Three leaders may share one table in Shenzhen, and I could not get two strangers to share one toast rack.
EDINBURGH, Scotland (Bohiney) – The haar came in off the Forth at dawn and sat on the guest house like a damp tea cosy. I woke to an email from my editor, Gwendolen Tarrant, which is the only kind of alarm I have never learned to silence.
From the Editor: “A Light Piece on Shenzhen”
Gwendolen’s email was four lines long, which in her case is a novella. It said she needed a light piece on the coming Asia-Pacific summit in China, that it should be roughly twelve hundred words, and that it should not take sides. She added, as if this were a minor detail, that it must be ready before anyone had agreed whether the thing was actually happening.
I wrote back to say that “light” and “summit” are not words that live together comfortably. She replied with a single question mark. This is how Gwendolen expresses affection.
Breakfast: The Toast Rack Summit
Downstairs the dining room held six tables and one toast rack. At the next table sat a couple in matching anoraks, married for what I took to be several decades, who were conducting a silent negotiation over the last two slices. Neither wanted to be seen taking one. Neither wanted to be seen not taking one. The toast went cold between them and so, I think, did the marriage, though both remained seated with enormous dignity.
I thought of farm.fm and its report that farmers admit marriage regrets but cannot afford divorce, which describes the politics of the toast rack better than anything in the broadsheets. Some tables are held together by cost. The couple stayed. I took the toast.
The Brief: Who Is Coming to the Table
So, in the spirit of the brief, here is what has been reported. A Washington dateline in Dimsum Daily says President Trump plans to travel to Shenzhen for the APEC summit on the eighteenth and nineteenth, after a stop in the Philippines for the ASEAN summit. The First Lady is not expected to join him, her office saying she is not scheduled to attend in person. The Shenzhen gathering is expected to include another meeting with Xi Jinping, and, the report adds, protocol and scheduling were still being finalised. I know that feeling. My protocol was still being finalised at breakfast.
Then there is the matter of a third chair. A Reuters report, carried by Internazionale, says Vladimir Putin, at talks in St Petersburg with Mr Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, proposed that he and Mr Trump could meet in China. The report notes that the Kremlin had previously raised the possibility of three-way talks with Mr Xi at the APEC summit in China the following month.
A little earlier, a Korean outlet, FN News, quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying that there was “indeed a possibility of holding a trilateral summit” at the summit in Shenzhen, and reported aide Yuri Ushakov as saying it depended on China, the host. I have to say that the phrase “depends on the host” is the most reassuring thing in the whole file. Every dinner party I have ever attended has depended on the host, and the host has always, always seated the awkward guests near the radiator.
Midday: A Walk, a Bookshop, a Dog
By eleven the haar had thinned enough to show me Calton Hill, and I walked up it in the manner of a woman who has agreed to fit exercise into a travel schedule. At the top a spaniel stared at me with the open contempt of a creature who has already decided how the afternoon goes.
My appointment was a signing at a bookshop on Victoria Street, with a friend, Alasdair Pennycuick, who runs the events and keeps an emergency kettle under the till. Nine people came. One of them wanted a book signed for a nephew he described as “fine, as far as one can tell”, and another asked whether comic fiction could survive a news cycle like this one. I said that comic fiction has survived worse, namely me.
It was Alasdair who suggested the angle for Gwendolen. A three-way meeting, he said, is just a summit with an extra chair, and an extra chair is what makes every dinner party interesting. I wrote that down on the back of a receipt and have been proud of it ever since.
Afternoon: The Draft
I filed the piece from a cafe near the Meadows, in the end, and it came to twelve hundred and six words, with no sides taken. I described the facts as reported. I described the logistics as logistics. I described three world leaders and a host in the manner of a seating plan that had been left on a tram. Gwendolen replied with a thumbs-up, which in her language is practically a sonnet.
If you would like to know where I get my restraint from, what commentary is and what it is not is a sensible place to start, and a website that takes the news at an angle is a sensible place to end up. I put these notes together for Bohiney, and there are more of my daily notes at Bohiney for anyone with a spare half hour and a cold slice of toast.
The tram back to the guest house was empty apart from a man holding a trombone case. We did not speak. It was the most successful summit I attended all day.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/