Letters from America
One of my strategies against being engulfed by Covid opinion has been the BBC’s iPlayer archive of the late Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America.
When radio phone-ins are becoming a loop of repetitive frustration, and social media offers more tribal head-banging, 15 minutes of measured commentary on past global crises is a therapeutic reminder that there was a time when news did not seep into every waking moment. And that however difficult things might seem right now, they too will pass.
Over the course of his 54 years of letters Cooke was such an effortless storyteller that you can dip into any week from the Kennedy assassination to the invasion of Iraq and time travel to a perfectly nuanced first draft of history’s ironies.
Listening to the news on Wednesday, it struck me that no observer would have been better equipped to convey the image of a gutter-politics president emerging from his bunker last weekend, with his nation’s cities on fire, to witness the first commercial launch of a space rocket. Cooke was, I later discovered, much closer to those events than I realised. As well as being flight director of the Nasa/Space X mission, the fabulously named Zebulon Scoville is Cooke’s grandson.
Turn over your papers
My elder daughter has spent the past week doing “virtual” university exams. When she first mentioned how it was going to work – 24 hours to submit each paper from her bedroom – it sounded like a fairly soft option: she could refer to her notes, look at textbooks, do a bit of Googling. But the reality has been more a punishing marathon of anxiety and resolve: if you are given 24 hours to write three essays you inevitably end up using 24 mostly sleepless hours.
All the traditional built-in “I ran out of time” exam excuses no longer apply. Students are rarely candidates for British sympathy but, though not at the sharpest end of this crisis, they have no doubt felt the isolation of the past months as keenly as anyone. One exam week down and two to go, and not even the prospect of a party at the end of it.
A jury of our Piers
At the end of January, I wrote a story about the ways Piers Morgan shaped the nation’s angry divisions. It involved a month of watching Good Morning Britain and reporting on how the personal obsessions of the nation’s most visible anchor – with Meghan Markle and the “snowflake” generation – also became the nation’s obsessions.
I now feel duty bound to add a postscript to that report. One of the more outlandish side-effects of Covid-19 has been the transformation of Morgan into a formidable voice of righteous anger against the failures of “populist” government. Who knows what prompted this change? Perhaps the fortitude of Captain Tom or a midnight visit from Marley’s ghost.
It began when Morgan finally admitted that the US president he had claimed as “cool, calm and collected” was clearly “batshit” crazy. Since then Morgan has been moved to acknowledge he went “too far” in his obsession with Markle, and even recognised his eternal nemesis, Ian Hislop’s Private Eye, as a fellow traveller. Last week, Anna Soubry, who received her share of Morgan vitriol, noted “Piers is on a journey”. Long may it continue.
• Tim Adams is an Observer writer
