I went to Florida to see Disney World. What I found looked like a dying country

I’ve always sensed a whiff of sadness in Florida, perhaps because so many people go there to die. Although not us, obviously, because we went for Disney World. Still, terminality is in the air. In Mafia films, Florida is always, literally, the last resort: the place the wheezing hood heads after he’s failed in the Bronx and Vegas and is now unwittingly destined for a one-way trip on a fishing boat.

Somehow, I reckon, they’re feeling the same mystical embalming lure as those Jewish New York retirees who come to trundle their last-ever mobility scooters into their last-ever condominiums. One day, this dangling American dogleg will fall into the sea under the weight of their coastal apartment blocks, as the whole damn country opts to end its days in the sun. Go south, and by the time you’re bouncing over the narrow archipelago towards the Keys where Ernest Hemingway perhaps first thought of shooting himself in the face, it is hard to escape the sensation that America itself is running out of road.