A game of two halves (with pinot noir)

Tales of a grumpy passenger

Our route was not quite as scenic as this.

It was a game of two halves. Our journey, I mean. Our mad dash to Italy by car. I won’t go into the details of why this was necessary. Let’s just say Italian bureaucracy, which covers a multitude of sins/revenue streams/mental health crises. In the end, despite the attempts of Italian truck drivers to treat passing cars as enemies to be vanquished, we made it.

After three failed attempts to get LPG (liquid propane gas) delivered, or at least three promises which turned out to be expressions of polite aspiration, we now have gas. (Stefano, from the energy company, and I vied over whose fault it was. I blamed my terrible Italian. He wouldn’t hear a word against me. “No, no, no, signora, è colpa mia!” etc etc. I’m now terrified of calling the company, fearing that the mutual gallantry can never be matched.)

I’m now wearing only two jumpers on top of my Uniqlo heat-tech fleecy top and my Uniqlo heat-tech leggings and jeans. It makes me smile when people say “oh, Italy, how lovely, a blast of winter heat!” Nope, that’s Bali. Seventeenth-century stone houses on Umbrian hillsides in January are about as warm as you’d expect.

Anyway, back to that journey. I have started to look forward to it in the way I used to look forward to the annual trip to Sweden as a child. That was a proper journey. Not a Stansted Express followed by a shuffling queue designed to make you feel like a criminal. It was a multi-staged affair that felt more like a pilgrimage. There was the car journey to Tilbury and the excitement of the Dartford Tunnel. There were the long queues to get on the ferry and the clanking chains when our lane, always the slowest, was finally allowed to crawl up the ramp. There was the descent to the cabin: so deep in the bowels of the ship that it felt like a trip to Hades. And then there were the picnics on deck, the Agatha Christies and the hours gazing out at the ocean.

I never thought in advance about the car sickness and the sea sickness and the squabbles in the cabin and the car. I thought about the cinnamon rolls and the glimpse of the beach when we arrived.

In some ways, I haven’t changed much. I start feeling chirpy a few days before we leave. It’s usually still dark, just as it was in those childhood years when we packed up the Morris Marina. On Saturday night I’d got to bed at 2am after getting home from Sky News at 1am. I got up at 5 and we set off at 6. I knew I’d be semi-comatose for the journey and, at first, I was. Then the sun rose as we zoomed down the A2 and I felt that surge of excitement I used to get as a child. I started dreaming of the bacon roll I always have at the Shuttle terminal at Dover. I thought about the first café crème at the first French aire. (I have written before about the joy of French service stations.)

The bacon roll was delicious and so was the café crème. The French motorways were remarkably clear. I’d brought a huge pile of books but I didn’t touch them. Instead, I gazed out at the fields, and the odd canal, and the odd windmill. From time to time, I fiddled with my phone. I relished the piercing, dislocating joy of doing nothing.

Before I met Anthony, I was always the driver. I was usually the only one in my car. Now I’m happy to be the passenger.

So, Day 1 was a success. The roads were smooth. The weather was good. The traffic was light. The weather in the car was pretty good, too. Not too much backseat (passenger-seat) driving. Mozart arias from the playlist. If the day had been a playlist, I would sum it up as “feel-good vibes”. There was a moment of disappointment when we were shown our room in the Swiss hotel we stayed in last summer. Then, we’d marvelled at the lavender-fringed terrace and the wood grain on the sand-blasted timber wall. This time what we were shown was a bit more vin ordinaire. When I mentioned this to the receptionist, she told me firmly that we’d had a free upgrade before and that if we wanted another one, we’d need to pay for it.

We moved to the room with the wood grain. I cracked open the pinot noir I’d snapped up at the service station (the cheapest bottle at the hotel was fifty quid). After enormous plates of schnitzel and rösti, we collapsed on our giant bed.

The weather on Day 2 of our journey wasn’t quite so great. Rain, fog, mist and misery seemed to engulf the car. The weather inside the car wasn’t so great either. I had a red-wine headache I couldn’t shake off and seemed to have turned, overnight, from chilled spectator of fields and windmills to hyper-vigilant traffic monitor. When a speed camera flashed, indicating a breach that would cost us several bottles of hotel pinot noir, I was impressed by my magnanimity, but felt the need to mention it after a few, in my view, serious violations of the Highway Code. (I haven’t looked at it since I was 17, obviously, but I’m sure the recommended stopping distances were a lot longer than my beloved’s – and, indeed, everyone else’s on the motorway.)

It wasn’t as bad as this, thank God

There are many, many wonderful things about Italy, but the A1 from Milan to Città di Castello isn’t one of them. By the time we’d done a supermarket shop, for food we couldn’t cook because we didn’t have any gas, we were both a tiny bit fractious – and ready to hunker down with hot water bottles, bread, cheese and an episode of the latest preposterous Netflix caper, Black Doves.

And then a new day dawned and then gas arrived and then the trumpets sounded.

I’m always amazed by how different the world looks according to one’s mood. On Sunday, it was a sunny place, filled with beauty and treats. On Monday, it was a cloudy place, full of giant slabs of metal that threatened instant death. I even forced myself to eat a salad at a service station instead of the lasagne I really wanted and resented it for the rest of the day.

On Sunday, while scrolling through the news websites on my phone, I read about some extraordinary women. Sudha Murty, for example, mother of Rishi Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murty, was the only girl in her engineering class and the first woman on the factory floor at India’s largest car manufacturer. She went on to help her husband build Infosys, one of the most successful businesses in India. A billionaire who never buys new clothes, she has funded hospitals, houses, roads and infrastructure. “Of all the qualities I wanted for my daughter,” she said in an interview in the Sunday Times magazine, “number one was compassion for people. Life is not fair but you should be fair to others and that requires self-sacrifice. To make things fair, you lose something.”

I read about Romola Garai, whose performance at The Almeida in The Years, by the French writer Anni Ernaux, has garnered rave reviews. Garai has called out the misogyny in her industry many times. “I don’t think or care enough,” she said in the interview, “about what men want to place any value on it. I have in the past, but I’ve warred with that.” She is looking forward to getting older. “I feel part of getting older,” she says, “is feeling more powerful.” She’s inspired by Annie Ernaux, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature at the age of 82.

On Sunday, when the sun was shining, I felt inspired, too. On Monday, in the lashing rain, I didn’t. I read about Trump’s threats to the Danish prime minister. I read about his decision to withdraw security from former government employees the intelligence community thinks are under threat of assassination by a hostile state. “I mean,” he said with the smirk of a Mafia boss, “there’s risks to everything”.

I read about his desire to “clean out” the Gaza strip. I read about his plans to replace government employees with MAGA loyalists. I looked again at the men he has assembled around him. Many have no skills relevant to their new roles apart from loyalty to their new boss. Some of these men have already done great harm. A certain person, for example, whose name is a kind of smell. Yes, there is a smell to this new government, this government that wants to change the world. It is a putrid stink.

And when I had calmed down, and my headache had gone, and the gas had arrived on Tuesday, I thought this:

I thought it was fine for me to have had a lovely day on Sunday. I thought there are always terrible things happening in the world and those things don’t stop happening just because they make me angry and sad. I thought: we get one shot at this life on this planet. It helps no one to be miserable and life is nicer when we’re cheerful.

I also thought it was fine to have had a bad day on Monday. When the painkillers don’t work and the traffic is awful and the gas has run out, no one has to smile. And if you’re angry that the world’s leading superpower is run by a sociopath whose policies are dictated by personal grievance – well, you should be. This is not “a faraway country of which we know little”. Decisions made there will affect us all. That country’s media, its social media, its podcasts and its algorithms, will have an enormous effect on who runs our country and how.

That morning, I also saw a Channel 4 poll on “Gen Z: Trends, Truth and Trust”. In that poll, more than half of British young people between the age of 13 and 27 said they would prefer a dictatorship to a democracy. They think the UK would be a better place if it was run by a strong leader “who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”.

Yes, they really did.

As I thought about this poll, I thought about the fact that American voters have handed the reins of their country to men (and the odd woman) who think that government is about crushing your enemies and punishing the weak. One of those men, the man whose name is a smell, also wants our country and Germany to be run by men (and the odd woman) who think government is about crushing your enemies and punishing the weak. He did a special salute to show that he was serious.

That special salute and a bad smell.

This is how fascism starts.

Yesterday, I read that a quarter of the children in some schools in Chicago are now staying home from school because they’re frightened of being deported. Many of the streets in Chicago are empty because people who have been allowed to live and work and pay taxes in the US are now afraid of being rounded up and locked up.

Tell me that this doesn’t ring any bells.

I’ve met quite a few people who say they are no longer following the news or what’s happening in America. I understand why you wouldn’t want to, but doesn’t that also ring some bells?

When powerful men do terrible things, I feel what many women (and many men) feel: grief, impotence and rage. I’m not naïve enough to think that women are the answer. Our third female prime minister has been marching around in a MAGA hat. But one of the things I felt, one of the things I feel, on this chilly but beautiful Umbrian hill, is a hard truth about women and it’s this:

If we continue to stick largely to the soft stuff, to the art and philanthropy and “compassion”, and if we continue to sit in the passenger seat, then the men who do the hard stuff will go hardcore. I think that hard stuff is about to get very hard indeed in this second half of a game that isn’t a game.