Monday

The separation of church and state is taken very seriously in the US, nowhere more so than in the public school system, where tussles over Easter-Passover are still being felt this week after kids returned home from school last Thursday bearing decorated eggs and bunnies. “Surely it’s pagan not Christian?” I said naively to a friend, who was in high dudgeon over the promotion of Christianity over Judaism as she prepared for her annual Passover pilgrimage to a beach in Miami. “That’s bullshit,” she said. “It’s to do with Easter and they know it.”

Meanwhile, grumbles from across the Judeo-Christian spectrum that too many other groups are being given public holidays, after the schools in New York shut for Chinese Lunar New Year in February. This did not, as intended by the mayor, Bill de Blasio, seem to usher in a warm spirit of multicultural understanding, instead triggering in non-Chinese parents scrambling for childcare a lot of grumpy “where does it end-ism?” What next, a day off for the Bahá’ís? The Jains? If Scientology is a religion, why don’t they get a day? You get the idea. And then in come the Christians with their bunnies and eggs, slyly trying to undermine the US constitution. It can only be a matter of time before Fox News catches wind of all this and starts to crank up its coverage of the war against Easter.

Tuesday

I have new health insurance, which as tends to happen in the US in these circumstances, means changing all my doctors. (I say “all”; I persist in the stubborn British belief that unless bits of my body are actually falling off, I don’t need a doctor at all.) My children on the other hand need routine immunisations and so we go to a fancy doctor a block from Central Park. I have heard good things about her, but also a report from a friend that when her three-year-old picked up a surgical glove in the consulting room and inflated it to look like a cow’s udder, the doctor was blatantly unamused. You might think this irrelevant, but in the competitive marketplace of New York paediatricians it constitutes a serious failure of salesmanship and my friend duly changed doctors. I would have stayed with our existing paediatrician until the end of time, were it not for the fact that, insurance issues aside, after my children’s flu jab this year he put a plaster on each child’s arm that, in both cases, was fully three inches from where the needle went in and I got the distinct impression he was short-sighted and hiding it. Even my British lassitude in the face of indifferent service has limits. That’s it, we’re out.

Wednesday

The gift that keeps giving, and may yet continue to give, is, of course, everything implied by the sentence “Sean Penn’s debut novel”. You are perhaps familiar with Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, but in case not, here is a sample of the actor’s prose: “There is pride to be had where the prejudicial is practiced with precision in the trenchant triage of tactile terminations.” In an intermittently respectful review in the New York Times, the reviewer wondered whether Penn’s novel could be described as a “furious, despairing takedown of America as the country battles its own worst instincts?” No.

Thursday

Mark Zuckerberg says he won’t back down or resign for his failure to stop the massive data breach at Facebook. There is human drama in this story, in which most of us have a stake, and yet as I read the headlines about the possibility that 87 million people’s data has been scraped, as opposed to the previous estimate of 50 million, it is hard to escalate my feelings accordingly. This is a failure of imagination on my part, but I wonder if “Cambridge Analytica” or the term “data breach” itself will come to have the effect on people that stories leading on “global warming” or “BAE systems” have had over the years; that is, a dim sense of outrage under attack from a much more powerful urge to turn the page and read about something more interesting instead. I’m reminded of John Oliver’s encounter with Edward Snowden a few years ago, when to Snowden’s obvious dismay, Oliver told him the only way to engage the American public with the complex and often very dry issues behind government surveillance, was to frame it with the question: “If I send someone a picture of my dick, can the government see it?” The Cambridge Analytica story may need a similar appendage.

Friday

Things I had forgotten about until I had children: weeing in car parks; conjunctivitis; the stress of children’s party games; the taste of jelly. The party games thing is particularly tricky, since we seem to have another party every weekend. I read endless pieces about the dangers of making one’s children conform to socialised standards, and then I watch my kids, born two minutes apart, and am struck again by how these things come preloaded. One child instinctively throws herself into the fray. The other, happy to play during free time, darkens at the first whiff of organised fun and retreats, scowling, to watch from the sidelines. My own socialisation compels me to chivvy her to join in, when in fact sideline scowling – be it on the edge of the dodgeball game, the Facebook feed, or the super-fun egg hunt in the park – is where my true people lie.

Digest week, digested: Happy Springterval.