Monday
Donald Trump has suggested that the war with Iran will be over in two to three weeks. The rest of the world just shrugs. We’ll believe it when we see it. The US president has said so many contradictory things over the past few weeks, it’s hard to take anything that seriously.
A few days ago he was promising to obliterate Iran’s energy supplies. He’s also claimed to have already won the war several times, though for some reason he still feels the needs to go back and win some more. Almost as if he hadn’t actually won in the first place.
Or maybe by “winning” he’s referring to the financial bets on the oil and arms markets that seem to have done very well for close friends of Trump and Pete Hegseth. Every cloud and all that.
Here in the UK, you can sense the panic in government at what might happen if oil and gas prices continue to rise. It would make more sense for Keir Starmer to level with the country. To say he has little or no control over the price of energy, that the world is in effect being held to ransom by the US and that it’s just our bad luck we are all being made to pay a Trump Tax. The price we have to pay for the American people having voted an unstable, childlike sociopath into the White House.
At the very least, the UK should acknowledge that the “special relationship” is dead in the water. At least until the US has a new president. Instead, we have to listen to Trump continually rubbishing the contribution of British forces while Starmer is making the king go on a state visit to Washington later this month. It’s not often I feel sorry for Charles, but he must be dreading it.
Tuesday
The showbiz industry magazine Variety reports that Sony Pictures Television is trying to get a show off the ground about the Jeffrey Epstein case.
The series is based on the book Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story, written by the Miami Herald journalist Julie K Brown, who led a years-long investigation into the convicted sex offender and helped persuade some victims to go on the record.
It will come as no surprise that the role of Brown has already been cast, with Laura Dern taking the lead. But as of yet, the character of Epstein himself remains unfilled. I guess it’s a lot tougher to persuade an actor to play one of the most notorious offenders in American history. It’s not exactly the dream job for most actors. Unless your haven’t had much work recently, or are fed up with playing Mr Nice Guy.
That said, maybe some actors will take it as a career challenge to play someone who is universally despised. After all, Martin Clunes – fed up with a lifetime of playing characters based on Martin Clunes – recently took on the role of Huw Edwards. I’ve no idea if the show was any good. I made a conscious choice that I could live without a programme about a newsreader grooming a young man.
Wednesday
After weeks of delay, the Artemis II rocket finally took off from Florida with its crew of four astronauts – or, if you’re Donald Trump, three American heroes and one Canadian, whom we can all ignore – on its 10-day journey around the moon.
You get the feeling that most people are relatively indifferent to the mission these days. Can’t see the point in going back to the moon more than 50 years after the last Apollo mission landed there.
Even back in 1972 there was a sense that the American public were getting bored with the lunar landings. The round-the-clock coverage of the Apollo XI landing had been downgraded to the occasional footage on the news bulletins come Apollo XVII. But I’m thrilled by Artemis II. It fills me with wonder and hope. That there are still worlds out there to be explored.
It also takes me back to being a child, when I used to keep scrapbooks of every Gemini and Apollo mission and cut out photos and news reports that I logged meticulously.
I felt I was living in a world of possibilities, even if they were out of my reach. The space flights kept on coming, often within months of one another, each one more ambitious than the last. For a few years, it felt as if it would always be this way. I can clearly remember watching the first lunar landing with my dad on TV and thinking nothing would ever be quite the same again. It was a warm, clear evening and my dad took me outside into the garden, where we both stared at the moon for about a quarter of an hour.
After a while, 12-year-old me became convinced that I could see the lunar module on the moon’s surface. My dad didn’t miss a beat. Checking that we were both looking in the same place, he said: “I think you may be right.” For that alone, I couldn’t love him more.
Thursday
It inevitably ended in tears. After just seven games in charge, Igor Tudor has been sacked as manager of Spurs. His track record of lost five, won one, drawn one was one I’m fairly sure I could have equalled if I had been in charge.
Let’s face it, it would have been hard to do much worse. And I’d like to think my interpersonal skills would have been an improvement on telling everyone they were useless and needed to grow a pair. Now, Tudor may have had a point, but trashing people isn’t generally the way to get the best out of them. So now Spurs find themselves one point off the relegation places and with just seven games to scrape together enough points to stay in the Premier League.
Finding a new manager who wants to take over a basket case who may well find themselves in the Championship next season can’t have been easy, so you can hardly blame Roberto de Zerbi for having negotiated himself a five-year contract. The chances of him lasting that long are nil. He might not even make it to September if Spurs are relegated.
Friday
The White House continues to pump out nonsense. This week it declared that there was universal support for the war in America. This will come as news to my daughter, Anna, and her husband, Robert, in Minneapolis – and millions of others who took part in the No Kings protests around the US last Saturday.
For Robert, last weekend was at least partial redemption. Earlier in the year, he had a ticket to see Rage Against the Machine and Anna told him he had to leave early to meet her at an anti-ICE demonstration. So he did, only to find he had missed a guest appearance from Bruce Springsteen. He was gutted. But on Saturday, Bruce was back in the city – along with Bernie Sanders and Jane Fonda – to play Streets of Minneapolis to a crowd of 200,000-plus. Good things come to those who wait. Including me. Anna is now back in the UK for a week for my wife’s birthday. It’s as if she’s never been away.