Monday

It’s been a good few days for 15-year-olds. First we had Alex Mann wowing Glastonbury as he rapped on stage with Dave. Then we had Coco Gauff defeating Venus Williams, a winner of seven grand slam titles, in the first round of Wimbledon. I’m slightly in awe but can’t help wondering where they developed the talent, the confidence and the determination. When I was their age I hadn’t a clue about anything very much and could barely look other people in they eye when talking to them. Even now as a 62-year old, I still experience my life as some kind of terrifying adventure for which I have been given no instruction manual. I can remember bringing my daughter home from hospital for the first time and thinking: I’m not ready for this as I really don’t have a clue what I’m supposed to be doing. It’s still a mystery to me that she and her brother have somehow grown up into the sort of adults I would like to have been. My career has followed a similar trajectory. Nothing about it has ever been planned, rather it’s been a survival regime to get me to the end of the day more or less intact, predicated on saying yes to every opportunity that has come my way. There are still many days when I struggle to get out of bed with anxiety. I’m writing this on my laptop holed up in my bedroom as nowhere else feels quite as safe today. With all due respect to Alex and Coco, there’s sometimes something to be said for getting your disappointments in early.

Tuesday

Some days the news values feel all wrong. A man stows away in the wheel arch of a Kenya Airways plane, freezes to death during the flight from Nairobi and, when the wheels are retracted, falls 3,500ft into someone’s back garden in south-west London. You’d have thought the story here was who exactly was the stowaway – he is as yet unnamed – and why was he so desperate to escape Kenya that he embarked on a journey he must have known there was a high probability he wouldn’t survive. And yet the way the story was reported by most newspapers in the UK, the main issue was the distress caused to the person into whose garden the man had fallen. For it wasn’t just any garden. It was the garden of a house worth more than £2m and its owner, who had so thoughtlessly had his sunbathing interrupted, was an Oxford graduate. And as we all know, Oxford graduates are much more sensitive than other mortals and find it much harder to cope with having their paving slabs broken by a desperate man frozen into a block of ice. The message to all other stowaways is clear: if you’re going to be inconsiderate enough to die in transit, at least have the grace to fall out over the Thames where there’s a chance your body may never be found. But failing that, fall out somewhere where house prices are lower and you’re less likely to disturb Oxford graduates.

Wednesday

My new summer tactic of not watching sporting events on TV in order to enhance England’s chances would be working better if I could stick to it. I managed to miss most of the Women’s World Cup semi-final against the USA by going to hear my sister play in her first big band concert since taking up the trumpet 18 months ago. So far, so good. I got home just after England had been awarded a penalty but before it had been taken. You know what happened next. Don’t blame Steph Houghton, blame me. I knew she was going to miss from the moment she stood over the ball. Years of experience, years of heartbreak. I’m doing rather better with the cricket. With England poised to go out of the World Cup, I avoided the match against India by first hanging out with my children in Brighton and then going to a stunning performance of Massenet’s opera Cendrillon. For what was effectively a quarter-final against New Zealand, I merely had the TV on mute in the background at work and only kept a partial eye on proceedings. As a result, England are now in the semi-finals. If I make a point of missing the next two games, England are sure to win the whole thing. Best not to watch Andy Murray and Serena Williams too. Instead I shall try to sound knowledgeable about why Tanguy Ndombele – a player neither I nor almost anyone else had ever heard of until six months ago – is the “complete midfielder” and well worth the club-record £55m that Spurs have spent on him.

Thursday

After another week close to the Tory leadership hustings and seeing the UK’s new MEPs arriving at the EU parliament in Strasbourg, I feel increasingly degraded and toxified by British politics. Almost every day we seem to hit a new low. Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt care only for the votes of 160,000 party members and are locked in a death spiral to prove who is clinically insane enough to lead the Conservatives. Both are promising to spend billions the country doesn’t have to counter the effects of a no-deal Brexit that almost nobody wants. Boris literally doesn’t have a plan while Hunt has turned into an Action Man Colonel Kurtz with a 10-point plan that centres on declaring war on the EU and giving it three weeks to surrender. It’s hard to know which is worse. Meanwhile, Boris also wants to make the country as fat as possible by getting rid of the sugar tax and Jezza loves the smell of napalm on foxes in the morning. Next up, the return of public hangings and transportation. Things are no better in Strasbourg where first the new Brexit party MEPs embarrassed themselves and the country by turning their backs on an orchestra and singer performing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy – a protest described by the clueless Claire Fox as “mild”, despite it evoking the Nazis in the Reichstag. Nor did the Lib Dems exactly cover themselves in glory with their “Bollocks to Brexit” T-shirts. Then we get Ann Widdecombe, the Brexit party’s pantomime dame, whose most notable contribution as a Tory MP was to ensure pregnant prisoners attended hospital appointments in chains, using her maiden speech to compare membership of the EU to slavery and fail to understand that the European parliament had a right to ratify selections for the top jobs. The UK is now the laughing stock of Europe. An object lesson in becoming a failed state. We are being governed by the new idiocracy.

Friday

Some recovery from the dehumanising effects of the Tory leadership contest and Ann Widdecombe in the form of Arthur Smith’s new show Syd at the Soho Theatre in London. Here were words – and music, provided by the pianist and singer Kirsty Newton – for the soul. Smith is not just a master of the laugh-out-loud, deadpan gag. As he’s got older he’s allowed a vulnerability into his act, and Syd is a touching tribute to his late father, a policeman whose reputation for preferring, whenever possible, not to arrest people on his south London beat earned him the nickname of “The Poet” from his colleagues. There were so many high points – who could ever resist Smith growling along to Leonard Cohen songs? – but what stayed with me longest was the section in which he switched between his father’s life as a young man and his own. While Smith was getting charged by the French riot police in Paris when taking part in a student protest he knew nothing about, Syd was watching his fellow soldiers get machine-gunned at El Alamein before being captured and made a prisoner of war. He eventually ended up in Colditz. I’ve often felt the same about my father, who spent the entire war in the navy, getting sunk twice and seeing horrors from which he never fully recovered. All I could manage between the ages of 18 and 24 was to get two degrees and become a heroin addict. No comparison really. I wasn’t the only person to leave the show in tears. Syd is only an hour long and is on for a couple more weeks before relocating to Edinburgh for August. Do go. You will come out feeling better about the world. For a short while at least.

Digested week, digested: The Tory hustings: the Unspeakable in pursuit of the votes of the Untreatable.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photo of the week (1): ‘And the best thing is you get paid a shed load of cash for being a complete twat.’ Photograph: Patrick Seeger/EPA