It was shocking. But then again it wasn’t. Political violence in America has been on the rise for years, even if no major political figure has been assassinated since the 1960s, when shootings led to the deaths of President John F Kennedy, his brother Robert, and the civil rights leader, Rev Martin Luther King. President Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt in 1981. 

These days, we have continual violence and threats of violence directed toward members of Congress, Supreme Court justices and others who have taken strident positions on one issue or another. The anger in America and the red-hot rhetoric have cleaved the nation in two. In recent years, Gabby Giffords, a Democrat member of the House of Representatives from New Mexico, was shot in the head at a gathering in her home state. Another House member, Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, was gravely wounded while practising for the annual Republican-Democrat softball game. Both survived, but with physically debilitating consequences.

Donald Trump was merely the latest target, a bullet zipping through his right ear at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, which is a “battleground state” for determining who wins the November election. On Saturday it became a battleground for real. Another inch to the left and the bullet would have been fatal (as indeed it was to the poor bystander nearby). Within seconds of the shooting, federal agents located a local 20-year-old man with an automatic weapon aimed toward the rally stage and immediately shot him dead.

Any fair assessment of the incident would have to concede that Trump has played an outsized role in ratcheting up American tensions. Now a convicted felon for business dealings and several times indicted for trying to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in 2020, he has become the champion of aggrieved Americans who feel hurt, cheated, ignored and disdained by countrymen of perceived higher status. “I am your retribution,” is one of Trump’s favoured campaign lines.

An attempted assassination would humble most of us. But not Trump. In the ensuing chaos, as Secret Service agents hustled him off the rally stage towards a waiting vehicle, blood dripping across his face, Trump pumped his fist in the air and implored people to “fight…fight…fight…” 

In 2024 America, that seemed the appropriate response.

After a disastrously ill-advised and unwise decision to call a snap election, the fallout and recriminations rumble on. In a shuffling of the political pack, deals are discussed and considered as a new order takes shape – while we keep our heads down and wonder what will follow. Not over there in the UK, but over here in France, where more than 100,000 of us Brits chose to settle after Brexit. The UK wanted out, we wanted in, or as far in as was possible. The deal we gratefully accepted saw us become official residents of France but, in most cases, remain British citizens. 

We enjoy many of the benefits of French citizenship. We are well served by an efficient health service; we pay taxes – always a pleasure – but we can’t vote. So we waited, with some apprehension, as the votes were counted, after Macron did a Sunak in calling an unexpected parliamentary election. It was a shock move that looked set to end as badly for the President as it did for the now former British PM. Perhaps the only consolation for Macron and, depending on how you see it, for the country, was that he was defeated by an uneasy hotchpotch of left and centrist parties, rather than by the hard right. 

Most of us Brits have settled in rural parts of France. We visit the cities and towns but we inhabit the picture-postcard French villages where houses boast flaked-paint shutters and a terracotta pot of geraniums by the front door. But we quickly realised the shutters on half the houses were permanently shut. Those houses are mostly for sale, though unlikely to find a new owner any time soon. Farms struggle to survive and in nearby towns the factories are long closed. The far right is inexorably on the rise in France’s rural areas, where their repeated promise – that only tough, decisive action will bring back better times – strikes home. They won easily where I live in the Languedoc, though after the results were announced a local reassured me: “Don’t worry, you’re not the sort of immigrant we want to get rid of.” 

One of Perspective’s regular writers (name redacted) begged to write a piece saying how hot Keir Starmer was, based on meeting him once in a London pub. I told her she was deluded and that while Sir Keir had many qualities, he was not sexy. I cited as extra evidence the fact he has admitted he has no favourite book and doesn’t dream. Where’s the hinterland? I also reminded her that I happen to be a self-appointed, global authority on the topic of sex appeal after a well-spent youth editing the Erotic Review. But now that Starmer is PM, of course, the female British commentariat – most notably Caitlin Moran – have started saying they’re turned on by his “competency”. Their reasoning is that nothing’s sexier than a man who can be relied upon to get things done. 

We’d all love to believe that, but the plain fact remains, as thousands of reliable, decent, average-looking blokes called Mike could tell you, that women still regularly plump for handsome cads and conmen. Or men with what my sons call “rizz”, meaning flirtatious charm of the brand exemplified by James Nesbitt in Cold Feet. My own dad had this quality in spades, meaning he managed to seduce my poor, naïve mum even though she was 27 years younger, spinning a web of lies about his background (though five children later, she had the last laugh). I also note that those of my friends who have thrown in their lot with decent, steady chaps all picked highly attractive ones. Conversely, I don’t hear a massed chorus of women lusting after the current governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, even though we must all hope he’s the most competent man in the UK. Nor was everyone talking about gym-honed actor Theo James – snapped for an ad campaign in his D&G budgie-smugglers this week – because he’s oh-so dependable.

Sexual chemistry is a weird old business, but it tends to be conducted via our eyes, noses and mouths in a far more persuasive way than our brains. Women are always saying they fancy clever men, but I live in Cambridge where many brilliant eggheads find it very hard to date because they have no social skills. This often changes if their work gets widely acclaimed and rewarded. A Nobel Prize can be sexy. For here’s another truism: power, fame and success carry their own transfiguring sexual chemistry, which can bestow glamour on quite normal people. How else did dweebie health secretary Matt Hancock attract gorgeous Gina Coladangelo to his side? 

So, I’d suggest what’s really going on when women – or men – say they fancy Keir Starmer is that they’re simply following social cues that say you should go “phwoar!” to a pack leader. Men behaved in the same way towards Margaret Thatcher (just see her flirting with Michael Parkinson in the 1980s), although she was no Marilyn Monroe. But this kind of allure is transient and evaporates when you’re out of office. Sir Keir is duly warned, while (genuinely gorgeous) Victoria, Lady Starmer, is probably amused. 

It’s probably time to admit that my mid-life crisis is in full swing. In case you think I’ve splashed out on a Maserati or taken up skydiving, forget it. It’s not so much that I’d consider the Maserati a waste of money, but that it would be wasted on me. Apart from its boot capacity, I’ve never had the slightest interest in what I drive. As for strapping on a parachute, even when I learnt to fly 30 years ago, my argument with gravity never went that far. Why hurl yourself out of a perfectly good plane? Maybe what I’ve done now isn’t as racy as either of these, but I’ll wager it’ll be far more life-changing: this year, instead of shaking out the piggy bank for a summer holiday, I smashed it open and bought a narrowboat. Now, instead of packing my bag for a couple of weeks in Normandy or Norfolk, I’m packing up for good and – quite literally – moving on.

The response of friends to my announcement can broadly be divided into WTF? and WTP? (When’s the Party?) Either way, now I’ve put it out there, pride alone means I can’t turn back – not that I’d dream of it, of course. But I confess it hasn’t all been plain sailing. Apart from anything else, it’s only when you start cramming your life into boxes that you realise the sheer volume of “stuff” (or other “s” words) we accumulate. The tiny size of what I’m moving on to, makes it even more a challenge. At 64 feet, as far as narrowboats go, this one’s no slouch. Still, she’s barely wide enough to lie down in sideways, and the total interior is smaller than my current living room. 

Yet, ironically, it’s a craving for space, and the sense of freedom it brings, that has me heading for a life on what boaters call “the Cut”. Britain’s 2,000-plus miles of canals, some dating back as far as the sixteenth century, cling to the country like a broken spider-web. Largely hidden from sight, they weave through cities, past factories, and across whole counties of countryside, using an ingenious system of locks to go up hill and down dale.

Many people are barely aware of these waterways unless they stumble across them. Except, of course, those like me who choose to live aboard. To put it mildly, it’s a diverse community, and I was a bit miffed to discover I’m no trendsetter. In fact, there’s a growing diaspora of fed-up, middle-class, mid-life types down on the canal, looking for a more affordable, and dare I say more fulfilling way of life. I’ve read all the blogs of those who’ve staked their claims before me, about how hard it’s going to be. Only time will tell if I’m going to make the cut.

A memoir of someone’s breakdown isn’t usually what you’d rush to put on your holiday books pile, but Tom Lee’s Bullet is engaging, like a literary Who Do You Think You Are?. The author has set out to unravel his family’s history of depression, a taboo subject when he was a child. After his father’s hospitalisation with mental illness, his mother also vanished for weeks without explanation – an event followed by years of her lying silently in a darkened room. Lee’s narrative, including his own debilitating ill-health as an adult and his battle with different medications, is set within the context of decades of changing governmental approaches to mental illness.

The story begins with Lee revisiting Severalls hospital in Essex, a place to which he’s magnetically drawn because each of his parents spent time there as patients. This once-magnificent, flagship institution, built in 1913 to provide a true sense of “asylum” (safety and recuperation for those with mental health issues) has long since closed. The failure of its ideals can be seen as a parallel story to Lee’s own narrative of failing to be the strong husband, father, son and friend he once was. His underlying hope is that by understanding what happened to his parents he might somehow uncover a way of making himself whole again.

It’s a courageous, honest account of depression that will be recognisable to anyone who’s suffered the consequences of “the intensity and intolerable drama of their interior world – guilt, shame, self-hatred, paranoia”. It’s also insightful for people who haven’t; for while “depression is a country the undepressed cannot enter”, Lee’s wife has no alternative but to support him through a condition that, from the outside, is “a terrible passivity, a void which nevertheless drags everything towards it.” His emasculation is only reinforced by his mother-in-law giving him the moniker “the Creaking Door”, a nickname he’s remarkably sanguine about.

Lee is not, by his own admission, a historian, sociologist or medical professional, so the political and scientific background can feel sketchy and uneven. To his credit, he doesn’t try to find glib answers and allows for the terrible possibility that he has a genetic disposition to mental illness that might be passed to his beloved children – the “bullet” of the title.

A different sort of bullet – a financial one to sort the UK’s growing crisis of mental health – is urgently needed. Lee notes that when the Lunacy Commission and local councils lavished £188,351 on the construction of Severalls in 1913 (unimaginable munificence now), it led to accusations that they too should be “mentally examined”. This sumptuously landscaped, 295-acre institution had a three-day opening for the public to admire its self-sufficiency (water, electricity, vegetable gardens), its workshops for tailoring, upholstering, cobbling, painting, carpentry, plumbing and glazing, its huge ballroom, cricket pitch and chapel that strove “to imbue lunatics with the true principles of gothic architecture”. Alas, it closed in the 1990s, along with many similar institutions, in the wake of Thatcher enacting a “Care in the Community” policy in 1983. Most of Severalls’ buildings have been demolished to make way for a housing estate. 

Lee’s mother suggests that in dark times he should cheer himself by remembering “a happy day” of sun and laughter, but it feels like a sticking plaster, as inadequate as Severalls’ glade-filled dreams for patients. What is the way forward? This book is a good place to start thinking about how to revive Britain’s desperate mental health services.