November 17, 2008 - Cancel Christmas - sorry, but no one gets anything this year
Given that it hasn’t yet got properly cold here, it feels like a very strange hallucination. In a naked effort to make us forget that we are living in an economic meltdown, the stores are full of fairy lights. Their illusion makes you feel you are in some sort of dream world - everyone is friendly, everything is cheap. Never mind what the news says about the collapsing auto industry, all is just fine and cheery.
November 11, 2008 - My night of joy, then exhaustion dawns
For a moment last week, around midnight on Tuesday, we all went mad with joy. Mad in a way I’ve never seen or heard. As I went to bed around 4am I could still hear the screams from people in the street: “We did it!” Emails came in from friends the next day: “I’m still drunk; you?”
November 3, 2008 - I can’t wait till all the shouting stops
We’re finally here: tomorrow is Election Day. You could cut the tension with a knife. Many of my friends have been stumping in swing states for Obama over the weekend, terrified that at the last moment a “Bradley effect” could rob him of the victory the polls predict. I don’t think this will happen. H L Mencken had a point when he wrote that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public - but he hadn’t met Sarah Palin. When Obama is declared victor, I hope, it will be a glorious coda to the Bush years.
October 27, 2008 - Obama is short of fans on Wall Street
The other evening I went as a guest of friends to a dinner to raise money for a hospital in New York. This was the same hospital where my twins were prematurely born. On entering this world they weighed only 2lb and 3lb respectively, but went on to thrive. So I was glad to be at this event with friends whose company I always enjoy.
October 20th - Uh-oh, now I’m in love with a vampire
Back before the fall of Lehman Brothers and the global economic collapse, I had a dirty little secret: my weekly addiction to the TV series Gossip Girl, about the absurdly rarefied lives of a fictional group of wealthy New York teenagers. Now ratings for the show are soaring: more than ever, people want cheap escapism.
October 13, 2008 - The silicon chips aren’t down yet
“How poor are you?” That’s what formerly rich guys ranging from hedge-fund kings and tech pioneers to bankers and trust-fund heirs are now asking each other at dinners around town.
October 6, 2008 - And a small glass of Chateau Plonk, please
Last week saw not just the initial failure of Hank Paulson’s bail-out bill but also the death of the $800 bottle of wine. “It’s just not OK to have that on your expenses at a time like this,” one restaurateur says…
September 29, 2008 - Lose your job and watch friends vanish
Alberto Vilar once promised so many millions to both New York’s Metropolitan Opera and London’s Royal Opera House that his name was engraved in both places — only to be removed in 2005, when prosecutors charged him with stealing most of his fortune.
September 22, 2008 - Women should beware male spinsters
For some reason, in the last week or so I’ve had a series of lunches and dinners with friends who are male, single, over 35 and never-married. Men like this were traditionally labelled playboys, a term implying they possessed a rakish charm and a wariness of settling.
September 15, 2008 - Lehman’s collapse rattles the really rich
The phone has rung off the hook all weekend. “Are you OK?” I’ve asked friends whose husbands have been at Lehman Brothers. No, of course they are not. They just saw everything they’ve worked for go down the drain. A lunch barbecue with a Lehman executive who has been there 16 years was cancelled. No explanation needed.
September 8, 2008 - Be very afraid of the hockey moms
Like 37 million Americans last Wednesday night, I sat transfixed as I watched the previously unknown figure of Sarah Palin turn herself into the angel of the Republican party. But the burning issue in my mind was: what is a hockey mom?
September 1, 2008 - Not even a woman can win it for McCain
John McCain made a brilliant move in choosing Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old governor of Alaska, to be his running-mate. This appointment ought to make up for all his own deficiencies. Palin is young. She’s female. She’s attractive; she’s got some celebrity, having been the runner-up in a Miss Alaska beauty pageant.
August 18, 2008 - Will Hillary rain on Obama’s parade?
The story I’d been hearing for some time has finally come out in the open: Hillary Clinton, Bill, and many of her major financial supporters, known as “bundlers”, are so livid at what they see as underhanded play by the Obama team that they intend to eviscerate what ought to be Obama’s coronation at the Democratic Party Convention in Denver this week.
August 11, 2008 - Creative Brits are the talk of the town
In New York, the pre-movie hype about Woody Allen’s latest movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, had all been about the kiss between Penélope Cruz, onscreen and real-life girlfriend of male lead Javier Bardem, and America’s modern version of Marilyn Monroe, Scarlett Johansson.
August 4, 2008 - It’s official: guys can wear shorts to work
For women, dressing for summer here is a whole lot easier (and cheaper) than in London. You know that stepping outside will feel like walking into a blast furnace, so you choose pretty light sundresses and then you buy a cardigan to battle the freezing air-conditioning inside.
July 28, 2008 - I’ve almost put my sons on the stage
The light-bulb went off while I was driving home last weekend. From the back seat of the car, my twin five-year-olds burst into song: “I’m a joker, I’m a smoker, I’m a midnight toker …”
July 21, 2008 - Divorce is up, personal trainers down
Last week, in the wake of the near-implosion of mortgage insurer Fannie Mae, and with rumours swirling about the fate of Lehman Brothers, where the stock has plummeted 70 per cent, I got an email from a friend. Instead of his usual pithy jokes, he sent me his investment fund’s second-quarter report.
July 14, 2008 - Tough times, but they still keep giving
New York’s billionaires, it seems, have not really noticed the downturn. They still spend their summers on lavish yachts in Europe, and are still flying in their own planes. Hearteningly, they also continue to give philanthropically on a vast scale.
July 7, 2008 - Oh, for the days of divorce with dignity
The headlines here recently seem to have all been about sex - and costly, illicit sex at that.
June 30, 2008 - Trial runs for Wall Street’s finest
It’s muggy here - a point emphasised by the increasing number of sweating brows I’ve watched on TV the past week. These brows mainly belong to men in suits who are on their way in and out of courthouses on charges of white-collar crime.
June 23, 2008 - Michelle will be a fine feisty First Lady
A friend saw Laura Bush recently and told me how “poised” our First Lady was: “petite” and “gracious”, a “listener”, not a talker. These are the traditional qualities we are supposed to admire in a First Lady. Feisty Democratic women have had a harder time fitting the mould.
June 16, 2008 - London, you’ve changed for the better
For the first time in a year I have spent the week in London, working and seeing friends. It has been an eye-opening experience; after all, it has been 11 years since I lived here.
June 9, 2008 - My nursery shame as a no-show mom
It was the one item in the diary marked “DO NOT MISS”, scheduled for 10.30am on Thursday. What occasion merited such urgency? My children’s graduation ceremony … from nursery school.
June 6, 2008 - Big Apple macho men spin out of control
I will readily confess to being a New York gym rat: I like to go for a run or workout on the elliptical machines. The only times it isn’t relaxing is if I happen to enter the gym at the same time as the “spinning” class is taking place …
May 19, 2008 - Give me Michelle over Hillary any day
It was an intensely political evening. First, the premiere of the amazing new film Recount, starring Kevin Spacey and Denis Leary, turned the dry legal arguments about “hanging chads” in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election into fascinating drama.
May 12, 2008 - Life’s just a deal for the new gurus
G. W. Bush christened himself “The Decider”, and expounded upon his ability to make swift decisions that come not from his brain but his gut. And look where that has got us…
May 6, 2008 - Don’t blame Obama for his mentor’s flaws
Those of us firmly in the anti-Hillary, pro-Obama camp are fed up with it. “I can’t read about it any more,” one Obama backer wrote to me over the weekend.
April 28, 2008 - Bring on the long, hot Manhattan nights
Where else would a mother in her thirties be invited to dance the night away, seven nights in a row? To sip champagne or cosmopolitans with movie stars and producers all night long and talk nonsense about unwritten movie scripts?
April 21, 2008 - I’m ditching butch Hillary for gentle Obama
For me, no matter what happens in Pennsylvania, I’m done with Hillary Clinton. I have long felt that either Democratic candidate would suffice as President.
