Catriona Olding has narrated this article for you to listen to.
My youngest daughter and her husband moved to New York last October. Three days after they arrived, she tripped on a step and broke her ankle. ‘So annoying, I was wearing such a good outfit, Mumma.’ They didn’t know anyone. In a boot and on crutches she tackled umpteen flights of stairs in search of permanent accommodation, avoided crazy people in the street and faced up to taciturn bank and phone-shop employees. The unfriendliness of the city upset her more than the pain and inconvenience of the break.
I couldn’t afford to visit then – so when a friend, American Cathy, who’s got a second home near me in Provence, offered to buy flights and organise a trip for me and my daughter to visit her in D.C. last month, I accepted. Despite the reassuring neoclassicism of the buildings and monuments – whiter in the sunshine than a new set of dental veneers – there’s a frisson of anxiety enveloping the Land of the Free’s capital city. A few of Cathy’s friends have lost high security-level federal jobs. People I met, while acknowledging that change was necessary, were embarrassed by their President and worried what he’d say or do next.
Cathy works 14-hour days and rarely gets out. On the first evening we asked two well-padded men seated at a waterfront restaurant in Georgetown what the food was like. In heavy accents they said it was good. They told us they were Russian and in town for a meeting ‘with your leader’. Afterwards, noticing Cathy’s clenched jaw, I said: ‘They look more like the Russian football hooligans who rioted before the last England game in Marseille than politicos.’
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