Digested week: If you were under house arrest, would you be wishing for more books about soil?

“Who’s Nicole Kidman?” asked my 11-year-old. For god’s sake. “You know Nicole Kidman,” I said. “She’s in –.” I tried to think of a single thing she might’ve seen her in. “She’s that witch queen with the hair in Aquaman.” Blank stare. “She’s in … she’s an icon, she’s really famous. She used to be married to Tom Cruise.” A pause. “Oh for god’s sake, Tom Cruise, from Top Gun.” “Oh yes.” “She was the villain in Paddington!” Thank God.

Kidman had come to her attention, and that of every other 11-year-old girl in the land, via Adéla, the Slovakian singer whose song, Nicole Kidman, from her debut album, Prima, has caused a minor TikTok sensation and went to No 1 on Spotify earlier this month.

“Do you mean Adele?” I said, when we got to this part of what already seemed like a very long conversation. Excoriating, alright-grandma look. “It’s Adéla. With an “a”. She was in Dream Academy, she went out in the first round.” I knew what this meant and got briefly excited. “So she’s a Katseye reject!” More stern looks. “She’s in trouble for mocking Christians.” I gave up at this point.

The Nicole Kidman song, given a discreet nod by Madonna in a TikTok, was inspired by a corset Adéla wore to the Golden Globes and contains the lyrics: “Babygirl in control / I feel like Nicole,” and: “Every single night / I pray that my tits are sittin’ right / Moulin Rouge, my corset is so tight.” Hmm.

Kidman has graciously accepted the compliment and this week, when the song played at a runway show for Victoria’s Secret in LA, the actor, in the front row, laughed and put her head in her hands. I thought the whimsy of the song was quite clever, then made the mistake of watching the video and, after having a full Mary Whitehouse moment, am rehearsing remarks I intend casually to launch over dinner on the relationship between thongs and UTIs.

Tuesday

What do we think of King Charles sending Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned Burmese leader, two books about soil this week? Suu Kyi, who is 81 and has been under house arrest at an undisclosed compound since her government was ousted by a military coup in Myanmar in 2021, was pictured receiving the books and smiling in a photo apparently staged by her captors.

It’s either a genius move on the part of the king – bringing to the gated leader visions of rolling English countryside and vistas she has, at present, zero chance of enjoying – or else, a little tactless. Soil to Table by gardeners Bridget Elworthy and Henrietta Courtauld, has been described as, “a celebration of soil and its connection to the food we eat.” And the second title Soil: The World at Our Feet, is a catalogue from an exhibition held in London last year.

Gift diplomacy is, of course, always tricky. You may recall the king’s father’s blunt knockback of a gift from a well-wisher during a walkabout with his wife in 2016. Offered a framed picture of Elizabeth II, the then Duke of Edinburgh snapped: “I don’t want that and neither does the queen. She knows what she looks like.” (The Lady Mayor of Windsor briskly stepped forward to accept the gift and smooth things over).

Wednesday

Larry David’s new essay in Air Mail, the online newsletter, caused enough division this week to provoke coverage in the New York Times. “In our Socialist America,” David went after the Democrat Socialists of America, aping the style of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal to write: “Everyone will be so fulfilled spiritually and financially that the police department will be dramatically reduced to where an officer’s only job will be to adjudicate domestic disputes. Toward that end, stands will be set up at local farmers markets, where they will work to resolve marital issues in a folksy, farm-to-table manner. Fresh berries will be provided.”

It’s a weaker effort on David’s part than when he went after Bill Maher in the New York Times last year, savaging him in an essay entitled My Dinner with Adolf for approving remarks made after a meeting with Donald Trump. (“This private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.”) Predictably, it’s David’s final section on the Middle East that has triggered a lot of take-the-phone-off-gramps fury from gen Z.

“We strongly believe in a two-state solution,” David writes in his mock manifesto. “To this end, we propose that Palestinians should be given all the land currently occupied by Israel and that Israel should be given Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific, where the weather is beautiful and grapefruits are aplenty.” Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are great advocates for the DSA, but for a fuller picture it’s worth returning to DSA co-chair Megan Romer’s side-splitting efforts to explain her party’s policies to David Remnick, earlier this year. “Yeah. You know, again, I don’t have, like, a solid …”

Thursday

Andrew Scott is everywhere promoting Elsinore, his Oscar-bait movie about the Shakespearean actor Ian Charleson, who died of Aids in 1990, and which I can’t wait to see. (Even though, occasionally, I feel about Scott the way I have come to feel about Nicola Walker – that the acting tics are visible enough to pull me out of the performance.)

Elsewhere in gay content, it’s worth stopping by a much-overlooked and very good show, Fellow Travelers, currently airing on Channel 4, in which Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey’s characters fall in love in 1950s Washington, right in the middle of Senator Joe McCarthy’s various purges. Alongside the well-known anti-communist witch hunt, McCarthy also went after gay and lesbian federal workers in what came to be called the Lavender Scare, ruining lives as he went. Bailey, who looks like a young Gregory Peck and as an actor just gets better and better, is heartbreaking in this show about an under-documented episode of history. Highly recommended.

Friday

News this week of Andy Burnham’s appearance on Gogglebox raises the happy, theoretical spectre of what previous incumbents at No 10 might have looked like on equivalent shows. Thatcher on The Weakest Link? Churchill on Bake Off? One feels that Blair would’ve actively enjoyed scaling the bouncy houses on It’s A Knockout. Someone alert the AI!

Digested week in pictures