Before I sat down last night to write this post, I looked back through some photos from the same day four years ago. It began for us with a hearty breakfast at The Comfort Diner on East 45th Street, after which we walked across to 5th Avenue and up towards Central Park. On her left hand, Liv wore the engagement ring I’d given her three days previously, my left knee sinking slowly into the Clapham Common mud and my heart beating like a drum as I squeezed it onto her finger.
Our destination that morning wasn’t some idyllic, frost-rimed spot in the middle of the park, perfect for holiday selfies and picture-postcard kisses. Instead we stopped between 56th and 57th Street, two blocks shorts of the madcap not-quite-roundabout enclosing Grand Army Plaza, and joined a growing crowd outside the monolithic façade of Trump Tower.
At midday Eastern Standard Time, as people around us chanted and waved placards, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. The ceremony took place 200 miles south-west of our location that day, but its impact was felt and communicated in visceral fashion; in the groans and tears that cascaded down the street in the minutes after Trump lifted his hand from the Bible he’s never read and gazed out over the gathered (semi-)mass of onlookers he’d conned.
The following day we returned to Trump Tower, our voices raised this time alongside those of the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers driven out onto the bitterly cold streets by the need to register their dismay and anger at what this assault on decency represented. Nearly half-a-million people shuffled like sardines along the packed streets of Manhattan on the Women’s March that afternoon, joining the roughly four million who filled cities across the US with pink pussy hats and – for a few short hours – the belief that hope and a vocal rejection of hatred might be enough to effect change.
Week by week, day by day, the last four years have tested any faith I may have had in that chimera to the absolute limit. The Trump presidency has been a sinkhole in the already fragile surface-layer of American society, but it’s also empowered and amplified populists around the world. Like a grotesque Rorschach Test, it’s served as an invitation to ethno-nationalists, strongmen, and social conservatives alike; pick the bits that work for you, package them in TV-friendly rhetoric, and embrace the same post-truth ethos that brought phrases like “drain the swamp,” “fake news,” and “lock her up” off the far-right message boards and into the mainstream.
A little over eight months after that New York trip, I watched Liv walk up the aisle of the 12th-century church next to her grandmother’s house in Droxford, radiant in a white dress and the biggest smile I’ve ever seen outside of cartoons. A week before our wedding, Trump’s Education Secretary, the (almost-literally) criminally underqualified Betsy DeVos, rescinded Title IX protections for sexual assault victims on college campuses. Three days after we returned from our ‘mini-moon’, his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, announced that discrimination protections under the Civil Rights Act would no longer apply to trans people; a day later, his ‘License to Discriminate’ made it clear that the Department of Justice would side with those who wished to withhold services from the broader LGBTQ community.
The blows kept coming, vicious, ridiculous, and heartbreaking in equal measure. You don’t need me to list them all here, and frankly I couldn’t if I stayed at my laptop all night. Covfefe. China Virus. Children in cages. Crazy Joe Biden. Corruption. Crooked Hillary. And that’s just (a fraction of) the Cs.
Liv and I spent our honeymoon in Argentina, a magical trip that both surpassed our wildest expectations and left us craving more. While we were happily cocooned in fancy hotels, wine lodges, and marital bliss, Trump tweeted that his nuclear button was ‘larger and more powerful’ than Kim Jong-Un’s. He threatened to cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority and referred to various majority-black nations as “shithole countries.” Practically in the same breath he described himself as a “very stable genius,” a moment that got filed in the same category of grim, gallows humour as so many other presidential proclamations issued during his time in office.
Martha was conceived in March 2018 and born in December of that year. Like all expectant parents, we tried to keep our stress level as low as possible during Liv’s pregnancy, and for the most part it proved to be a gloriously happy time in our lives. We were both working, in jobs that paid well and challenged us in positive ways. Our travels over that spring and summer took us to Madrid, Lisbon (by night train), Cornwall, Manchester, the Wimbledon Queue, Exeter, and perhaps most memorably of all, La Manga Club in the south of Spain, courtesy of The Tennis Podcast. When at home, we had friends and family close by, lots of creative projects to fill our time with, and a rock-solid faith in our ability to ride whatever waves were coming our way as Martha’s due date grew closer and far more real.
Meanwhile in the world outside our lovely little bubble, Trump revoked access to the White House for journalists who criticized him, mocked and refused to attend the funeral of John McCain, allowed the Saudis to whitewash the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, separated migrant children from their families at the Mexican border, and flew to Helsinki for a sycophantic and unsettling press conference with Vladimir Putin. Plus ça change, right?
The cognitive dissonance accelerated through 2019, as Martha filled our lives with joy on a daily basis, while Trump set fire to everything and gaslit the people he was elected to lead. In case it’s all blurring into one at this point, that was the year he used a sharpie to try and redraw a map of a hurricane, because it contradicted comments he’d previously made about the storm’s path. Which somehow feels like word salad even as I’m typing it, despite the fact that I LITERALLY REMEMBER THAT HAPPENING. He also told left-wing Democratic Congresswomen to go back and help the countries ‘from which they came,’ threatened his political enemies, claimed he ought to be given a third term, continued to boost extreme right-wing voices inside and outside his administration, tried to force a foreign power to dig up dirt on the man who would ultimately defeat him in the following November’s election, and – finally – suffered the ignominy of impeachment in the House of Representatives as the year drew to a close.
Fact-checkers estimate that Trump lied an average of 20 times per day during his presidency. Think for a second about what that means for the people exposed to his speeches, emails, and tweets. A view of the world completely divorced from anything approaching reality. The daily stoking of resentment, nativism, and a deep suspicion of the nebulous forces assembling to reimpose ‘deep state’ norms at the expense of Real American Values.
Anyway.
We’ve been incredibly lucky over the last 11 months. Liv and I both had Covid in March, but neither of us were sick for more than a couple of days. By that time, we’d moved from our beloved but fundamentally impractical ground-floor rented flat in Brixton to the three-bed semi we now own (along with Halifax) in unlovely Croydon. Martha has remained in nursery throughout the pandemic – a boon for both her and us – and while I spent six months scratching around for work between June and December, we never faced anything approaching the financial hardship that we’ve seen in the community around us. Even more importantly (from our perspective), friends and family have stayed mercifully healthy during this weirdest and most emotionally taxing of periods in our lives.
Over the summer months, as the rate of infection slowed and a window of something resembling normality opened, however briefly, we spent the most wonderful week in France with some of our best friends. The weather was sunny and hot, the local wine tasted like only local wine can, and from our charming gîte – complete with its own bar and network of caves – we ventured out each day with our children to explore the local countryside.
By that point the US election was only three months away, and as I checked the news each morning the disparate and often random talking-points thrown out by the Trump campaign over the previous six months started to coalesce into something more sinister. Mail-in voting was a big con, the President declared over and over again; one that would lead to rampant fraud in swing states. On the day we left for France, he tweeted this:
“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”
A few days later, sufficiently alarmed by a sudden slow down in USPS deliveries, the House of Representative summoned the Trump-appointed Postmaster General to explain how service levels would be restored in time for the election and the expected deluge of postal votes.
Battle lines had been drawn. Narratives framed. And you know what happened next. I spent much of that strange, surreal week in early November camped on the sofa in front of CNN, rotating different hoodies and PJ bottoms as Jake Tapper, Jim Acosta, and John King chronicled the slow death of Trump’s presidency, if not Trumpism itself.
I wrote on Facebook the night before the election that ‘it’s who Trump is, what he represents, and what he’s enabled that makes getting rid of him such a priority. He’s a venal, petty, bullying narcissist; a pathological liar, utterly lacking in even basic empathy for the people he’s meant to lead […] His administration has made America meaner, angrier, and morally destitute. It’s done untold harm to immigrants, minorities, women, and the poor. God knows how much worse things would be if he got re-elected.’
I stand by those words now, though the seditious mob who attacked the Capitol earlier this month showed that electoral defeat in itself wasn’t enough to banish the specter of further damage. I’m also aware that Trump’s departure from the White House is not some panacea, either for the US or for the political leaders, groups, and onlookers held in horrified thrall by his presence there over the last four years. The conditions that led to his victory in 2016 – and to 74 million people voting for him in 2020 – have not gone away. In this country the next election isn’t due till 2024, which means close to four more years of Johnson, Hancock, Gove et al, and probably more, given that even the government’s bungling response to Covid hasn’t been enough to wean British English voters off their addiction to Tory misrule.
Oof, and I was going to end this post on a happy note. OK, no, I am going to end it on a happy note! “Joy cometh in the morning,” said Joe Biden in his speech yesterday afternoon. History can’t be charted on a single, smooth timeline. The four-year period that drew to a close with Joe Biden’s inauguration on the steps of the same Capitol building invaded by Trump’s foot-soldiers was a time of darkness for America and the world. However, amid the fear, the apprehension, and the constant doom-scrolling, it’s also been without question the happiest – and most joyous – four years of my life.
Starting with the moment I proposed to Liv (and – crucially – she said yes), three days before Obama left office, and continuing through our move into that cosy Solon Road flat, planning a wedding, getting married, going on honeymoon, finding out that Liv was pregnant, having a baby, watching Martha grow and do something new/brilliant every day, buying a house, and surviving a pandemic together, we’ve packed more joy, love, and life into the Trump administration (and Brexit Britain) than I’d dreamed might be possible even when the rest of the world wasn’t on fire. I don’t feel guilty about that – for one thing, it would be pointless and sort of self-indulgent to imply that my own feelings about life should proceed in lock-step with the broader story unfolding around me – but I have been conscious on many occasions of its jarring strangeness, and of the level of privilege that allows me to sit here and write this after everything that’s happened. Context matters (in all things), and this period of such consequence for my family has been scarred to an irreperable degree for so many by this presidency.
For all that the Brexit vote and Trump’s victory over Clinton reignited my obsession with politics – on both sides of the pond – ultimately they will not be the first things I think of in years to come when I cast my mind back to 2016-2020 (and early 2021). Instead it will be that journey – so giddy and frenetic in one sense, so calm and easy and right in another – from planning to move in with my girlfriend, to celebrating our daughter’s second birthday, and raising a glass both to the anniversary of our engagement trip to New York and to the dawning of this bright new day in America.
In every meaningful sense, it’s been quite a four years.
Wine Info
Year: 2015
Grapes: Mourvedre, Grenache, Counoise, Vaccarese
Producer: Domaine les 3 Cellier
Alcohol: 14.5%
Source: A gift from Liv’s colleague, Professor Popat
Taken from the Friarwood Wines website:
In 2007 Marceau (Marc) Cellier decided to retire and hand over his vineyards to his three children (Ludovic, Julien and Benoit) and Nathalie (Ludovic’s wife). They are the 8th generation of the Cellier family to work the vine and to make top-class Rhone wines. Domaine les 3 Cellier was thus born on August 1st, 2007, with the breakup of Domaine Saint Benoit. The Cellier family retained 13.4 hectares of vines, all within the Chateauneuf-du-Pape appellation.
45% sees ageing in new French oak; production is only 250 cases per vintage. Medium-bodied, with red fruit, soft texture and a forward, approachable character accentuated by herb-touched complexity. A real charmer.
Wine Verdict
Livvy
This bottle of wine was a Christmas present from Professor Popat, the most senior consultant in my department, and a hugely generous one at that! Châteauneuf-du-Pape almost feels like a celebrity wine – a pretentious punchline in How I Met Your Mother and a notoriously expensive bottle, I was fascinated to try it and see if it lives up to its reputation.
And it definitely does, of course! Smooth and fruity, it has a strong body without being heavy and was really delicious. It had a richness like velvet that managed to avoid being overwhelming and had a lasting finish without being particularly tannic. Really beautifully balanced with a hint of chocolate, a hint of red fruit, it was a combination of everything that is delicious and one of the best red wines I’ve drunk in a while!
9/10, what a gift!
Chris
Châteauneuf-du-Pape is a style of wine I approach with a fair degree of suspicion, given its tendency to attract a price premium (over its true value) in this country. However, I loved this one, and not just because I’d already had two glasses of champagne by the time we started drinking it.
For one thing, it somehow smells of the South of France; of dried fruit and the afternoon sun. It also manages to pack a huge amount of flavour into each mouthful without being overwhelmingly heavy, despite the high alcohol content. Alongside that initial dryness, there’s cherry and maybe a hint of stewed plums in there, mixed with something more savoury/umami.
It’s a wine that I liked a lot from the first mouthful, but really loved by the second or third glass: not an unusual state of affairs, but one that I think on this occasion mainly reflects how rich and deep it is. Drinking it made me very happy indeed!
9/10
Chris and Livvy Drink Wine 