughts of taxi receipts clean from my mind.
Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
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