As satire and reality collide I find it difficult to see the funny side of anything going on in Westminster
It’s been a week since I got back from Minneapolis, where we were visiting my daughter and her husband, and the holiday already feels like something of a distant memory. I arrived back at Heathrow late in the morning and by the afternoon I was sketching Boris Johnson’s press conference at the
G7 summit. Since then, politics has become progressively more mad: so much so it’s even affecting my sleep. Last night I had a dream that I was crossing and recrossing the
Irish border, petrified I was going to be stopped by guards. I don’t think that’s one I need to take to my shrink for interpretation. But the holiday was wonderful – the first time we had all been together as a family since last
Christmas – with plenty of lazing around beside lakes as well as more energetic activities. The one downside, apart from the expense – the government’s efforts to drive the pound towards parity with the dollar to simplify a US-UK trade deal did us no favours – was that we got to learn more about the workings of the
American healthcare system than we anticipated after my wife broke her thumb playing softball. Just as well she had taken out insurance – though we never managed to reclaim the unused tokens at the
baseball centre that another family stole from us while we were tending to my wife – as her treatment came to just short of $8,000 (£6,500). Needless to say, on our return home, the doctors here said they would never have repaired the break with pins that large. It was like listening to one builder inspecting another’s work.