Back to Black

The spring is sprung and crochet seems more attractive than Trumpalogue.

This week I cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post. I feel guilty about shooting the messenger, but I have reached peak Trump and need respite.

I might instead subscribe to Crochet! or Model Railroader, so I can join online forums of people whose only concern is to find a ball of wool with the same dye lot as the rest of the tea cosy they are making for their niece or how to recreate in miniature the rolling stock used at the Port of Baltimore in 1946. They have to be healthier distractions than full immersion in dissecting President Donald Trump’s Tweets, and the ballby-ball commentary about TV satirists’ mimicking White House press secretary Sean Spicer.

I no longer recall the original Mission: Impossible TV series, but surely that title belongs to Spicer’s job. I don’t know how he manages to get out of bed each morning. In Washington DC, this is the daily news diet, occasionally interrupted by news of the biggest non-nuclear bomb in the world being dropped on Afghanistan or the possibility of war with North Korea. Those kinds of things.

Every man and his dog will soon be doing an analysis of Trump’s first 100 days and I intend to read none of them. In part, this is because the whole 100 days thing is, in my view, a media construct.

But anyway, having just lived through all 100 of them, I have no desire to relive them. Not yet, anyway. Maybe in 30 years’ time, when this is history, I will read about it, but for now I would rather escape it.

The spring is beautiful in the US capital. Pink and white dogwood trees are blooming, azaleas are blazing like bonfires in suburban gardens and everywhere sunlight is filtered through the bright lime hue of spring leaves.

Yet, following the news it is hard not to feel a sense of foreboding, which, I think, is created at least as much by the media as by the President. One of them needs to go, and there is no unsubscribe button for him.