At a conference centre just south of the Virginian town of Leesburg, a Houston sheriff in a broad-brimmed Stetson sits at a table alongside two smart-suited Japanese law-enforcement officials and a Brazilian police officer with medals pinned to his khaki uniform. A few tables away, there is gentle ribbing between Belgian and Senegalese officials, as the White House’s World Cup point man, Andrew Giuliani, probes them on their teams’ respective playing styles. As security representatives from 46 nations and 16 host cities murmur to one another beneath large screens depicting national flags, the room has the feel of a UN confab – except with more cops and football talk. 

While it’s a quiet morning when Monocle visits the International Police Co-operation Center (IPCC), the hub of the multinational operation tasked with keeping the 2026 Fifa World Cup safe, that changes when a match begins. “The atmosphere in the room gets pretty lively,” says FBI special agent Doug Olson, the senior co-ordinating official for this year’s tournament. “There’s a heavy bit of competition at the tables. It’s like a kind of a microcosm of the tournament itself, which is great.”

Healthy competition in the tournament comes at a time when the US has kicked off a less than sportsmanlike battle for global supremacy. From berating hisNato partners at the recent summit to threatening the seizure of Greenland and Canada, US president Donald Trump continues to busily work through a list of allies to anger and alienate. 

The security repercussions have been wide-ranging. Many European nations, including the UK and France, stopped sharing some intelligence with the US because of their lethal strikes on boats suspected of carrying drugs in the Caribbean. The Netherlands also scaled back co-operation, concerned that intel could be used to violate human rights or assist Russia. 

All of which makes international co-operation at the 2026 World Cup just a little bit eyebrow-raising. “The work that’s coming out of this IPCC has been absolutely key to making sure that this [World Cup] is safe and secure,” says Giuliani, son of Maga stalwart and former New York mayor, Rudy.

Pressed by journalists on whether ill-tempered relations between the US and its neighbours to the north and south had affected efforts to keep everyone safe, Giuliani and Olson insist that there has been no impact. “I can’t speak to any of the issues surrounding the World Cup but I can tell you that the security co-ordination with our Canadian counterparts has been outstanding,” says Olson. The Mexican contingent have similarly “been great partners”.

After gushing about working with the tournament’s co-hosts, Giuliani launches into Trumpian hyperbole. “I said that there’s going to be no larger platform to be able to show off true American exceptionalism,” he says. “People are seeing that now… the great hope and promise that the United States offers over our next 250 years.”

When Giuliani was appointed as executive director of the White House Task Force for this year’s event, there were whispers of nepotism and broad scepticism about his ability to manage such a huge sporting tournament. But as Sunday’s final approaches, there has been scant drama off the pitch. Much of this is down to the security co-operation by all the participating nations – except for Haiti and Iran, which were excluded from the IPCC. 

During every match, the tables are rearranged so that representatives from each competing team are seated alongside officials from the host city. Then they can talk in real time about any intelligence coming from the ground or from online spaces warranting investigation or response. 

If Trump bothers to pay attention, he will see the benefits of multilateralism in action. One nation cannot go it alone and browbeat others into co-operation. Keeping the world safe means some give and take, with cross-cultural understanding and respect helping forge alliances that will benefit everyone. 

While there is no way that Giuliani would concede such a political point, one example he gave encapsulates it perfectly. He said thatwhile a US security apparatus might know the threat environment around a New York Giants or Philadelphia Eagles game, they need input from other nations to understand the behaviour of a global fanbase and to decode any warning signs of trouble.

Olson agrees. “Safety and security aren’t accidental,” he says. “We do these things deliberately every day and we receive threat information every single day. That is shared with all our partners at the local, state and international level. That’s how we’ve been able to maintain a safe World Cup.”

At the Nato summit in Ankara last week, Trump abruptly announced that the ceasefire with Iran was over and harangued his allies for not doing more to assist him in a conflict that he unilaterally started. It was classic Trump: combative, unco-operative and it didn’t win him any of the extra assistance that he was hoping for.

When Trump attends the World Cup final on Sunday, many of the US’s traditional allies will be hoping that some of that footballing goodwill flows off the pitch and helps the president understand that alienating your neighbours is a geopolitical own goal.

Charlotte McDonald-Gibson is a Washington-based journalist and regular Monocle contributor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
 
Further reading:

– The biggest contest of the 2026 World Cup is off the pitch
 
– A sticky World Cup tradition: Tracking down Panini football stickers

– Tacky? Yes. Patriotic? Often. But the World Cup needs its anthems

On my first trip to Tokyo in the late 1990s, I bought a minidisc player and a small microphone. Then I set out to record sounds around the city. When I walked into a central Tokyo pachinko parlour, I was met with a wall of sound as chaotic as it was beautiful. I stayed longer than I intended, just listening. 

That experience introduced me to Tokyo’s very particular relationship with sound, which is layered and complex, and unlike any other place that I’ve visited. Since that trip, my field-recording practice has taken me around the world. I’ve created site-specific soundtracks for buildings and public spaces, and worked with architects and developers in cities from London, Oslo, Singapore and Beijing. At the centre of my work with Mscty Studio, which I founded in 2010, is the idea that if cities sound better, people feel better. Sound is as fundamental to good urban life as clean air or safe streets.

You can learn a lot about a place just by listening. Now that I live full-time in Tokyo, the city is not just my home – it’s my school too. 

The FamilyMart jingle  

Take the Familymart jingle. Step into one of these chain konbinis (convenience stores) and you’re greeted by what might be Japan’s most recognised piece of functional music. It’s cheerful and bright, sitting somewhere between a doorbell and a lullaby. A shop attendant might hear the melody hundreds of times over the course of a shift or an office worker might hear it once on their way home – but the jingle has the same effect. People have a real affection for it. That’s a harder thing to achieve than it sounds, and most businesses haven’t bothered to try.

Train station melodies 

Every Tokyo Metro train station has its own departure melody that is chosen for how they affect passenger stress and behaviour on the platforms. Many of the melodies have been composed by serious musicians: Minoru Mukaiya, who wrote more than 170 of them, was also the keyboardist in celebrated jazz-fusion band Casiopea. Each piece is short enough to avoid irritating commuters, yet long enough to signal that it’s time to move. 

Sonar and the city

Take a train to somewhere like Kagurazaka or Koenji, and you’ll hear a different tapestry of sound. In the quieter parts of Tokyo, the sounds of daily life weave through the atmosphere. Head to a café in the morning and you might hear temple bells cut through the whir of coffee grinders while the sound of a tofu maker’s water sloshes out a rhythm. Walk through narrow streets after a spring rain and you’ll hear a serene silence that only happens after a big storm. These are sounds that build into something special: a distinct arrangement that tells you exactly where you are – if you know what to listen for.

Intersection of sounds  

It’s impossible for a city of some 14 million people to have a curated soundscape everywhere. There are plenty of spaces where no one has thought about sound at all. Visit one of the city’s many construction sites, a crossing in Shibuya at rush hour or a department store’s basement food hall, and you’ll be treated to a cacophony of footfall, cookery, voices, cars and clattering machines of all kinds. 

But if you stop long enough to listen, a place’s story begins to emerge. And while Tokyo sounds much the same today as it did when I first started making minidisc recordings back in the 1990s – some things have disappeared. Once ubiquitous, the garakei (push-button flip phone) with the clickety-clack of its physical buttons, the snap of its clamshell case and the custom ringtones people chose with care, has largely disappeared. It has been replaced by the near-silent smartphone. But something else has arrived. Walk through Asakusa or Nakameguro today and you’ll hear a sound that wasn’t common 25 years ago: the persistent clatter of rolling suitcases on stone and pavement. It’s percussion in a city that has welcomed record numbers of tourists in recent years.

When I listen to Tokyo, I hear both its history and its future. The music of this city has become so familiar to me but I still notice new notes.

Nick Luscombe is a broadcaster for BBC Radio, presenter of Monocle Radio’s ‘Tokyo Music Hour’ and sound artist based in London and Tokyo. He is the founder of Mscty Studio; mscty.space

Finland’s reputation as a heavy-metal hotbed was perhaps a deciding factor in Freddy Lim’s appointment last May as Taiwan’s envoy to the Nordic nation. Lim has an unlikely side gig: fronting Chthonic, the Republic of China’s biggest heavy-metal group. It’s a hinterland that has come in handy as Taipei faces mounting diplomatic challenges from Beijing. “Metal is a universal language,” he says. “It makes it much easier to make friends.”

Lim’s transition from long-haired, leather-clad caterwauler to polished diplomat hasn’t been as abrupt as it might sound. From 2016 to 2024, he was a member of Taiwan’s parliament, the Legislative Yuan, and of its foreign-affairs committee. “We have played in Finland many times so some people in the government already knew me,” he says. “Finns are sometimes considered to be quite distant and quiet but when they find that you share the same musical aesthetics, they open up.”

Taiwanese diplomacy is a matter of existential seriousness. China, which regards the territory as a temporarily rogue province, has spent considerable energy and resources undermining its diplomatic networks. Since the UN admitted China and ejected Taiwan in 1971, countries have effectively had to choose between them. Beijing’s campaign to persuade Taipei’s remaining partners to switch sides has left the latter with just 12 such allies. Technically, Finland is not among them – Taiwan’s outpost in Helsinki is only a de facto embassy.

For Lim, that makes it all the more urgent to tell his people’s story. “I find so many parallels in Taiwanese and Finnish history,” he says. “There are similar struggles among small countries like ours – how we survive, find our identity and battle with bigger powers. These few months in Helsinki have already inspired me to go deeper and more universal in my music.” 

Since Lim stepped into his post, he has performed several times in Finland. “People easily see that Taiwan and Finland need to work on our democratic resilience,” he says. “But there has to be something deeper within our societies that isn’t just about our neighbours but is about us. Metal is a far more natural way to create understanding.”

Here are five other unlikely statespeople who have applied their skills to international relations.

1.
Shirley Temple (USA)

The 1930s child superstar pivoted to diplomacy later in life, serving as the US ambassador to Ghana (1974 to 1976) and Czechoslovakia (1989 to 1992). “Politicians are actors too,” she once said. “If you like people and you’re outgoing… you can do pretty well in politics.” 

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2.
Gabriela von Habsburg (Georgia)

Georgia’s ambassador to Germany from 2009 to 2013 was a curious choice: the granddaughter of Austria’s last emperor, she is also a sculptor. Von Habsburg could see the overlap, however. “When you do art in public places… you need to defend what you’re doing and be convincing,” she said.

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3.
Saint-John Perse (France)

Winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 might not even be the most interesting thing about Perse. He was dispatched around Europe before the First World War and in 1916 was sent to China. He headed up the French foreign service for much of the 1930s and was later exiled to the US by the Vichy government.

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4.
Sidney Poitier (Bahamas)

Poitier was a 70-year-old Oscar winner and Hollywood icon when the Bahamas appointed him ambassador to Japan in 1997. He served in this role for 10 years and was also the country’s ambassador to Unesco from 2002.

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5.
Vikas Swarup (India)

While on an extended posting in London in 2003, career diplomat Swarup wrote a novel about an unlikely quiz-show winner, which was later adapted for the screen as Slumdog Millionaire. He went on to serve as India’s high commissioner to Canada.

Unsuspecting shoppers turning up at FamilyMart’s latest convenience store in Tokyo last Friday were met with scenes reminiscent of a new release from the hottest of fashion brands: two-hour queues, a cap on purchases and a crowd ravenous for merchandise. Exterior details immediately announced that this was a special opening and a fresh departure for FamilyMart, which operates 16,400 shops across Japan. There was a redesigned logo – still in the company’s signature blue and green – a sharp new look for the interior and a rooftop luxuriantly planted with trees. 

This isn’t any old FamilyMart: it’s Famima – in this case, Famima Park Azabudai. The new concept was devised for the company’s 45th birthday and brings together some of Tokyo’s most prolific creators: Nigo, the creative director and the man behind streetwear brands A Bathing Ape (which he established in 1993) and Human Made; Masamichi Katayama, whose studio Wonderwall has, for more than two decades, produced some of the city’s most memorable retail interiors (including many for Nigo); and Hiromichi Ochiai, the fashion designer behind Convenience Wear, FamilyMart’s inspired line of basics that took the market by storm in 2021 and has already shifted more than 30 million pairs of socks. 

“It all started with the idea of ‘I wish there was something like this in a convenience store,’” says Nigo, Famima’s creative lead. Just over a year after his partnership with FamilyMart was announced and following many discussions, this abstract thought has taken a tangible form: a next-generation convenience store on the fringes of the Azabudai Hills development that breaks with typical konbini design convention. The goal was to make a convenience store so special that people would go out of their way to visit it.

Nigo’s magic touch is everywhere – from the logo to cushions, T-shirts, stickers and tote bags. He is a man who understands the power of the ordinary; under his inspired eye, cheap boxes of tissues become collectables. Even the blue, green and white striped staff uniforms, in a robust cotton rather than the usual wash-and-wear konbini nylon, look good enough to buy. 

Convenience Wear’s concept – “good materials, good techniques, good design” – continues to go from strength to strength. The new Famima has limited-edition exclusives, fitting rooms and clothing assistants. There are denims (jackets and jeans that quickly sold out) and a new brand ambassador in the shape of popular actor Tadanobu Asano. Ochiai’s unerring sense of colour has created a delicious wall of socks and T-shirts wrapped in now-familiar clear packaging. Before Convenience Wear, most thought that no fashion brand could thrive in the confines of the konbini. Ochiai is proving them wrong.   

Neat touches from Katayama’s Wonderwall include Famima Stand – a window where shoppers can buy takeaway goods, including Fami-Chiki (FamilyMart’s relentlessly popular boneless fried chicken), then sit on a bench outside. The eccentric rooftop forest is a stroke of genius, creating a welcome thicket of greenery. Occupants of the surrounding high-rises are afforded their own view, a giant “F” sign not visible from the street. As ever, Wonderwall has brought the fun factor to what could be a quotidian shopping experience.

The project has rethought the konbini, a beloved and fundamental part of daily life in Japan, while keeping its DNA. Famima is still a convenience store – it has all the food, essentials, cash machines, delivery services and microwaves that any other would have. “We wanted to embrace the rationality of the Japanese convenience store but explore the sense of enjoyment and richness that lie beyond it,” says Katayama. “We didn’t want to create a place that people would visit just for convenience; we wanted to refine its appeal and uniqueness so that people would feel compelled to go there.” 

There are now around 56,000 convenience stores around Japan – engines of innovation that have the customer base and ubiquity to drive trends. Used by all walks of society, regardless of age, gender or wealth, the konbini represents retail at its most democratic. “Convenience stores are a type of business that Japan can be proud of on a global scale and represent a unique culture,” says FamilyMart’s representative director and president Tatsuo Odani. For him, the Famima project not only reboots the standard convenience store but also offers a route forward for the business. “To achieve sustainable growth in the future, transformation and evolution are essential,” he says. FamilyMart, he hopes, can become a “global brand that cannot be imitated”.

As it explores new possibilities for the konbini format, FamilyMart says that lessons here can be implemented at other locations. For now, there are no concrete plans for other standalone stores but Famima elements are being rolled out in regular FamilyMarts across Japan. Nigo, as always, is at the forefront of this shift. “We hope that this next-generation convenience store will allow people in Japan and around the world to experience Japanese culture and lifestyle.” 
family.co.jp

The sleep economy is restless. Tiringly, the topic has become something of an icebreaker in hospitals, hotels and across the wellness industry. I’ve lost count of the number of conversations with Whoop-wearing, sleep-tracking addicts, who insist on talking me through their statistics – it’s the 2026 equivalent of forcing people to look at your holiday pictures. 

Rest is an important health concern. Despite all the chatter, most of us still have no idea whether we are doing it right. Data from the OECD found that the long-living Japanese “only” average six to seven hours a night, making it the lowest and therefore most sleep-deprived of developed economies. A widely reported study earlier this year suggested that eight hours is not the ideal number after all. Get this: too much sleep can actually be detrimental to our health. It’s all enough to lose sleep over, which might just be a good thing. 
 
When it comes to daily habits, the world can be divided into several camps. Those with and without air conditioning, say, or toilet paper users versus water washers. But napping is another of those great dividers. Either you are an afternoon snoozer or one of us who push through, viewing naps as unproductive, bone idle and workshy. In northern Europe, it’s just what we’re taught.

One of the eye-opening things about moving from London to Hong Kong was the sight of hard-working city suits going to a coffee shop for a mid-afternoon snooze rather than a shot of caffeine. The same is true of the many factory tours that I have been on in mainland China, where the lights go off after lunch and workers stretch out on the flooring.
 
A recent headline from the South China Morning Post caught my eye. The article claimed that, according to research conducted by the China Sleep Research Society, a staggering 72 per cent of Chinese take a daily nap for at least half an hour. The benefits of napping apparently go back thousands of years (as is the case with most things in China) to medical texts and enshrined in Chinese medicine. Song dynasty poets wrote verses about the joys of an afternoon nap, while former leader Deng Xiaoping, a diminutive man from Sichuan who is seen as the architect of modern China’s economic and technological rise, was also an avid napper – some endorsement. 

For our latest issue, I visited a wellness clinic in Bangkok. After watching a nurse drain nine tubes of blood from my arm, I was later informed by the doctor that my “telomeres” – tiny tips on our chromosomes that shrink as we age – are shorter than they should be. The culprit? Not enough deep sleep. A surprise because I thought I slept rather well. The cause? Young kids waking up in the middle of the night. The cure? Time and a daily dose of patience. 
 
The CEO of BDMS Wellness Group is of a similar age to me and has managed to lengthen his telomeres with a combination of good diet, clean living and daily exercise, while running a major company and being a family man. Crucially, he claims to be in bed most nights before 22.00. Early nights are more manageable in Bangkok and Hong Kong where it’s dark by 19.00 throughout the year, provided you can black out the many bright lights and other neon-lit distractions. By contrast, try sleeping before 22.00 in northern Europe right now when the days are incredibly long.
 
Could this be where the nap comes in? Brits, Germans, Swedes and Dutch are not accustomed to the siestas enjoyed by their southern cousins (who, incidentally, live two years longer on average) but summer is the one time when we get to give it a go. Holidays in Italy, Spain and France, mixed with time in the sun and hotel stays, allow for some horizontal time after lunch. The prospect of bringing this new habit home along with a few bottles of the local plonk fades quicker than a Mediterranean suntan. But if machines and AI are going to be doing more of the work and climate change is pushing up temperatures, is it time that we listen to a bit of Eastern wisdom? I think so. Why don’t we sleep on it?

James Chambers is Monocle’s Asia editor based in Bangkok. For more news and analysis, subscribe to Monocle today.

As lazy, sultry, summer Saturday afternoons go, today couldn’t be more perfect. The setting is the Villa Arnica in Lana, Südtirol. The temperature is hovering around 30C but there’s plenty of shade and a refreshing breeze from the Dolomites. The day started with a gentle breakfast and then a seven-kilometre walk through the apple orchards, past guest houses with well-tended gardens, and into the buzzy Kuntrawant for coffee before a retail planning meeting with Pippa and Raffi – wait till you see what we’re cooking up for the autumn season for our shops and website! 

In a couple of hours, we’ll head up to Obermais to ensure that all is in order for our Merano outpost’s annual summer party. Shortly after, readers from near and far will spill out across Dantestrasse to enjoy icy bottles of Forst, chilled weissburgunder, focaccia bites from the Ottmanngut hotel team and the best bellinis courtesy of Martin and Jakob, who popped down from Munich. As gatherings go, it’s Monocle at its smaller-scale best because it mixes local talent and produce with a crowd that comes from Bolzano and Trento – but also Dubai and Hamburg. 

On the more ambitious side, it’s our Quality of Life conferences that embody all we do in a live, pacy format that runs across three days. In case you missed it, we’re heading back to Lisbon this year – where it all started 11 years ago. From 3 to 5 September, we will be turning things up a notch for the 10th edition of the conference but it also becomes the official warm-up party for our 20th anniversary. While the official date is 14 February 2027, why not use sunny Lisbon as a backdrop to get things going? Since our first conference, you might have noticed that the Portuguese capital has become something of an unofficial hub and while we don’t have a shop or office, we do have some ex-staffers who’ve returned home and who will ensure that we have an insider’s edge. It also helps that I have an apartment in town and a capable Portuguese executive assistant – even if he is from Porto!

If you’ve not been to a Quality of Life Conference, here’s what you need to know. First, there are no keynote windbags. Everything is a discussion hosted by Monocle editors. Second, we bring in the audience with real questions, delivered on the spot. None of this submitting your questions on an app. No! Third, it’s a proper crowd who are paying to be there rather than a room full of bored people dispatched by their companies. And while there are many other reasons to go, the key aspect is that we seek to unravel how we can make daily life better in transport, education, media, hospitality, shopping, security and much more. But in case that’s not enough, here are 10 more reasons to join us.

1.
If you’ve not been to Lisbon in the past decade, it’s a changed city. Most of that change is for the better but we’ll also discuss how to remedy some of the kinks.

2.
We’ll be anchoring the conference from the Gulbenkian. It’s one of Europe’s best cultural enclaves. 

3.
Robert Bound will be back on stage. Just you wait!

4.
The mayor is giving us the keys to the city. Well, for a brief moment.

5.
You can lose yourself among some of our favourite bookshops on the continent. Under the Cover and Good Company come to mind first.

6.
You will learn how your feet are linked to how you think and respond to the world. Promise! You might even learn how to walk better. 

7.
Lisbon on the Atlantic. The sea will be perfect. A bracing 17C like it almost is all year round.

8.
We’re going to have some serious conversations about the future of retail.

9.
There’ll be plenty of tips about how and where to invest in Portugal.

10.
It’s going to be the perfect way to wrap up summer and hit Q4 in full stride, possibly with exclusive footwear from a hot new Japanese brand.

Enjoying life in ‘The Faster Lane’? Click here to browse all of Tyler’s past columns.

In the record business they have a refrain: you have your whole life to write your first album. A debut novel is much the same, it can feel like the statement of a long-lived thesis or the discovery of a career-defining theme. Some writers go on to elaborate extensively on that same theme – sometimes drifting from it, occasionally perfecting it. But the experience of being published for the first time is often preceded by a guiding love of literature. 

Here, Monocle brings together some of the year’s most exciting debut authors for insights into their literary taste and where they continue to draw inspiration from. We posed one simple question: What is your favourite line of literature? 

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Enzo is a coming-of-age story that unfolds over the course of an intensely hot summer in the south of France and to the soundtrack of cicadas singing in dry grass (writes Josefina Nagler Gómez). This is the final movie from French director Laurent Cantet, who passed away before its realisation. It fell to friend and long-time collaborator Robin Campillo to fulfil Cantet’s vision. Enzo (Eloy Pohu), a 16-year-old boy from a bourgeois family, has struggled in school and turns to a career in construction. While working on a building site, he becomes enamoured with Vlad, a young Ukrainian man longing for a clean slate and some distance between himself and the war at home. Here, Campillo tells us about the uniqueness of our teenage years, romance compared to love and working on the film alongside Cantet in his final days.

Is ‘Enzo’ a love story?
I don’t believe in love, I believe in romance. The movie concerns itself with lots of loves: for self, country, family, love and romance. Vlad and Enzo form a deep love but the romance is unrequited. Vlad is moved by Enzo’s understanding of him as a hero but ultimately their relationship is formed and challenged by the infatuation of the adolescent mind. 

Why do our teenage years provide rich stories for cinema?
We can all relate to a teenage crisis, thinking that it comes from the outside when it actually comes from within. We begin to understand that the order of the world is more fragile than we thought. In a way, anything is possible and all the doors are open to you but the world you thought of as legitimate and grown up is more of a fantasy. There’s something terrifying in its wide-open possibility.

Many of the actors in ‘Enzo’ are first-timers. How did you approach casting?
Introducing up-and-comers is a part of Laurent’s legacy and it was important to both of us to give space to new talent. We were searching for actors who did not yet know that they were actors. We saw great potential in Maksym Slivinskyi (Vlad) and Eloy Pohu (Enzo), and they are indeed both very good. 

Do you think of this movie as a ‘swan song?’ 
Cantet and I shared a friendship of 43 years, which started at school. We discovered films and filmmaking together. In the end, that was what united us – we were discussing Enzo up until the last day of his life. This film is what prevented us both from falling apart. It was not bravery that made me finish Enzo – rather, it was the only thing that I could do, the only way to honour the friendship. So, yes, it is a swan song.

Air Force One, not actually a plane but the radio call sign for any aircraft carrying the US president, has traditionally been a quiet, if staid, part of the national landscape. Until recently that call sign would typically apply to two 40-year-old Boeing VC-25A (modified 747-200B) jets. Their most prominent feature of late, has arguably been the “air stairs” from which presidents climb and descend, waving and smiling. These are not only a stock image in news broadcasts but have become, with elderly presidents such as Joe Biden and Donald Trump, a measure of their fitness, with any stumble or slowness dissected and analysed by online commentators.

As he has done so often, Trump relishes a controversial revamp of a quiet, staid fixture of the national landscape (see the Kennedy Center). It began, of course, with the gifting of a plane (a Boeing 747-8) from the Qatari royal family: a constitutionally questionable $500m (€437m) “flying palace” transferred to a sitting US head of state with, apparently, no strings attached. The plan is to convert the plane into a new “bridge” VC-25B that will ultimately be squirrelled away at Trump’s yet-to-be-built presidential library. The whole tab is being paid for, curiously, by siphoning funds from a programme to modernise and upgrade the US ballistic-missile arsenal. 

Then there was the jettisoning of the plane’s iconic livery – a storied collaboration between designer Raymond Loewy and John F Kennedy – in favour of a “more American” design. It’s heavy on the blue, a shade the Air Force warned could have thermal impacts. The result is rather as if you had asked ChatGPT to “give me the airplane livery version of a trad Republican politician’s suit, including the gold lapel pin.” The discreet US flag on the tail? Let’s make it bigger and let’s make it wave like some soda-pop ad for “America 250”.

But ethics and aesthetics aside, the unprecedented rushing of the plane into service (at what contractor L3Harris dubbed “maximum velocity”) raised myriad security questions. A Boeing 747-200B has anywhere between five and six million parts. Was 10 months sufficient to “scrub” the plane, even as it was being overhauled for its presidential-airlift role? As is so often the case with Trump projects (e.g. the Reflecting Pool), corners were cut. Unlike the historic Air Force One fleet, the new plane does not have the ability to refuel in midair and only possesses one set of embedded air stairs (instead of the traditional two). This means passengers and crew have to rely upon on-the-ground infrastructure to board and deplane. Air Force One planes are “speckled with missile approach warning sensors and many laser countermeasures turrets,” according to TWZ. These have not been seen so far by analysts in photographs taken from test flights of the new model. The old planes are also hardened against missiles and the electro-magnetic pulse [EMP] of a nuclear blast. “It is very unlikely, if not impossible,” TWZ notes, “that this aircraft was hardened against EMPs in the timeframe required for fielding it.” 

All these suspicions came bubbling to the surface earlier this week when the president, at the behest of the Secret Service, switched to a legacy Air Force One plane for his return from the Nato Summit in Ankara. Was there a security threat or, as the president claimed, did he just want to send the plane on a victory lap of US bases? Is the plane truly fit for duty – not just to transport the president but also to serve as a mobile command post – in hazardous foreign skies or is it just a ceremonial trophy plane? 

The fact that another plane was on standby speaks to the seriousness of the enterprise. As the national security historian Garrett Graff has noted, the plane from which the president steps down to the tarmac is just one in a shadow air force. Apart from the primary plane and the backup plane, the president is typically accompanied by Marine One helicopters. “The US,” says Graff, “is the only country in the world that provides full helicopter lift capability to its head of state when travelling abroad.” Then there are Boeing E4-Bs, or the “National Airborne Operations Center,” capable of litigating nuclear war from the skies. There are even, Graff notes, a “secret fleet of unacknowledged planes,” unmarked Gulfstream jets, a sort of back-up to the back-up.

All of which is why the seemingly feckless addition of a foreign-sourced Air Force One plane, with a breakneck overhaul, seems so remarkable, and why the events in Ankara muddy the waters. “There are certainly times when presidents have flown on other aircraft – for instance, on unmarked cargo jets into war zones – and occasionally a president will switch to a back-up aircraft mid-trip if there’s a serious maintenance issue,” Graff told me. “But this mid-trip switch stands out for suspicion.”

I am always surprised that there are not more one-eyed people in Mallorca.

On Sunday, we drove to the east of the island, parked under the shade of a pine tree and made our way down the track to the beach. It wasn’t too busy and in this heat people tend to stay a few hours then depart for a siesta, a lunch, so there’s always more sandy real estate available among the beach umbrellas. 

As the afternoon slid along on a timeline eased by suntan cream and a pint of piña colada from the chiringuito, I noticed that the gentle breeze’s soundtrack was occasionally giving way to proper blasts of wind. I knew then that it would only be a matter of time before a beach novice was left humiliated and facing a potential lawsuit.

And sure enough, just a few metres from us, the first beach umbrella took flight à la Mary Poppins. It somersaulted across the beach with gymnastic grace. Would the spike take out an eyeball, impale an abuela, send a cerveza flying? Not this time: its athletic owner leapt into action with a diving save. I held off from applauding.

This very thing happened to me some years ago but my parasol came dangerously close to widowing a member of a nearby couple. So now we always have a screw on the beach – a big one. You corkscrew the plastic contraption into the sand and then insert the umbrella’s stand, which gets held in place with the aid of a bolt. We got ours from a Chinese store in Palma that has everything from paint to Post-it notes and is marvellously called Wan Ke Long. Very handy.

Anyway, I love the drama of a day at the beach and from behind my sunglasses find myself becoming drawn into the myriad little scenes and stories that play out across la playa. My partner gets a little cross when, halfway through one of his fascinating anecdotes, he realises that I am actually lost in the squabbling of our neighbours.
 
On Sunday, however, I caught sight of something that required his advice. Next to us was a man, Spanish, handsome, in his forties, perched on the edge of his sun lounger reading a book. But little did our man realise that he had suffered a gusset malfunction and that one of his croquetas had made a bid for freedom.

After some cajoling, the other half turned over to take in the scene and agreed that it was unfortunate. “Shall I go and tell him,” I asked, thinking that it was the decent thing to help safeguard this gentleman’s reputation. David suggested that while this might be well-received, it could also come across as a little odd. And as I didn’t know the Spanish word for testicle, the whole interaction would be dependent on me doing an unwise mime and lots of inappropriate pointing. So, I left him – and it – to their own devices.

After all, there were more stories around me that required my full attention. Why, for example, did the muscular tattooed man have a bunny tattooed on his bicep (some childhood pet he never got over?). Would the two men playing a vigorous game of padel on the shoreline hit anyone with their ball? I hoped so. Is selling watermelons on the beach good business?

I had barely turned a page of my book by the time we needed to leave this sandy live telenovela whose cast of characters had kept me entertained all afternoon. A Mediterranean beach truly trumps any streaming service. There’s romance, danger and the ever-present potential of an eye being lost. I will be back for another instalment very soon.

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