Taylor Swift and I had been talking about having lunch together for almost a decade before it finally happened last week. In 2012, I wrote her an email complimenting her gracious acquiescence to that ghastly Kanye person at the NAACP Video Awards. A couple of years later (she gets an average of 23,650 emails and text messages every week!) she wrote back to thank me and to ask if I might want to “grab some sushi” the next time she was in Poughkeepsie, though I actually lived in Beacon at the time, and then moved back to London, and then back to Los Angeles, and then back to London again, while she became America’s Sweetheart.
But as I foreshadowed earlier in this paragraph, the constellations finally aligned this week, and we met She had only 18 minutes, so a place with table service was out of the question. It would have to be one of the two big sushi chains, Itsu or Wasabi, where one doesn’t have to wait for some bright young thing to come over and gush, “How you guys [London servers are trained to address gender-mixed groups as “guys”] doing today? I’m Tristan, and I’ll be your server.” You just choose a boxed set, if you will, from a big refrigerator and then go up to the till, where a not-so-bright young thing snarls if you ask for an extra eyedropperful of soy sauce.
We sat down, Taylor in Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses to keep people from recognising her, and began mixing soy sauce and wasabi in little plastic tubs. I asked if I should address her as Tay, She giggled winsomely and confided that her closest friends actually call her ‘Lor, with an apostrophe. I was reminded of my old friend Hugh M. Hefner, with whom I used to play backgammon and kiss absurdly gorgeous young blonde women. Most people seemed to call him Hef, but he told me that those nearest and dearest to him called him Ner, apostrophe optional. I told ‘Lor that I had briefly conspired to call The Romanovs, my 2015 Los Angeles band Sailor Twit. She smirked obilgingly.
As seldom-Trumpers, we agreed that the prospect of her old antagonist, recently rebranded as Ye, becoming president and Herschel Walker vice president was thrilling. I admitted to ‘Lor that I find her music pretty insipid, and that, as a lapsed music critic, I recognise many critics having put her recent More Slanders About Past Boyfriends album on their Albums of the Year list not because they liked it, or had even heard it, but because they didn’t want to seem hopelessly out of step with the general public. She wasn’t very pleased, and summoned one of her aides over for a whispered little conference, at the conclusions of which ‘Lor said, “Harsh words coming from someone who’s been writing and recording since 1971, and whose new stuff is lucky to get 20 listeners on Soundcloud.”
Touché, I said, rakishly, and we moved onto the collapse of the United Kingdom, as most recently evidenced by ambulance drivers and nurses going out on a strike and millions having to skip meals to be able to afford to heat their homes, on which their mortgages have skyrocketed. “I do find the accent adorable, though,” she said. I of course knew, through her confessional/accusatory songs, that she has dated Ralph Fiennes, Sir Ian McKellan, Andrew Lloyd Pierce, Ricky Gervais, Jeremy Corbyn, and, during a brief fling with bisexuality, Home Secretary Cruella Braverman.
“Time’s up!” one of ‘Lor’s aids chirped eagerly, and the next thing I knew I was alone with my thoughts and the nine pieces of sushi Taylor Swift’s fame hadn’t allowed her time to consume.
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