A man wearing a dark suit walks into a casino with a woman and a young boy. They crouch down together in a corner of the room. Banks of slot-machines hum and chirp all around them. In the orange glow it could be three o’clock in the afternoon, three o’clock in the night, or any other time. This is Las Vegas but it could be anywhere.

‘I have to go away for a while,’ he says. ‘But I want to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed spending time with both of you.’

I’d never been to an airport, certainly not on a school night. My father had packed a thermos of coffee, telling my mother we were just going for a drive. He always had a tape playing in the car, some endless wailing of guitars, but tonight, as we drove through the empty city, watching traffic lights soundlessly change for no one but us, I heard something else: no guitars or drums, no verse or chorus, instead something akin to classical music, epic and sweeping, but also repetitive, hypnotic, cold, metallic; the voice crackled like a robot, at turns joyful and menacing; I caught a few words that I’d learned in first-year German. And as we left the city, turning onto the motorway, I let the music synchronise with the rhythms of the road, each lamp-post arriving with a beep, so that we were sliding through a corridor of sound and light.

My thumb brushes over the buttons of the remote control, pausing above the one that might connect me to a church service back home. Alone on Easter Sunday, with no cooking duties to bring our family together, no reason for an extra phone call to mum, I’m not sure what I should be doing on this blue April morning, even as millions of others are waking to a familiar script and clear instructions. Christmas is simple, with its modest insistence on good cheer and homecoming, everyone back to the nest and the secular rituals around a kitchen table, while Easter mixes death and celebration, a resurrection as terrifying as its crucifixion, a story barely a hundred generations old, so that even the non-believer has to wonder at its proximity and mystery, and on this particular morning some part of me wants to be overwhelmed by the myth, take part in the ceremony, join the hymn, maybe receive a little guidance, but I leave the TV switched off, and then the doorbell rings.

I wake, stretch my toes, and make plans for the new day. I am alone and alive.

The colour of my eyes, the length of my arms, my memories of childhood and former prime ministers, my instincts to compete or share, complain or endure: I carry all this with me but have chosen none of it. The strands of my being are mysterious and sacrosanct. I have a soul.

Letter to The Economist published on 25 January 2020

It’s encouraging that your newly crowned Charlemagne columnist has already stumbled on the European Union’s greatest achievement (‘Why stereotypes rule in Brussels’, January 10).

Not content to have kept the peace, built a single market, launched a new currency and quadrupled their membership in the space of a lifetime, the Union’s members have also allowed themselves to revel in their national cultures and, yes, indulge their well-worn prejudices. You can have your gateau and eat it, after all.

But this is more than a “coping mechanism for complexity”; it goes to the heart of the Union’s success. The member states never did try to “iron out” their distinctions, crass or otherwise, but instead wrote them into the Union’s DNA, from a legal commitment to “respect its rich cultural and linguistic diversity” (article 3 of the Treaty on European Union) to a daily workload that is negotiated in 24 official languages.

A close family, respectful of its differences, is stronger than the sum of its parts. Britain’s liberal instincts will be sorely missed after January 31st, but perhaps not as much as its knack of settling disputes with a good cup of tea.

Yours sincerely,

Jonathan Hill

One tree stands alone in the corner of our garden, and this autumn we had it cut back. When I got home from work to see what the gardeners had done, I stumbled on a crime scene. Under a forensics lamp, a squad of professionals were packing away their cutters and pouring water over their hands, while the chief took photos of the amputated body. In the apartments over the wall, a woman stood on her balcony, arms folded, no hint of gratitude for her new corridor of sunlight. She finished her cigarette and turned away.

How much evidence can we resist before we finally accept that our liberal democracy, in its British and American forms, is now exhausted? If the misery caused to millions by the Great Recession and our failure to punish its culprits were not enough, then what are we waiting for? However we vote, on either side of the Atlantic, we cannot deny that our political institutions are overwhelmed by the upheavals of our era, while our leaders across the public and private realms seem bereft of any social purpose or vision of the good life.

When she snuck into the kitchen, her parents were staring at the open pages of a funeral brochure, her mother’s finger resting on one of the photos while her father looked over his wife’s shoulder, a hand clamped over his mouth. They might have been working on a crossword.

The man had not left the museum for some decades, yet no one could remember when or why he had entered. Staff had come and gone but no one knew his name or from where he had arrived; no photograph recorded his early years in the place or any previous life he may have led. The man was part of the museum, that much was sure, but no one would have called it his home.