Monday
It is not often that one conceives and fulfils a lifetime ambition all in one morning but today I achieved this momentous feat. To wit: over breakfast I read about the great sunflower fields at Westgate Farm near Walsingham, Norfolk, which for the two weeks that the mighty blooms are in mighty bloom across its 16 acres invites people to come and pick their own for a small fee. Have you ever heard of anything better? Desire – no, need – filled me.
I demanded my husband – the driver of the family, for Walsingham is a short car trip away – abandon his desk, crowbarred my son out of bed and by 10am we were looking out over acres of sunflowers under an azure sky, and do you know what? It was even better than I had imagined. It’s just sunflowers, you see. Sunflowers almost literally as far as the eye can see. All facing the same way, because they are – get this – flowers that follow the sun.
We followed the little dusty tracks that led through the fields and wind about so that eventually you are facing the flowers and they are facing you, and the effect is so joyful and uplifting that even your family hostages begin to break into smiles.
We picked our allowance of five each and were home by lunchtime. They are now in a massive vase I was once mocked for buying but which I must have known somewhere deep in my soul was meant for this, and life is good.
Tuesday
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are engaged! If this means nothing to you, that’s fine. Move on. If it means something to you – hurrah! Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are engaged!
People, we need this. We need a good news story that we can follow for months with avidity. It’s been a while, y’know? Everything I need is already in place: it’s a couple I recognise, who seem nice, and in whose existence I am not remotely invested, and the ring is proper. A million dollars’ worth of diamond on a silver or platinum or something band (I do not care about bands, I care about diamonds) that Elizabeth Taylor might have deigned to give house room to.
My only criticism is the floral backdrop against which the happy pair stood for the Instagram shot announcing the engagement. It was SPARSE. It was PALTRY. I suggest a reshoot. You know where. Sunflowers are what you need.
Wednesday
Biddy Baxter, thou shouldst be living at this hour. No, thou really should, because thou wouldst have stopped this latest nonsense in its tracks: Blue Peter is marking its 67th year by ending its tradition of live shows, so that editing can make the content snappier to compete with online content and increase the likelihood of viral moments being created. As if you can a) manufacture a viral moment and b) hope to catch anything like the buzz of a baby elephant crapping all over a studio and John Noakes while its keeper hauls gamely and futilely on its leash. Whither the rogue pachyderms of yesteryear?
Lulu the elephant and her bowel movements were broadcast before I was born, yet it remains an iconic moment of my childhood. How? Because we may not have had t’internetz or social media back then but we had Denis Norden, It’ll Be Alright on the Night and eventually home VCRs and we knew how to make our own fun.
Postscript: This entry sent me down something of a rabbit hole and I can now confirm that the 1977 clip of newsreader Colin Baker (“Soaked, with cold feet, an aching heart, married, several children, and pissed off. Really, dreadfully pissed off”) is available on YouTube. My fellow Nordenites, enjoy.
Thursday
A round of applause please – and you will see why this is such a clever way to open this paragraph in just a moment – to the London borough of Westminster, which has just been determined to have the highest rate of gonorrhoea (AKA “the clap”, d’you see!) in England. There were 749 diagnoses per 100,000 people in 2024, in case you were wondering. Islington was next with 724 (so close, Islington! Say no to a few more condoms in this – uh – coming quarter and you may take the 2025 crown), and Archway third with a nugatory 397 per 100,000 inhabitants. Liverpool had the highest rate of any regional city, followed by Nottingham and Manchester. Croydon, Newcastle upon Tyne, Blackpool and Leeds made up the rest of the top 10.
I am glad my days of sexual adventuring, going into town and up north are all safely over. If yours are not, let me share with you a factoid I had forgotten and which may help keep your genitals from becoming interested in anyone else’s whenever you think of it: another nickname for gonorrhoea is “the drip” and I remember now that is the worst thing I have ever heard.
Friday
Look at us, heading into the weekend and at last, at last, September! It’s the most wonderful time of the year. In fact, it marks the true new year. The real time for resolutions. Academic diaries want you to buy them, autumn wants you to hunker down and dedicate yourself to good and self-improving works (summer wants you to disport yourself, be the louche villain you’ve always wanted to be), and for anyone who made it through tertiary education it is hardwired into us as the chance for achievement/re-invention and makes far more sense than an essentially arbitrary midnight and Jools Holland giving the nod.
We all crave meaning, structure and authority – universally symbolised by the purchase of a Helix Oxford geometry set in a silver tin from WH Smith, despite a set square not having seen legitimate use in a place of learning since Lulu was leaving her mark in a studio. School and its rhythms increasingly seem to have been the last bastion of them all, of peace. Especially now our own children are about to return there after two long, long months. Happy days.
