Society

New York It’s Indian summertime and the living is easy. There hasn’t been a cloud above the Bagel for two weeks and the temperature is perfect. But the noise of cement mixers and construction everywhere is unbearable, and there is gridlock while the world’s greatest freeloaders are in town for the annual UN assembly. Despite the great weather, the place feels joyless, the media full of dire warnings about safe spaces and racism. There’s something very wrong here. Pessimism rules an anxious, depressed and angry people. Well, I’d be depressed too if I took American media and its pundits seriously. And speaking of depressed and angry buffoons, a halfwit called

Mindfulness at our all-inclusive Turkish beach resort began at 11 o’clock. Our mindfulness teacher was a tiny, smiley, flexible-looking woman who was not much bigger than the wheeled amplifier she dragged in behind her on to the beachside ‘wellbeing’ platform. With her musical voice she led us in a few brief arm stretches and neck rolls, then asked us to lie flat on our backs and think about what we were thinking about. Our intention this morning, she said, was to bring our minds back from elsewhere in time and space to the here and now and try and keep it there. This is what mindfulness is, basically, she said.

When I was growing up, my Italian grandfather was my favourite person. He taught me to play a mean game of draughts. He told me stories about his childhood in a remote mountain village in Abruzzo. I couldn’t hear often enough about how he got the deep scar across the bridge of his nose. He was standing as a little boy behind his father who had a pair of shears slung over his back and they fell and sliced his face. He told me they had to stick the adhesive strip of an envelope over the cut. My mother told him to be quiet every time he gave me the