The US has been intensely weirded out this week by the Eight Toes of Barbara Bush, and yet also suffused with a strange glow of sentimental nostalgia. It was a revelation made on live television this week by Jenna Bush Hager, daughter of the former US president George W Bush. While presenting on the Today show, an item about feet caused her to announce: “You wanna know the truth? My grandma’s missing a toe on each foot!”
“Barbara?” gasped her co-host, and Laura confirmed, adding: “It happened with age. They say if you don’t sleep much, your toes go away!” Your toes … what? Too much information, surely? And yet, wacky stories about the Bush family are almost comforting in this era, a reminder of an age before pussy-grabbing, Holocaust centres and so on. And in fact there have been stirrings of the rehabilitation of Dubya, with approving comments for his support for a free press and his obvious contempt for the incumbent at January’s inauguration. Curtis Sittenfeld’s brilliant 2008 novel, American Wife, sympathetically based on Laura Bush, has also given the former first lady a new prestige. And yet it was the fake news about weapons of mass destruction from Mr Bush and his associates that got us into Iraq. The Bush family will need considerably more picturesque toe loss before its reign looks like a golden age.
The great dash for dots
Colouring books for grownups are now a fact of life: an activity once associated with books for kids on pulp-quality paper bought from motorway service stations. Now there are pricey colouring books for adults near the till in Waterstones, often devoted to a single Hollywood star such as Robert Pattinson or Ryan Gosling. Now we should come to terms with the fact that dot-to-dot books for grownups are huge as well. There are soothing dot-to-dot books with which you can create big, elaborate pictures of Reims cathedral, for example, the drawing emerging from the numbered frogspawn as if by magic – no batteries or indeed talent required. Dot-to-dotting is a growth sector in publishing – an industry that is glad of growth sectors – and dot-to-dotters find that it helps with mindfulness and stress.
Fair enough. And the great thing for old-school bibliophiles is that there’s no point in downloading a dot-to-dot to your Kindle. But I can never see an adult dot-to-dot book without remembering the legendary dot-to-dot donkey in The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok, in which the numbers led you to draw, and then cross out, the animal’s tactlessly large penis. It could be a way forward for adult dot-to-dot.
We’ll always have 10am
Researchers at the University of Nevada have declared that 9am lectures for students should be banned on health grounds, because they interfere with young adults’ body clocks. Lectures should be no earlier than 11am, they say. Absolutely right. I myself remember resenting the 9am lecture: the overwhelming sense that there was something absurdly ascetic and self-harming about getting up at that time in the morning to listen to an analysis of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella. Now, as it happens, there is a furious row in the world of film reviewing about a new scheme to start press screenings at 9am instead of the usual 10:30am, so that more films can be fitted in. Not good. So when should they start? I’m prepared to compromise. As Claude Rains’s debonair police captain says in Casablanca, when the desperate Bulgarian couple say they will be in his office at 6am: “I’ll be there at ten!”
