Plan A was to run a round of errands in the afternoon. Plan B was to catch up on the overdue Portico pages that have so alarmingly piled up (several books, three New Yorker stories, a movie, a play, and a concert). In the end, I settled on Plan C, because, after lunch, I felt both sleepy and gassy. The gassiness contraindicated gadding about, and the sleepiness ruled out writing. So I sat in my reading chair and swallowed Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges.

The day wasn’t a total loss. After the pizza that I ordered when Kathleen announced her homecoming, I sat down at my writing computer and sketched a lot of notes. It isn’t the same as writing, by any means, but at least it captures the raw material for writing that I so easily forget if I don’t write things down.

Why do I ever think that I’ll be able to remember something? Oh, there are plenty of things that I have no trouble remembering — but I’m never cautioned to write them down. The mystery at the moment is the crunchy alternative to sliced apple that I hit on when I adapted the curried chicken salad from Island, the Madison avenue bistro that Kathleen and I head off to on the odd Sunday afternoon. What can it have been? And how can I forget something that was perfect.  

Later on, in a few years, I hope to be reporting that Will O’Neill and I have had a super time dashing through the city, crossing against the lights and cadging free rides on garbage trucks. For the time being, though, I’m not only not going to make up stories about grandfatherly escapades (or steal them from Wes Anderson movies). I’m going to treat Will’s visits as sacrosanct — as all but unmentionable. What you can’t see, I can’t say.

I’m reminded of something that happened a few years ago. A very nice French gentleman ran a blog called Journal d’un vrai Parisien. Perhaps you read it, too. The Journal runs no more, because the Vrai Parisien fell in love, and he very prudently concluded that he could not conduct normal blogging activities while developing an intimate relationship. At some point, the lady’s privacy would have to be compromised. Not because the VP had a juicy story that he couldn’t resist sharing, but because the blog simply wouldn’t make sense without a few corroborative details.  

Happily, I face no such dilemma. I’ve got plenty of other stories to bore you with. But if I go silent every now and then, you’ll know why: I’ve been burping.

Remembering how nearly I almost fell into crankiness yesterday, I was going to write about my new weekend regime, which is centered on the idea that Sunday is a day of rest. Of rest and review. Of cooking my head off, if friends are coming to brunch. What it is not for: organizing closets, sorting through old Christmas cards — you know what I’m talking about. La drudgerie. On Sunday, the apartment ought to sport very clear decks.

And it didn’t, certainly not yesterday. But never mind about all of that now. Ever since I read the latest page at Number 27, Jonathan Harris’s often engaging Web site, I haven’t been able to summon much interest in my housekeeping problems. Sorrow, occasioned by the death of a bright young man over the weekend, won’t let go. I feel the dimensions of the hole that his dying has left in the lives of his bright young friends, certainly; but, as a new grandfather, my heart lurches out to his parents.

So here is the link. “How sad,” indeed. “How very sad.”

My friend Jean Ruaud discovered Mr Harris’s Web site during the holiday season, and I’ve been following it ever since. Pretentious as this sounds, I think of Number 27 as a Bildungsblog, as the record of a man’s character development. Not that one’s character ought to be very fluid by the time of one’s thirtieth birthday — the occasion that inspired Mr Harris to inaugurate his photo-a-day site. In today’s world, however, thirty is the new thirteen, minus the hormones, at Mr Harris’s level of privilege. Life has been so varied and interesting that it is only now beginning to sink in that some of the varied and interesting people with whom his path has intersected do not themselves lead varied and interesting lives. In fairness, perhaps, it sank it some time ago, but I sense, in the epigrammatic, sometimes vatic notes that Mr Harris strikes, that my point is being felt and discovered. 

This must be why, even though the young man is in his physical prime and quite capable of taking care of himself, Jonathan Harris seems to me to be one of the most vulnerable creatures on earth. Because of his very giftedness (which he still hasn’t sorted out, of course), one senses the gods’ gimlet stare, poring for a weak spot. Isn’t that what happened to poor Tom over the weekend? (I almost typed, “the weakened.”) It’s not clear whether anybody knows why Tom toppled from his fire escape — but it doesn’t seem to matter. At some fatal level or other, he lost his balance, and that is all there is to it.

Now I shall stop, lest I compound my presumption.

As I write, I’m listening to something that I haven’t heard in well over twenty years. The last time that this music was in my library, it was on an LP. Very likely, I probably still have the LP, in storage. I can well imagine that, the last time I looked at it, I promised myself that I would make a tape recording. Because tape was still the only other game in town. Then, along came modern times, pretty much like the Jamestown Flood. Lots was lost.

But a phrase stuck in my mind, and so did the knowledge that this phrase was written by Alexander Borodin, my favorite Russian composer. (I think of  Tchaikovsky as a Baltic writer, classed with Sibelius and Grieg, and not as a true Russian.) I thought for the longest time that the Borodin phrase came from a piano trio, but in fact it turns out to come at the end of the composer’s Piano Quintet in c.

When I acquired the LP — I’m not entirely sure that I actually paid for it; this would have been during my radio days in Houston — it was unusual in featuring chamber music from outside the Viennese-classical canon. Like most callow youths, I regarded chamber music as either ennobling or boring, and possibly both, but never as fun. And the Borodin, despite its minor-mode signature, is fun. And when it’s not being fun it’s gorgeous, the way the sun on the snow is gorgeous after your first all-nighter with a significant other.

The work on the flip side of the LP was Mendelssohn’s Piano Sextet, Op 110. I picked up the Naxos recording of that a while back, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. What I was looking for is what I’m listening to right now, this very minute. I wish that I could whistle it for you.

When you re-read a novel that made a big impression twenty or thirty years ago, when you read it the first time, you find yourself wondering if you’ve actually ever read it before: books change, and that’s, in the end, the mosts lovable thing about them. Novels are always new.

Music, at least for me, is just the opposite. Oh, I’m not saying that this Borodin quintet “takes me back.” It doesn’t. The only thing that it reminds me of is a time when I thought that it was very beautiful, and I think that it’s beautiful right now in very much the same way. As with a book, I hear things that I didn’t hear the first time, but the sense of seeing an old friend again as if no time had intervened is very strong, and pretty terrific.

What to do with the pile of fiction — that is the question.

At bottom, I suspect that there was some sort of train wreck: books that novels weren’t entirely congenial, all being read at once. Two are rather hard-boiled (Falconer and Hard Rain Falling) while two are British/Overseas (How to Paint a Dead Man and Bone China). All are well written, but all have strokes against them. I don’t want to read about (a) prison life, (b) marginal frequenters of pool halls, (c) being stuck in a crevasse — another kind of prison, or (d) decayed colonial gentry. No one could make these topics interesting to me, so all that good writing is rather thrown away. I read with pleasure but only after having forced myself to open the books; and I never want to go back for more.

Instead, what I want to read is The Night Climbers, a caper novel that falls somewhere between The Secret History and Dorothy Sayers. Ian Stourton has acquired his title by the ingenious clipping of a longer one: The Night Climbers of Cambridge, by the pseudonymous Whipplesnaith. Originally published in 1937, The Night Climbers of Cambridge has been brought out more recently by Oleander Press. Here is the opening of Chapter Eleven, “Trinity.”

With the Guide-book in our pocket and high expectation in our hearts we go to Trinity, the aristocrat of the college climbing-grounds. King’s can offer some more severe climbing, St John’s has strong counter attractions in the New Tower and the Bridge of Sighs, the Old Library is a safter romping-ground, but Trinity heads the list. It has everything in its favour. It is more extensive than other colleges, and offers every variety of easy and difficult climbing test. The roof-hiker can wander over many furlongs of roof-tops, alone with his thoughts in an empty world, so near and yet so far from the world of sleeping men below.

There is nothing quite like the austere, “I want to be alone,” rogue male British undergraduate. He knows nothing of the world, but he already overflows with its cares. Treating the university as a pocket Himalaya is a good way to clear the mind, what?

By Ian Stourton’s day — The Night Climbers appeared in 2008 — the sleeping men below were approximated by sleeping women, sometimes very closely. Otherwise, I expect, his Cambridge would not be unrecognizable to Whipplesnaith.

I don’t recall how I found out about night climbers. It was in connection with the Daily Office, of course, and I may even have given the matter a link or two. But what I also did was to go Amazuke and order books. Of course it was a mad impulse. I would never be a night climber; it’s not my kind of mischief at all. (I altogether lack the desire to “prove myself physically,” whatever that means.) And I still don’t understand just how Oxbridge functions as an educational institution. There seem to be fearsome examinations, but what comes before has never quite made sense. The Night Climbers of Cambridge suggests that the point of a university education has little to do with classrooms.

But I was always in or about some sort of trouble as an undergraduate; frankly, I think it’s a miracle that I lived through it. (There were at least two serious brushes with fatality — even if neither broke the skin.) And I am going to bring my experience to bear on the pleasure of reading The Night Climbers (the novel). The only thing more terrifying than recalling my reckless collegiate exploits is to imagine my little grandson growing up to follow in my footsteps. It ought to be very scaring.  Watch for tweets.

It would seem that the thing to do with the fiction pile is to ignore it. Maybe it will just go away.

Journée de paperasse. As I intended it to be. For one thing, there was the lamp issue from Gracious Home to settle.

To understand the lamp issue, you must also understand the Quatorze frugality. Last Wednesday, I bought a pile of stuff at two branches of Gracious Home on Third Avenue. (There are three separate store-fronts at the moment: the original hardware store, the linens and china shop across the street, and the lamps and plumbing fitures outlet catercornered to the southeast. Quatorze and I foresee consolidation.) I bought stuff and “had it delivered.” Q was almost beside himself that I didn’t just carry what was carryable. Why have it delivered? Because I always have things delivered. I read once that a gentleman doesn’t even carry a handbag, much less a package, and while I’m not quite that austere, and often lug heavily laden tote bags to and from the storage unit, I take advantage of delivery services wherever they’re available.

When the halogen lamp, marked down, on sale, to $300, wasn’t delivered, Q swallowed his Schadenfreude and advised me to make some calls before the weekend. I disregarded that advice as well.

So, today, I had a situation. I was on the phone for quite a while, explaining various coded messages that I won’t bore you with to various personages. (Namely, the fact that I received two shopping bags, each of which was labeled “1 of 2,” an ominous mistake, especially as there ought to have been a 3rd.)

On the telephone this morning, the gentleman at Gracious Home’s shipping department was rightly skeptical for a while — I can only imagine what blue-haired scattiness keeps him hopping from day to day — but by deploying the scissorhands that I developed in law school (clarity and documentation!) I eventually coaxed a halfway grudging determination to cooperate. When the lamp was eventually located in a dark corner of the store’s premises, grudging cooperation became abject apology. I felt that I ought to apologise, too — if I hadn’t tried to combine two deliveries from different branches into one, the lamp would never have been mislaid (I’m quite sure of this) — and we wound up the conversation with wreaths of mutual thanks. The lamp arrived about two hours later, forty minutes before a further call told me that it was on its way.

A happy ending; but Q would have eschewed the drama. 

Kathleen said, “I like the new lamp!” Of course it was for her — a halogen table lamp that will allow her to see what she’s doing at the writing table in the bedroom. She sounds forbearing in the story as I tell it because she decided to let me buy the lamp, and she decided to let me buy the lamp because she didn’t want to hear about an ugly purchase. So I bought a handsome lamp (reasonably handsome; halogen is so Sixties), and it took forever to arrive.

We all pick our battles. Even Quatorze.

It is a commonplace to blame the Internet in general, and the Blogosphere in particular, for the current polarization of public opinion. I think that it’s quite correct as well. But I am almost certain that this extremism is a phase, an inevitable introductory experience. I expect that it will wear off, at least among more intelligent Internauts.

The novelty, of course, is the Web’s triumph over personal geography. We are no longer bound by the chances of locality — of knowing only those people who literally cross our paths (and, in order for us to get to know them, cross our paths again and again). Everyone with Internet access is a global citizen, well-prepared to add his or her weight to whatever cause appeals. For most people — for most Americans, especially — this contact with sympathetic souls scattered across the globe, with like-minded new acquaintances so far-flung that there can be no thought of meeting each and every one of them, has been a kind of Christmas-morning treat, with no end of presents to open. A useful comparison to bear in mind, I trow! Given that even the most amply-benefacted children are rarely at their most serene while they’re still surrounded by clouds of shredded gift wrap. There is something about getting a lot of what you want that is naturally discontenting.

And for many Americans, it is only with access to the Internet that meaningful discussion of personal opinions has become possible — imaginable, even. People formerly discouraged by being shouted down or wittily finessed by glib and clever relatives and co-workers now have access to venues in which what they have to say will be heard afresh, and, initially at least, without interruption. This alone may explain the rather pungent pong of revenge that marks so many ill-tempered comments. Finally, everybody gets to call everybody else an asshole, to the sound of at least two other hands clapping.

Here, I’m afraid, I must mention the opposition to abortion, which, for all its rhetorical flourishing of “pro-life,” is nothing but a campaign against a certain medical procedure. Antiabortionism is only the flagship of a global reaction against social change, but its anti-ness, firmly entrenched at the Internet’s first light, has infected almost everyone who wants to speak up on any subject with self-righteousness. We are not them. This is what I think will pass. The flame of reaction burns very brightly, but never for very long; it is exceptionally wearying. Eventually, I am sure, the idea of regarding the elimination of a rudimentary and ill-conceived speck of potential as murder will be seen by most adults as an insult to humanity.

What I envision, then, is an Internet at which people don’t much concern themselves with people unlike themselves. This would be a prescription for the utmost provinciality if we were not so like snowflakes, each one of us for all practical purposes unlike every other. If I’ve learned anything from the delightful people whom I’ve gotten to know in nearly fifteen years of Internet life, it’s that there is no potential club of People Like Me out there awaiting my discovery. There really are no People Like Me. And this isn’t (down, Fossil!) because I’m “unusual.” If I’m aware of the fact, it’s only because I thought about it a bit. I’ve come, after much tumbling, to rather like the idea that no other person on earth is going to be a perfect fit for me. (My dear Kathleen hates coconut and loves hot weather! Where on earth are we to find common ground?) My difference is not a problem.

And I think that a lot of other people are coming to the same conclusion, just as happily.

 

Last week, I made a somewhat intemperate remark about sport, at Facebook. I wished for it to be as illegal as cocaine. Frankly, I’d rather that cocaine were as legal as sport. But what occasioned the comment was the hubbub of enthusiasm for the Winter Olympics, which I encountered wherever I turned.

What I object to isn’t sport. It’s the yearning for transcendence that moves so many people to whip up enthusiasm at Big Game time. There’s a dreadful collectivism about it: no matter how interested anybody says that he or she is in figure skating, the principal appeal is the fact that everybody else is watching. This is what explains the success of reality shows. We’re wired to believe that the bonfire gets bigger and warmer when more of us draw up to it.

We’re wired for a lot of things that don’t work in civilization, and here’s why: civilization is intended to take over most of the survival functions that in tribal societies (most places on earth today, in my opinion) are seen to by instinct and self-interest. Consider our health-care debate. It’s obvious to all civilized folks that a society that doesn’t guarantee some minimal level of health care to all of its members is wearing a big black eye. The tribals, more shrewdly no doubt, wonder why they ought to pay for other people’s problems.

The United States has never been about civilization. Civilization in the United States was from the beginning seen as a weakness into which the Eastern cities had degenerated. They were “soft.” Not that the United States stands for genuine tribalism, either. It is Calvinist through and through: Me and God, two for the road.

But our rugged individualism turns out to be a crock. Except for a few woolly mammoths, it is awfully boring. Even Americans like to have friends — and with friends come commitments. Because we like to pick our friends for ourselves, though, we’re hardly tribal.

Except at Big Game time! Then we gather to form one immense tribe, rubbing our hands lustily in front of the gigantic bonfire of common spectacle. Because sport is utterly devoid of internal meaning (as all games are — which is why we play them, those of us who play), and because its external meaning is, ultimately, a numerical matter of scoring (you can argue the fine points of a game, but respect for scoring is the one and only universal in sport), the Big Game makes for a perfect Big Tent. Everybody is welcome.

That is, everybody is welcome to check individuality and insight at the door.

What’s exciting about watching sport is awfully close to what’s exciting about watching a poor sod stand on a ledge with a view to jumping. Things could go horribly, arrestingly, fascinatingly wrong!. When they don’t, and something ineffably beautiful happens instead, you ought to turn off the television set and find other beautiful things to watch — Fonteyn and Nureyev, perhaps. A beautiful performance ought to be your signal to leave the pack, and cultivate your own idea of beauty and grace. Tell me about that, and I’ll not only hear you out on Davis and White but watch a clip myself.

I had dreams of bringing the late spate of light entries to an end this evening, but now that it’s time to write, I haven’t a thought in my head. I made the mistake of watching the second half of Honolulu after dinner, and it gummed up my brain. “Gum,” you may not realize, is an anagram, more or less, of “MGM.” Honolulu is a catalogue raisoné of the high-minded vulgarities to which MGM was prone in years around 1940. It’s all there, but never moreso than in the hula skirt worn by Eleanor Powell with her tap shoes. Kathleen is in a state somewhere between apoplexy and plotz.

I loved every minute.

But I’d probably love anything tonight, now that my latest slate of doctoring is over. Friday’s Remicade infusion had its effect on Saturday, as I sloughed off a dully inexplicable fatigue and worked hard enough to feel tired for a reason. This morning’s procedure was devoid of bad news. At my age, and perhaps at any, there is only one form for good news: the fact that you are as alive as you are today means that you will probably be alive tomorrow. This state of affairs could end at any time, and indeed it will. There will come a time when tomorrow looks unlikely. There does for everyone, or at least for everyone who is not crushed in an unforeseen catastrophe.

Quatorze met me at the flat afterward, and we set out for lunch — how good it was to chew! — and an hour at Westphalia, which more than ever hums with currency. Q was determined to gratify my desire to get an imposing portrait of Kathleen off the floor and onto one of the storage unit’s walls, and I was resolved to let him try for as long as he liked. What’s imposing is not so much the portrait itself, which nobody likes except Kathleen and the artist who painted it, as the frame in which the artist mounted it, a baroque object found on the street with a pope in its hole. Getting it off the floor opened up quite a number of shelves.

Then we went to Gracious! I used to call this UES hardware store  “Gracious Empire,” but now that I am thinking of writing a musical about the enterprise (with branches in Lincoln Plaza and Chelsea), I prefer the exclamation point. We went to the lighting branch first and then to the main store, and in both locations I placed bulky, low three-figure orders and had them delivered. (“Had them delivered” is New-Yorkese for “asked that they be delivered.”) Then I strode into Third Avenue and hailed a cab. There was nothing at all out of the way about my buying a dozen boxes of lightbulbs and a garment rack, but I felt, stepping into the taxi, that I’d bought a shooting box in Scotland. I was almost intolerably pleased with life. I have been in Tired-of-London mode for so many weeks now (Remicade withdrawal?) that I feel honor-bound to report this afternoon’s bout of gross insouciance.

Spring must be just around the corner.

Regular readers know what the header means.

Not a lot to report, you betcha.  I got very hungry, but, eventually, my stomach gave up. There’s still plenty of Jell-O. I finished the last of the nectar before nine.

I watched three movies. Le Patinoire is one of the funniest films that I’ve ever seen. So funny, in fact, that I’m not recommending it to anybody. It must be just me. To Kill a King was — like The Wolfman, it would have been better in Martian. Was today really the day for Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand again? Now it’s too late to watch Honolulu, a movie I didn’t even know about until just the other day, when Brooks Peters ran a clip. I love Eleanor Powell, but I bought the tape for George and Gracie. Not to mention Honolulu.

Amazingly, I completed tomorrow’s Daily Office. I worked. That has never happened on a Jell-O day before — and I estimate that there have been somewhere between twelve and fifteen of them. Jell-O days have always had a determined sort of Victoria-mourning-Albert inertia about them.

I am going to eat my head off tomorrow at lunch. Frites en ciel.

This morning, as I was tootling downtown to see The Ghost Writer, I saw my first Elders. It took a bit of noticing. At first, I was aware only of a pale blond young man with very long eyelashes. He was standing right in front of me, wearing earmuffs not unlike my headset, running round the back of his head. He did not look happy, and he certainly looked out of place in New York City. But I didn’t notice that he was an Elder of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints until I noticed that the guy whom he was facing, a more substantial twentysomething leaning against the subway door, and who seemed to be talking to him now and then, was wearing a badge that announced him as an Elder. I read no further, but I noticed that the young man right in front of me was wearing an identical anorak. “Elder,” I thought. The idea of sending such young persons to the fleshpots of New York on missionary work strikes me as cruel and unusual, but that’s exactly what it’s supposed to be, I suppose. Unusual enough to make Utah look good. Or (worse!) Idaho.

I have more to say, but my brain is clogged by adoration of Olivia Williams. This isn’t to say that I’m  not still in love with Emily Blunt! All I do these days, it seems, is go to the movies and tombe amoureux with actresses. Then I come home and talk for hours with my true love.

This is what it comes to in the end: each week day lasts as long as an episode of Masterpiece Theatre did, forty years ago. Time becomes businesslike, and gets you where you’re going (death) with a dispatch that you didn’t appreciate when you were younger. And you can’t tell anybody who’s still “younger” to be on guard. They’re too — younger.

When I look back on the day, this Thursday that is about to come to an end, I see, if not progress exactly, then a certain advancement of the story so far. There was a very upsidey visit to the dermatologist. Since almost anything that a dermatologist tells you is TMI as regards the rest of the world, I’ll reduce it to one word: “Moisturizer!” Which, you’ll note, requires no prescription. So that was good. I got a haircut — which really means that my beard was trimmed. I showed up impromptu, after the doctor’s appointment. I could have waited, but the proprietor, who always takes care of me, was getting ready to take care of another gent, and it was he who suggested that I submit to his second-in-command. The result was that I look a bit too much like Gianni Versace — but the young man promised that, next time, he won’t take so much off. It’s all good: it will all grow back. The proprietor, I soon gathered, wanted to talk futbol with his client, a thirty-something man of Romance-language background who spoke with the slightest accent. Brazilian, perhaps? Because he was less comfortable in the barber’s Spanish than he was in English. The two of them were still chatting when I was walking out the door. Would sport exist as we know it, if it weren’t for barber shops?

Now, I hadn’t expected to get a whole paragraph out of the hour between one and two, and it’s true that, during that time, I felt that time had slowed down a bit. But it speeded up again at lunch, which — can it really have done so? — took an hour and a quarter. It’s because I was reading. The corollary to the rule that time flies when you’re an antique is that it takes aeons to read anything. Before the club sandwich was set before me, I knocked off the “last of Prince Albert” chapter in Strachey’s Queen Victoria — a desert-island book if ever there was one. Chalk one up for me! But then, over lunch, I read about rape in American prisons. The NYRB piece was really about impunity in American prisons — for the staff — so it wasn’t really all that contradigestive. But I had to re-read many sentences.

After a few more errands, I sat down to write up The Wolfman, which I saw last Friday. Time really flew during that project. It seemed that I could work no faster than four words per hour. At one point, I fell asleep with my finger on the ‘k’ key.

Then it was time to make dinner. I wasn’t at all ready. There were messes all over the apartment, and piles that needed sorting and putting away. And I wasn’t in the mood; I was “too tired.” But I gone with it like a manly man. We had a chicken sauté — by which I mean that chicken legs, browned in clarified butter, were simmered, along with shallots and mushrooms, in a broth that was finished with thickening cream — served over cavatappi, with a stir-fry of snow peas and green onions (nothing remotely Chinese about the seasoning). For dessert, Eli’s palmiers, which please Kathleen during the chocolate ban of Lent.

Tomorrow, time will really slow down for a few hours. I’ll be at the Hospital for Special Surgery, being examined by my Facebook friend, rheumatologist Steven Magid, and absorbing a Remicade infusion. Time will stop altogether next week, for a few hours on Wednesday, when I have my umpteenth you-know-what. Don’t listen to old people when they tell you that time flies by in a blur. Just remind them of what it’s like to visit their many doctors.

For almost two hours this afternoon, Quatorze and I toiled in the apartment, with Q doing most of the toiling. At one point, an importunate Fossil Darling telephoned. I had to tell him that Quatorze could not take the call because he was busy screwing on the floor. Wonderful seconds of dead silence. You know, I wish I could remember how those dumb old jokes went; you know, the ones with “they pushed, they pulled, they pushed, they pulled, and then — ” but all I can remember are the “shut up” jokes. —Mommy, Mommy, I don’t want to go to Europe. —Shut up and keep swimming!

Now I remember how the push/pull jokes went. “And then they got out of the car to see about the tire.” I do love the dumb jokes of childhood. (“See this lump in my shoe?”) Not that I don’t appreciate a crackling bon mot. We used to tell one about Eleanor Roosevelt at the United Nations. She was introducing Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, “who led the Democratic Party in Nineteen-Hundred-and-Fifty-Tooooo [think Streep as Child] and again in Nineteen-Hundred-and-Fifty-Six” — at which point some character in the peanut gallery called out, with Bronx-cheer gusto, “Adlai Stevenson’s an ass!” To which the imperturbable former First Lady replied, “Nevertheless!” To tell you the truth, I had made this joke an entertaining staple of my repertoire before I realized that it probably hadn’t happened verbatim.

Where was I? Oh, yes: Quatorze was screwing on the floor. He was screwing the “bridge table” together. It would be difficult to play any game of cards, much less bridge, on the “bridge table,” which is in fact a console or sofa table, meant to stand against the wall in a corridor or behind a sofa. I think that I know why it’s called a “bridge table,” but it’s too boring to go into. The long and the short of the story is that once homes had been found for the items of furniture that were, in a sort of cold-fusion chain-reaction, displaced by the “bridge table,” the apartment looked almost exactly as it had done before the toiling and screwing. —Shut up and keep digging!

Seriously, by tomorrow afternoon, even I won’t remember what we did. So you might wonder why we bothered. I certainly do. I’d better think of something, though, or Quatorze (who did all the work, after all) will weigh in with a Comment. Did I mention the Chinese footbaths? It was so that there would be room for the Chinese footbaths behind the love seat in the window. Yes! That was it. The Chinese footbaths.

When Will paid his first state visit to the apartment last week, one of the two Chinese footbaths had arrived. I made a joke about how it was big enough to give Will a bath in, but even though I did not come out and call it a “Chinese footbath,” Megan didn’t see the humor. She missed the ha-ha. I think that all that she could see was her son’s cracked skull. I am writing this down now so that, when Will inherits the Chinese footbaths, he will have a good joke with which to entertain his friends.

We pushed, we pulled. Then I got back to work on the Book Review review.

Between five and six o’clock, I dragged myself around the apartment in despair, hoping that my neighbor and former French prof would have forgotten our date. “Hoping” is too strong a word; I knew perfectly well that he wouldn’t forget. But how could I receive him? I looked a mess, and so did much of the living room. I hadn’t finished tomorrow’s Daily Office, but what I had done had depressed me completely. Not that I wasn’t already depressed. Feeling tired and fragile, I could not imagine simulating the bare minimum of sociability. Also, I was very cold. The heat hadn’t worked since lunch time.

Despite this funk, I threw myself into the shower and, having hosed down, put on a lot more clothing than I’d taken off. So that was two problems taken care of. I was clean and I was comfortable. I sat down and knocked off two more hours. It would have been nice to finish the page, but the doorbell rang promptly at six. There was nothing for it but to plunge headlong into the murk of Bad French. 

Regular readers will not have forgotten my friend Jean Ruaud, recently the guest-editor of The Daily Blague. As a native of Touraine, Jean speaks just about the best sort of French that there is — but not to me. With me, Jean is eager to speak English, and since his English is a lot better than my French (among many other reasons), I oblige. But I don’t learn any French. Happily, I did not become Jean’s friend because I hoped to practice French with him, so I am not disappointed. In Jean, that is. My French, however, is un bordel.

Plunge I did, though, and pretty soon I was thrashing about like an enthusiastic but not very bright retriever, describing the problems of modern Greece in a language somewhat closer to Greek than English, but not necessarily français. La Grèce — I had to ask my prof for the gender, but not before I’d referred to in the masculin for several paragraphs. I looked back nostalgically on la Guerre froide, which, it must be acknowledged, imposed a certain discipline and a measure of organisation upon world affairs. I confessed that, President Obama’s appeal, things have gotten worse in this country than they were pendant les années Bush. (Don’t miss tomorrow’s Matins!)

Then we talked about the eighteen-month cauchemar, involving a leaking oil tank, at the prof’s weekend house (the tank belonged to a voisine mécreante). I am always glad that I don’t own a car, but the prof’s tale of woe reminded me that I am also glad that I don’t own a house. Come to think of it, though, not owning a house did not make the loss of heat for six hours more bearable than it would have been if I’d been in contact with the repairman. I wouldn’t have had to listen to bland and meaningless assurances that “they’re working it.”  

But the heat did come back on while the prof was here. He asked me to check it even as I was headed for the HVAC. Most of my problems had been taken care of by this time, and now this: j’étais content.

J’ai descendu avec le prof shortly before eight — in time to pick up a collis at the package room. When I got back upstairs, I felt quite well for the first time all day. I even ordered a historical novel that the prof spoke of reading, Bernard Cornwell’s Agincourt.

I’m on a Morse jag. I’ve got all the Inspector Morse episodes, and I know at least half of them by heart. For that reason, I don’t watch them very often. But, once a year, I succumb to the charms of John Thaw and Kevin Whately and the galaxy of Names that people the thirty-three episodes. What happens is your basic faute de mieux: there isn’t a feature film that appeals (or there is one, but I’ve watched it five times in four days), so I go through the Hickson Marples. When they’re done, I turn to Morse. When I’m through with Morse, it’s Jane Tennyson’s turn. The only rule is that I have to watch all of each before moving on.

This year, I’m doing Morse blind. I insert each DVD into the kitchen screen after taking scrupulous care not to know which episode it is. This is better, let me tell you, than watching the shows in alphabetical order — how wet was that? Next time, I hope, I’ll know enough to watch them in the order in which they were aired. The episode in the machine right now is the one about the competition for the mastership of some college or other, and the woman who is shot in her own townhome — by mistake, as I recall. Although “as I recall” is never very comprehensive. For which thank heaven! The killer is a hoity-toity lady who bosses her husband around. She is not apprehended outside the Bath hotel where Morse confronts her, but soon after. As I recall.

I watch these shows in the kitchen, which is to say that I don’t watch them at all — I’m cooking, washing dishes, exploring the refrigerator. With my rigid spine, I don’t have the option of turning a casual glance in the screen’s direction; I have to stop and reposition myself to see what is going on. That’s not necessary most of the time, and when it is necessary, failing to do so simply makes the episode all the more richly interesting, because my little brain secretes implications and complications to make sense of what I haven’t seen. This kind of misinformation can take years to uproot. I can never remember what happened to the Wolvercote Tongue.

What I love most about these shows — Morse, Marple and Tennyson — is that they are presented in English, a language that is all but unknown in my country.

Unlike yesterday’s, this evening’s visit was planned. It was Nana Penny’s wonderful idea, conceived long before she arrived in New York: she would bring Will up to our apartment so that his parents could have a few hours alone together, after six weeks of Not.

If I weren’t so tired, I’d think up a slew of State Dinner jokes. The three grown-ups had an Upper East Side classic: lamb chops (from Holland Court), steamed baby Yukon potatoes, and Lesueur peas. It was wildly out of harmony with the spirit of the evening, which called for sandwiches on tray tables. We did not dine together, for example; Kathleen played with Will while Penny and I dug in. Adding injury to idiocy, the lamb chops were overcooked by about a minute.

On the nursery front there were many interesting issues. I don’t think that I ever drank a martini,  back in my martini days, as fast as Will put away his bottle. The downside of this healthy imbibition was an apparently painful intake of air: the boy was botherated by gassy cramps. Kathleen and Penny managed to elicit relieving burps, but when I bounced Will, I simply made him uncomfortable.

That, on top of the overcooked lamb chops, would have convinced me that life is no longer worth living, if it weren’t for pictures like the one above. Nana Penny will be back this summer, thank heaven. What an angel she has been!

As for Will, there was a stretch just before dinner when he was looking up at me from Penny’s lap, and really taking me in — but enough about me. The thing is that, for the first time, I thought that I was seeing his face to come. And it was super, because it seemed that Will is going to take after his handsome father.

Here we were, snowbound. I had canceled an outpatient skin surgery, and Kathleen had decided to work from home. So we were both here even though, according to the calendar, neither one of us ought to have been. When I learned that Megan and Will were, against all the weather odds, out and about, I asked my daughter to make our house her next stop, and she did. Thus did Will O’Neill pay his first visit to his maternal grandparents, at the ripe old age of not-quite-six weeks.

Nana Penny made it all possible. Of all of us on Megan’s side of the family, Penny is the only one whose experience with infants is better than theoretical. (Given that Megan is not far from forty, I hope that I’ll be excused for having forgotten what little experience of babies I have that hasn’t been superseded by no-smoking regulations.) She burped him into contentment after his second feeding, which was not preceded by sleep of any kind.

As I say, he’s an intellectual. Megan says, “We’ll see.” I say that I’m not talking about the future. He’s an intellectual now. Which is not at all inconsistent with his loving his Texas boots.

Watching DVDs in the middle of the day is usually a bad idea, but I was dying to see Peter Richardson’s Churchill: The Hollywood Years, a movie that to the best of my knowledge has never been shown on this side of the Atlantic. The premise of the farce is that, far from being a portly, middle-aged gent with a plummy English voice, Winston Churchill was a studly American Marine. With the brave, romantic aid of Princess Lilibet, this swaggering action hero squelched the occupation of Buckingham Palace by Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels. Then he flew off into the Battle of Britain and died a hero’s death. (Not shown.)

Even with Christian Slater as Churchill, the romp is nowhere near as bad as you might think. Harry Enfield’s George VI is an atomic hoot, trust me. Antony Sher and Miranda Richardson completely refresh the look and feel of the funny-Adolf-and-Eva shtick. Jessica Oyelowo plays Princess Margaret as if she were Ava Gardner — let’s see more of her! The nicest performance, though is the one that points, inadvertently, to precisely what’s missing from Churchill. Every once in a while, Neve Campbell seems about to burst out of her Princess Elizabeth impersonation and into a fit of giggles. This makes you remember The Carol Burnett Show.

What made the sketches in Carol Burnett so much funnier than anything that anybody had ever seen before was the principal performers’ bold but somehow helpless flirtation with Losing It. The jokes were completely trumped by the agony crimped into the faces of Carol Burnett, Harvey Korman, Tim Conway, and Vicki Carr as they struggled not to break character and laugh their heads off.

The rule against spluttering laughter on stage is dictated by the quality of the comedy. If there’s no quality, there’s no rule. The Carol Burnett troupe turned this around. Their trembling jaws signaled their awareness that they were putting on tripe, but the signal itself transmuted “acting” into “improvisation” — even though, for all we know, the breakdowns were as rehearsed as the blocking.

Christian Slater’s problem, in Churchill: The Hollywood Years, is that he’s aware that his comic-book antics and shoot-em-up bravado are ridiculous. Aside from a few almost unwatchable “sincere” shots, he smirks his way through the entire picture. But it’s not the right smirk. It’s the smirk of the Big Man on Campus who’s being required by the Dean of Students to do something un-cool. Hey, his smirk says, I’m only going through the motions here. Think Eddie Haskell.

Carol Burnett never smirked. She threw herself into her preposterous roles with with the passion of an operatic diva. So did Harvey Korman. They vied for preposterousness. It was inevitable that one of them would sooner or later surprise the other with a stupendously preposterous bit, causing the predictable audience reaction right up close. (I seem to recall that Korman had a knack for strutting so strenuously that he would flub his lines — a doubly whammy for his colleagues.) Harold Bloom might say that our laughter is overdetermined.

Churchill: The Hollywood Years left a mystery in its wake: would it be best to watch it before Inglourious Basterds or after? See what Mr Teasy-Weasy does with the Führer’s hair before you answer that one.

Ah, to have Kathleen at home again. How nice is that.

We ate the stew for dinner. It was good, but the mushrooms had faded away, and the flavor was just perceptibly un peu fané . Of course Kathleen hadn’t eaten it before, and she didn’t miss the mushrooms. She even asked for a hunk of bread — which she used to sop up sauce with the help of a fork. If I knew better, it’s only because I’m older. We both grew up in households where bread never appeared on the table; it was for toast and children’s sandwiches, period. No wonder I taught myself to bake it!

I meant to add fresh peas (fresh frozen peas, that is) to the stew, but I forgot all about them.

We talked for an hour after dinner about Russia, China, and the American weakness for abstraction. By which we meant that most Americans see Russia and China as “former Communist nations.” Whereas they never were anything but Russia and China, really, and, now, that they’ve thrown off their ideological corsets, they’re reverting to type — always a strength. We talked about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and how the British have been able to break with the Anglophone hoo-ha about infectious homosexuality because they’re no longer ruling the globe in pink.

We talked about 1 Corinthians 7.9, which both of us had always understood thus: It is better to marry than to burn in hell. In fact, according to my Greek New Testament, what Paul actually wrote was this: It is better to marry than to burn with passion. Eric Patton, God love him, remarked that he couldn’t remember when he learned the correct reading. Burlington Bertie from Columbus, he is.

A good day.

Is that my problem? I saw America first. Almost all of it, by the time I went to boarding school in 1963. Everything but the Old South and Arizona (and the two new states). Wasted, all of it was, on someone who responds to “natural wonders” in a decidedly pre-Romantic manner. Show me a majestic mountain range, and I’ll show you an obstruction. Show me Manhattan’s skyline, and I’ll show you a majestic mountain range.

“America the Beautiful”? Either I’m crazy or they’re crazy. I panted to go to Europe because I believed that there were beautiful things there. As indeed there are. Grosvenor Square (with your back to the Embassy). Wilton Crescent. Not every square inch of Paris is beautiful, certainly (the Champs-Elysées is rather a shock, if you’re not looking straight ahead), but most of it is either lovely or interesting. A lot of New York is interesting, but hardly any of it is genuinely beautiful. The Empire State Building, for example — it’s the perfect skyscraper, and I love it to pieces. But beautiful? It’s too big to be beautiful.

New York is better at jolie laide. The Plaza and the Dakota, both designed by Henry Janeway Hardenburgh. The central block of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is uglier every time I look at it. The scale is so off! Or, rather, there are two scales. The pillars and the portals belong to different designs. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t trade it in for the Sully Wing, but I wouldn’t tear it down, either.

Lake Louise, the most beautiful spot that I have ever visited on this side of the Atlantic (or the Pacific), is not in the United States. But even if it were, I have to tell you that I’ve no need to see it again: its beauties were perfectly captured in Springtime in the Rockies, probably because Daryl Zanuck made sure that they were. I’m content to watch the movie. When, by the way, will it come out on DVD? Probably never, now. Thank you, Steve Jobs.

Don’t you wonder, whenever you find yourself on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, why somebody decided to build a really big Cannes on the wrong side of the Arctic Circle? That’s the United States for you. Everyone says, brave new world. We left the Old World behind. To which I say, ha. Or, rather, Washington, DC.

As you can see, I can’t bring myself to talk about the natural wonders. Such as Mount Rushmore! I saw Mount Rushmore once. I had already seen North By Northwest, though. Actually standing by those dinky telescopes on a hot summer afternoon was a whole lot less interesting without Cary Grant and Leo G Carroll, let me tell you. I had a lot more fun the previous summer when I stayed, with my parents, at the Ambassador East in Really Big Cannes. It was a lot easier to imagine Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in the deeply piled corridors of the Ambassador East Hotel than it was at a scenic outlook below Mount Rushmore.

I would not by any means call myself a people person, but I have absolutely no interest in rocks or the plants that like to grow on them — excepting, of course, the granite outcrops that bind Manhattan to the Westchester of my childhood. Them I like. Come to think of it, they must have been Henry Janeway Hardenburgh’s principal inspiration, working at a deeper inspirational level than the language of equally metamorphic Beaux Arts ornament that clads his famous façades.

Anyway, I saw America first, and I don’t recommend it. Remember that Peggy Lee song, “Is That All There Is?” I was singing it at fifteen. Happily, the answer was “no.”