American Notebook

Travels in Obamaland: we take our two boys for their first holiday in the vast parish of St Barack, as his first 100 days come to an end. The wave of T-shirt wisdom unleashed during the election campaign hasn’t dried up: one favourite is a sepia image of a group of American Indians, being sold by native Americans in Union Square — and bearing the slogan ‘Homeland Security: fighting terrorism since 1492’. For more portable appeal, try ‘I love my country — it’s just the government that bothers me’.

Joanna Coles, a feisty British export as editor of the American Marie Claire, kindly gives us a dinner at the hotspot Waverly Inn (particularly so, since if you’re a Brit who travelled there in the days of the two-dollar pound, you spend a lot of time hankering for a time when Bergdorf’s seemed quite reasonable). One of our fellow guests was at the Waverly the night that news of the titanic wobble at the insurance giant AIG broke.