Digested week: What to give to the billionaires who have, well, billions?

Monday

My wife feeds me information about our upcoming holiday plans on a need-to-know basis. This is partly because I get anxious about impending travel, and partly because she’s not interested in my opinion. At some point in the spring she will furnish me with dates; later on she will let slip the name of a destination airport. I don’t mind this, but when I’m asked if I’m going anywhere nice this summer in the course of a conversation, my only answer is: “Apparently.”

This year I cannot even be that specific. At some point in January my wife booked a week in Greece (don’t ask me which bit) in the second half of August. By the end of April we’d written off the trip, although it technically remained booked. By the end of May, however, the idea of actually going once again seemed a faint possibility.

At the end of June I was less certain than ever. There had been talk of air bridges, travel corridors and traffic lights, mostly in the form of promises of further information at some point in the future. A list of countries to which Britons can travel without having to quarantine for 14 days on return still hadn’t been announced on Monday, even though the start date for the plan was 6 July.

Meanwhile Greece announced plans to open up to air travel from EU countries, but the UK wasn’t on their list; travellers from Britain will have to wait until at least 15 July. I’m not sure where my US passport leaves me in all this. The EU remains closed to US visitors.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I’m not in the position of trying to book travel based on incomplete, confusing and sometimes contradictory information. My holiday is all arranged and paid for; I just don’t know if I’m taking it yet. I should add that I’m more than happy to stay home if it means avoiding stress, uncertainty, risk and potential illness. Then again, I say that every year.

Tuesday

The reality TV phenomenon Kim Kardashian reportedly became a billionaire after the global beauty company Coty announced it was taking a 20% stake in the KKW brand, tipping her into the 10-figure tax bracket. To celebrate the news her husband, Kanye West, tweeted a picture of a tomato – more precisely two tomatoes and a few flowers arranged artlessly on the ground. By way of explanation he wrote: “So blessed this is still life/So I made you this still life.” Perhaps explanation is not the word I want here.

His gnomic effort raises an important point: how does one appropriately congratulate someone on their newfound billionaire status, especially in a country where millions are unemployed, coronavirus infections are setting records and demand for greetings cards that say “You’re a billionaire!” on the front remain low? Well done to West for trying to make it sound like some kind of spiritual attainment, but I’m old enough to remember when the reward for making a billion dollars was a billion dollars. If you wanted more affirmation than that, you had to buy it.

Wednesday

Dr Clare Wenham, assistant professor of global health policy at the London School of Economics, gained considerable notice on social media after her daughter Scarlett interrupted a BBC news interview about lockdown measures to ask some urgent questions about unicorns. Meanwhile, over on Sky News the same thing was happening to the channel’s foreign affairs editor, Deborah Haynes, whose son had a priority-shredding query regarding biscuits.

Such scenes have become commonplace under lockdown, to the extent that your credibility as an expert is strained if you can’t interpret global economic indicators while a two-year-old pulls your hair. My remote work station is safely at the far end of my garden, and anyway my sons are too old – not to mention too asleep – to disrupt a Zoom meeting during normal working hours. I suppose if I left the door open there’s a chance I could be attacked by a squirrel mid-interview, but I have no plans to maintain my composure under those conditions.

Thursday

The prime minister suggested that we should applaud bankers the way we do NHS workers, in what may go down in history as his “I am not a communist” speech. His tribute to “those who make our NHS possible: innovators, wealth creators, capitalists, financiers”, didn’t lead to any clapping or pot-banging round my way on Thursday night, but for all I know they were having street parties in some of the better postcodes. Again, I may be showing my age here, but there was a time when a massive amount of capital was considered its own reward. Nobody wanted any applause for it, indeed many modest financiers and capitalists went to extraordinary lengths to disguise how much money they had. Some of them even sent it overseas, far from clapping hands. I wonder if that still happens.

Friday

At last some clarity on coronavirus and summer travel. “Today marks the next step in carefully reopening our great nation,” said Grant Shapps, who is, alarmingly, the transport secretary. “Whether you are a holidaymaker ready to travel abroad or a business eager to open your doors again, this is good news for British people and great news for British businesses.”

To sum up: the UK-wide 6 July relaxation of quarantine restrictions for travellers will go ahead as planned, but on 10 July, and for England only. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland travellers will for the time being have separate rules. If you land at an airport in England and then travel to Wales, your status defies categorisation at this point.

The good news for travellers to Greece is: you can come back from Greece, even if you can’t yet go there in the first place. And you will still have to quarantine on your return because Greece has deferred its decision on UK travellers until mid-July, so it’s not one of the more than 50 countries on Shapps’s air bridge list. Bear in mind when making your holiday plans that these rules are subject to change at any time without warning, and then back again.

The question is as open as ever: am I going anywhere nice on holiday this year? I have absolutely no idea.