Hannah Moore

Amazon has teamed up with Disney to launch a new app, Hey Disney! – a joint voice assistant feature which will allow your child to ‘Interact with Mickey Mouse, or Dory from Finding Nemo’. Just what we need. Customers can use Hey Disney! at Disneyworld theme parks – 'ask “Disney Magical Companion” to request fresh towels or the forecast, and Olaf from Frozen might tell you it’s cold out.’ Thanks Olaf. My husband thinks she’s spying on us. ‘The Russians,’ he says with an ominous shake of the head I already fear that my Amazon Alexa is gaslighting me – now she can manipulate me using that awful Mickey Mouse voice. A cold war is brewing in my household, between us humans and the cyborg who lives in our Amazon Echo Dot.

Christmas dinner for American pioneers was modeled on an English Christmas, for those who could afford it. Families with enough money served turkey, plum pudding, preserved fruits, mince pies, meringues and perhaps even a fresh ham. Children in the Midwest might wake on Christmas morning to find strings of candy and raisins draped on the tree, and wafers, gingerbread or oranges hidden in their stockings. Parents would give gifts of wooden toys, dolls made from corn husks, little glass baubles and colored ribbons for the tree. But in remote places on the western frontier, Christmas often meant providing food and accommodation for travelers and strangers.

In the German state of Hesse, the Christian Democrats have announced that, if they win next month’s state elections, they’ll back hunting licenses for wolves. The centre-right Free Democratic party has promised to do the same. Germany has around 1,000 wolves. Last year, the EU president Ursula von der Leyen’s pony was killed by one. Dolly was a 30-year-old pony and a beloved member of the family, who live in German state of Hannover. Von der Leyen is now proposing to relax regulations for wolves’ protection throughout the EU and animal rights activists are accusing her of seeking revenge on Europe’s wolf population for the death of her beloved pony.

Barbecue is a fact of life in America. Long summer evenings and reliably good weather make it an easy choice – plus turning on the oven heats up the house to an intolerable level, so if you want a hot meal, outdoors it is. When I was a kid my mom wouldn’t turn on the oven for the entirety of July and August. It was burgers, salads or quick quesadillas on the grill every night of high summer. Americans have been barbecuing pretty much since before the nation was a nation. The tradition came up from South and Latin America with the invading Spanish. Barbacoa they called it, and they’d use green wood so it cooked long and slow. Americans in the pre-Civil War South had big barbecues for 4 July, just like we do today.

Walking into the Sedlescombe Sainsbury’s superstore recently I passed a girl in tracksuits carrying a stack of steaming pizza boxes. ‘I didn’t know Sainsbury’s does takeaway pizza,’ I said to my husband. ‘Anniversary dinner?’ (two days away). Why not?  Sainsbury’s has been toying with made-to-order takeaway food for a few years, while shutting down their butchers, fishmongers and delis. It is opting for fast food in place of skilled, knowledgeable customer service. And it really shows.  Testing its products wasn’t quite as easy as I’d anticipated. I can’t attest to all Sainsbury’s but the level of disorganisation and incompetence at the Sedlescombe branch on the A21 astounds me.

Mexican food is my comfort food. My devotion stems from memories of my mother’s enchiladas. I used to love watching her fry the tortillas in oil. They would bob about like lily pads, sizzling gently. Then when the bubbles formed with little pops, Mom would lift each tortilla out of the hot oil and place it on a paper towel. At the same time, she’d be heating salsa roja on the gas stove and, when it was ready, she would dip a spoon in the pan and put a dollop on a tortilla, swirling the spoon to coat the whole tortilla, then turn it over and do the same on the other side. She was such a careful cook, and neat. The bowls of fillings sat ready and waiting on the kitchen island, each with its own spoon.

As half-term approaches, the kids at the school gate visibly slow down. They start dragging their feet and purple smudges appear under their eyes. I feel sorry for them. Then I think of my home country, America. No half-terms. Children in the US went back to school on 3 January and they won’t have a week off until 3 June – five months without a break. Children form their own societies, Lord of the Flies-style, where the only rules are the ones the bullies enforce  If that sounds blissful from a childcare point of view, here’s the drawback: the American summer break is 11 weeks long. Eleven weeks!

To celebrate my birthday, which falls six days before Christmas, my mother used to make gingerbread houses for me and a dozen of my friends. Every December, she set to work baking sheet after sheet of gingerbread. The baking would take up the first week of the month, and in the second she would assemble the houses, laying their icing foundations and sealing the four walls with crisp white frosting. These would dry in the basement laundry room, taking up every available surface. After school, I would peep at the houses and dream about my party. On the big day, my mom set out each perfect house at the formal dining room table, and we convened to decorate them.

What is the secret to a billionaire’s success? When Warren Buffet was asked how young people could mimic his wealth, he said: ‘Hone your communication skills, both written and verbal… You can have all the brainpower in the world, but you have to be able to transmit it, and the transmission is communication.’ Buffet knows this is easier said than done. Early in his career he’d vomit before every speech. After graduating from Columbia Business School and the New York Institute of Finance, he took a public speaking course from Dale Carnegie. ‘It changed my life,’ he says. It’s the only diploma displayed on his office wall. Other businessmen also rank public speaking as a key driver of success.

Last October I flew to Reykjavik for a spa weekend among the volcanic lagoons. It sounded blissful, but the reality was strange and, in some ways, downright alarming. This was back when people still cared about Covid, and no one seemed to care more about Covid than the Icelanders (even though the data suggested that barely anyone there had the virus). You might imagine their reaction when someone collapsed on an incoming plane. That someone was me. I didn’t have Covid and had multiple PCR tests to prove it. What I had was a bout of vertigo so bad that I initially thought the plane was crashing. I managed to tell the Icelandic stewards, “I’m fine, really, it’s just vertigo.” One of them said to the other, “We’ll give her the injection, pull her pants down.