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Monday

Is there anything sadder than the end of summer? As schools go back next week and parents rely on the boosting effect of a return to routine, we look around for other ways to soften the blow. A few things this year that might make it easier: the need for rain ensures that the advent of autumn is slightly less depressing than usual; people with attic conversions in which you could bake a muffin over the summer will be able to use them again; and if you happen to be a woman of 50 or thereabouts, the fresher weather is ... a relief.

Still, looking down the barrel of dark nights and the slow descent towards Christmas clenches the spirit and I find myself pining for the very recent past. I think of this as micro-nostalgia, a form of self indulgence that, in this case, involves looping back in my mind to the first days of summer when it was all still ahead of us. There should be a word for this particular and intense kind of yearning, which might be described as: a wistfulness for past anticipation based on the certainty of future nostalgia. Even the Germans might struggle to find a compound to cover it.

Distraction comes in the form of the back-to-school shop, which, stupidly, I think will be nice to do the old-fashioned way. And so we take our actual bodies to an actual shopping centre, walk around for five hours, visit 700 shops, buy two lip glosses and some stick-on nails, then come home and order the entire back-to-school haul online. So much for nostalgia.

Tuesday

At the National Theatre in London for a production of Pride, the musical, which has been making people weep since it first opened in Cardiff in March, and London in June, and will, presumably, continue to do so when it transfers to the Bridge Theatre in Southwark this winter. I was ready with tissues but managed to hold on – just – despite the show’s absolute best efforts to take me down.

If you know the story, which chronicles the solidarity between striking Welsh miners and gay activists in the mid-1980s, you’ll understand the show’s potential for poignancy. The stage production is, if anything, even more moving than the 2014 film. Part of this is because it leans slightly more heavily than the film into the Aids story. Towards the end of the show, Pride uses a trope popularised in recent times by Madonna, who, during her Celebration tour in 2023, sang Live to Tell while images flashed up on screens of all her old cohorts from the 80s who had died of Aids, and everyone in the audience lost it. The recently shuttered Broadway show, Cats: Jellicle Ball, which celebrates the 80s drag queens of Harlem, did a similar thing to stunning effect.

And it’s not spoiling anything to say that Pride uses a similar method to flay the audience into a final state of sniffing, gulping and hiccuping disintegration as fallen heroes come up on screens in black and white – captured in a youth made more glorious by its horrifically truncated end.

Wednesday

Harry and Meghan fly back into Britain after six years in the US, and the world’s media is treated to the opinion of British people stopped on the street for their thoughts. It always strikes me how much better prepared the average American is when called on by a passing TV hack to offer a spontaneous view. This was particularly in evidence this week as passers-by in Nashville were asked about Dolly Parton and were, by and large, effortlessly fluent, while those in the Cotswolds, where the not-quite-royal couple are reported to be moving, were required to say something sensible about them. (There was a lot of shifty body language, sliding eye contact and “made their bed and lie in it” sort of commentary, all of which made me feel very fond of my people.)

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail dug up the term “praetorian guard”, and raised, with relish, the prospect of the two brothers running rival courts, while the New York Times speculated on William’s “silence” since his brother’s return. Which raised the question: feud or otherwise, what did anyone actually expect the Prince of Wales to say?

Thursday

Pushback against the forthcoming Ali G movie, Ali G: Who Iz I?, gathers force in the form of a petition – 35,000 signatures and counting – to keep the film out of cinemas on the basis that, under not very subtle cover of satire, it reinforces racist stereotypes. On the other hand, it may be the case that no petitions are necessary if Sacha Baron Cohen’s 20-year-old vehicle strikes modern audiences as an embarrassing anachronism that is as bafflingly bad as it is crashingly unfunny.

Early indications aren’t good. You might have seen Baron Cohen in character earlier this year, towing a camera crew to Centre Court at Wimbledon and contriving to get himself thrown out. Dressed in a white tracksuit with a marijuana leaf insignia that turned on a joke about the All England club’s “grass”, he did a piece to camera in which he joked that tennis was a “crap version of ping pong” and made some gags about drug dealing. It’s a short video I defy you to get through without hiding your face in mortification.

The other Baron Cohen characters haven’t aged well, either. Does anyone want to see the comedian as Bruno, a straight guy playing a screaming gay that plays on a tonne of homophobic tropes, ostensibly to flush out the bigotry of its targets but which invites the audience to recoil alongside them? Borat was the best of the bunch, somehow managing to retain an endearing core that gave the character more humanity than the others and lacked what feels like the speciousness of Ali G.

Why is he doing this? (One can make a good guess.) Baron Cohen has also directed the movie and surely, nobody wants it. If Ali G had novelty value back in the day, he has long been replaced by characters such as Diana Morgan’s Philomena Cunk, who manage to send up dumb TV culture without humiliating people or trading in caricatures that get a charge off the very thing they purport to be spoofing.

Friday

A good end to the week in the form of an outdoor screening at London’s Barbican of the 90s film Beautiful Thing, an adaptation of Jonathan Harvey’s classic coming-of-age play and a movie I must have watched 100 times back in the day. The film, directed by Hettie McDonald and starring Tameka Empson as Leah and Linda Henry as Sandra, Jamie’s mum, killed me then. This is partly down to the soundtrack from the Mamas and the Papas, and also to all those 90s references – peppermint foot lotion from the Body Shop, anyone? – that feel so far removed they might be signifiers of a lost world in a JG Ballard novel. Of all the film’s lines, it’s strange what sticks and the line I keep thinking of ahead of the screening is: “The whole of bloody Thamesmead can hear you!” More tissues!

Digested week in pictures