somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

THIS WEEK’S Mini Trends is filled with summery, beachy vibes, even if the rest of the summer will be spent somewhat in lockdown. If you’ve been scrolling through Instagram, you’ll most likely have noticed that all the fashionistas have been traipsing about with a chic wicker market bag …

Somehow lately, the conversations have often shifted towards cars. It is true that here in Paris the traffic has increased since the Coronavirus Crisis, as instead of taking public transportation more Parisians have taken their weekend cars out during the week as well …

IT HAS BECOME one of these typical British summers, with the weather suddenly turning chilly and rainy and even blustery and stormy at times. We had about three glorious days of summertime last week and made the most of it by spending as much time outside as possible, knowing that it couldn’t last.

In June 1940, as the Nazis marched into Paris, the French interior and furniture designer Jean-Michel Frank procured a visa in Bordeaux and sailed to Lisbon with his boyfriend. Within days France had surrendered to the Germans, the prelude to some 76,000 French Jews being rounded up and sent to death camps. It was, you might say, a fate that Frank narrowly escaped—except by then he was already dead by his own hand. In March 1941, physically ill and mentally frail, narcotics no longer providing adequate solace and the world burning around him, he decided he’d had enough. “I ask all my friends who have been so good to me to forgive me,” he wrote in his suicide note before taking a fatal overdose of barbiturates in a New York apartment.

Tourist says of the new single, “’Last’ to me, is a reflection on grief. I started this track with James a few years ago, and while writing it we noticed that we were hearing the lyric differently, I was hearing “you know you’re lost” whereas James was hearing “you know you last”. The duality of that truth resonated with me, as both meanings are applicable when someone leaves us. It has struck a more personal chord recently, as recently one of my dearest friends passed away very suddenly.”

This is a story about a border war. Specifically, a border war between two nations that happen, at least in theory, to be precisely the same place. One of them is Britain, a small, soggy island whose power on the world stage is declining, where poverty, inequality, and disaster nationalism are rising, where the government has mangled its response to a global pandemic so badly that it’s making some of us nostalgic for the days when all we did was panic about Brexit …