Limo in Finly, IN

The series has given up trying to squeeze its characters into the modern age and is content to just be. Fans of the original will sink into it as if it is made of marshmallows and air

It all fell into place for me around the shoe montage. Roughly halfway through the third season of And Just Like That, there is an on-screen procession of footwear, strident and unapologetically far too long. Carrie has been accused by her downstairs neighbour of walking too loudly on the floor above his bed. A parade of sandals, boots and mules strut back and forth across a polished and expensive wooden floor. I watched this march of the stilettos and began to suspect that the storyline had been retrofitted to the idea of simply showing off the shoes. And I realised that, even if that is the case, I don’t mind at all, because And Just Like That has found its feet.

It took a while for it to get there, but finally, the Sex and the City spin-off feels comfortable in its own skin. If the first two seasons were fondly received but sometimes excruciating exercises in attempting to squeeze its characters into the modern age, then this feels like a loosening of the belt. The leads are no longer trying to be anything other than themselves: absurdly rich New Yorkers in their 50s, troubled mostly by the burdens of making sure they spend enough time with their friends. Life’s primary emotional entanglements – love, work, family – are present, sure, but they hum away lightly, like ambient noise, any sharp corners dulled by vast riches.

Having sold her single-girl apartment, Carrie is now living in a sparsely furnished, absolutely massive Gramercy Park townhouse. She is still with Aidan, though he remains in Virginia, taking care of his troubled teenage son. It is a long distance relationship, with the emphasis on distance. Charlotte is still a happily married mother of two teenagers, with a successful art-dealing business, though early in the season, her dog gets cancelled. Lisa is trying to get her documentary about pioneering Black women off the ground, but the stress of it means she is sleep-talking, so her husband, Herbert, has to move to the spare room. Seema, the not entirely convincing Samantha replacement, is trying to assert her worth in the workplace. Miranda is dating again, and looking for an apartment, and is a human rights lawyer, very much in that order of importance.

You make a choice, with And Just Like That, of how to consume it. You can look at it and see its Nero-like qualities, stark and vivid. You could accuse its fluorescent fairytales of fiddling while Trump’s America burns. Much of Carrie’s ennui comes from whether or not she will buy a dining table that costs almost $7,000, so that she can begin to fill her still-empty mansion. The show scoffs at tourists in New York, rural life, the countryside, items of clothing that cost less than an average month’s rent.

Yet I find myself sinking into And Just Like That as if it is made of marshmallows and air. It is funny, warm, and self-aware enough to just about get away with it. Miranda’s ex, Che, has departed from the women’s lives and in the six episodes released to critics, they aren’t mentioned at all. Che was And Just Like That trying too hard, and in their absence, there is a sense that it has stopped putting on a front. Now, it has a kind of gauzy acceptance that these women are fully ensconced in the rarefied world of Manhattan’s wealthy, middle-aged elite. The hardest they have to try is when endlessly discussing what emojis in text messages are really meant to say.

It should be unbearable. But the show’s devotion to the fantasy of dedicated, lifelong, rock-solid friendship is what gives it a heart, and in turn, that gives its more egregious vulgarities a free pass. Most Sex and the City fans have been following the lives of Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda since 1998, and there is a specific comfort in seeing them (without Samantha, of course) operating as a unit, 27 years later. Every episode rolls on, as each minor drama softly bumps into another minor drama, with stakes so low that you have to crouch to see them. It is all so steady, so frictionless, as smooth as the foreheads of the Upper East Side.

I have no idea if it is good or not. I truly, genuinely, don’t know. It remains filled with Samantha-esque quips and puns that, like the shoe montage, appear to have been worked backwards, as if the gags come first, and the plots are created to fit them. But if there was a reluctant fondness that came when watching the first two seasons, then that fondness now appears much more readily. Their concerns are so gentle, their worries so slight, that to watch it is to be lulled into a state of easy comfort. The stilettos march on, as they always did.

And Just Like That season three aired on Sky Comedy and is available on NOW.

I’ve always loved my husband, but now that we are older and in our 60s, I definitely hate him less. Maybe I shouldn’t have had to wait 33 years — a third of a century — to hate my husband less, but time has been good to him. And it’s not just that he’s aging better than most men this side of Richard Gere, although that doesn’t hurt. It also helped, at least from my perspective if not his, that the industry he spent most of his career in collapsed.

Now he gives more because he has more to give.

Bruce and I met in our 20s, and our relationship got off to an extremely slow start. Let’s say his courtship skills were rudimentary. For our first date, he asked me if I wanted to go “to an art opening and get some free wine.” It wasn’t until a year and a half after we met that I realized this kind, interesting and abnormally tall man was someone I could finally let my guard down around.

I had published a couple of books and was writing screenplays and teaching creative writing as an adjunct professor. Bruce got a full-time job as a magazine writer and editor. We did OK financially, especially because we didn’t have huge material needs and we had enough free time to enjoy each other.

Then we had kids. And I became the first line of defense for two sick and aging parents. Bruce was a committed father, but his job took up more and more of his time. Screenings, book parties, dinners with writers — the demands (his word; mine would be “benefits”) of a magazine gig in those halcyon days.

Despite being steeped in second-wave feminism, I was still stuck with a majority of the domestic grind, like every generation of women before me. I was laboring hard at my career, too. As a working-mother friend of mine recently reminisced over cocktails, “We did everything.” That was our real-world experience of the “having it all” illusion. Doing it all. We did, and we resented it.

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I wasn’t a stay-at-home mother, but I dropped off and picked up my kids from school every day, organized their activities, took them to the doctor, bought their clothes, kept them fed, homework, bath, bed, the whole schmear. (When I showed my husband this essay, he wrote in the margins, “Um, you weren’t totally on your own: I dropped off one or the other kid every day and at least in my memory got them breakfast every morning.” The former note is sort of true, the latter is a complete fantasy. PS: He also suggested the Richard Gere comparison above.)

By the late 1990s, my husband made a very (he inserted that word) good living, but we were a family of four in New York City, so we needed both incomes. There were years when I taught 11 classes and wrote books and screenplays, book reviews, the occasional essay, all while running our household and intermittently hospitalizing my parents. I also didn’t have a classic office job like Bruce’s, which meant my days had flexibility. I could do laundry at 2 in the morning while grading papers — the trifecta being simultaneously food shopping on Fresh Direct.

I know our life sounds rarefied, but at the time, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Bruce was always a loving dad. His children adored him. I adored him. He coached their soccer and basketball teams. He is and was a great moviegoing/sports-attending/comic-book-reading/cartoon-watching/Frank Sinatra- and Bob Dylan-listening mentor. He’d take them to the playground on Saturdays, although he arrived back at our apartment one afternoon with only one of my daughter’s shoes. (They cost 30 bucks. We could have gotten a babysitter!) Another time he let her fall off the slide onto her head. (He suggested I might mention the time I created a toxic event in our kitchen when I was sterilizing some formula bottles in a pot of boiling water and left them on the stove so long that they started to melt. OK, but that happened because I was alone with our infant daughter, exhausted, and had fallen asleep well after midnight while he was still at work closing an issue of a newsweekly.)

Bruce was also very adept at coming home from work after the kids had already been tucked into their bunk beds, lights out and all that, and rousing them so that he could read books to them. (Fun times trying to get them to settle back down while he finally ate his dinner, which I’d made and saved for him on a covered plate — why?) He read to them every page of every book of “Harry Potter.” This truly tender, if inconvenient, practice lasted until one evening when I poked my head in and saw he was reading away, enjoying himself, while our daughter was deep in her own book and our son was already fast asleep.

As a man in a still sexist society, Bruce had other uses. Whenever we had a meeting at school, I could call him at the office and say, “I need a penis in the room,” and he’d show up because issues seemed to just disappear when he walked in wearing a good suit, calm and cool (unlike me). And sometimes even wearing dark glasses inside (ugh). (Another bit of Bruce’s marginalia: “I only did that when I needed glasses for distance and I didn’t have my nonsunglasses on me.”) The people in the room reflexively asked him all the questions about our kids’ lives, when I was the one who had the answers.

I was aware that I was very lucky to have the career and family I wanted, but I often grumbled “eff-Daddy” under my breath.

Now that we’re old, all that’s changed. Our children grew up and moved out of the house. There is no more college or camp tuition. We miss them, but there definitely is something to the empty nest. Meanwhile, the magazine industry tanked, and my husband couldn’t find full-time work anymore. Instead he did what he’d always wanted to do: He wrote full time — books for adults and, prolifically, books for children.

I had a new husband! Historically a humorist, with a stinging wit, he was more like a poet now. He’d talk for hours with his picture book collaborators about pacing and page turns and argue about specific words and illustrations. He gave readings in bookstores to toddlers and babies.

These days I have far more demands on my time than he does and much less flexibility, and as always, I wouldn’t mind more room for, ahem, writing — I still teach and chair a department — but Bruce has picked up the domestic slack. He hasn’t quite turned into Meghan Markle, but he learned to cook, and now he does all the shopping; there are martinis and dinner waiting when I come home late at night from work. He’s always down to hear about my day, and we sometimes linger at the table over music and wine talking for hours. He is definitely the happiest and most creative I’ve ever seen him.

Sometimes I wonder, “Why did we have to wait this long?” But I know the answer: It’s all too much for two people, and we were so lucky to have what we had, tumult and all. Now I’m savoring these days with my dreamboat husband.

More on marriage

Opinion | Frimet GoldbergerThe Case for Staying Married to a Spouse You Cannot StandApril 9, 2023

Opinion | Esau McCaulleyMarriage Made Me Let Go of My Dreams. Good.Feb. 12, 2022

Helen Schulman is the author of the forthcoming book of stories “Fools for Love.”

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A biting wind swept across Grace Road on Thursday and though the crowd was thin, there was just enough stardust to keep the autograph hunters happy. Andrew Flintoff was perched on the pavilion balcony, while Mark Wood, trying his hand at coaching during his latest injury layoff, patrolled the boundary’s edge with a smile.

Out in the middle there were also runs for Josh de Caires, son of Mike Atherton, who compiled a fluent 79 from 93 balls on a green-tinged pitch. De Caires is a player in the modern mould charting his own course but some of the old man’s mannerisms were there to see. Mercifully, the lower back appears to be much less creaky.

But more noteworthy than the Professional County Club Select XI – a team of fresh-faced rookies led by De Caires, coached by Flintoff, and with selector Luke Wright in attendance – was the identity of their opponents. Zimbabwe have arrived for a one-off, four-day Test match against England that gets under way at Trent Bridge next Thursday, their first appearance on these shores for 22 years.

Much has changed since a series chiefly remembered for Jimmy Anderson, peroxide highlights in his hair, bursting out of the traps with five wickets on his debut at Lord’s. Tour games have largely gone the way of the Nokia 3310 (the must-have mobile phone back then, kids) and Zimbabwe have slipped from feisty overachievers, a team laced with a good deal of quality, to the unofficial second tier of Test cricket.

Indeed, after the Test next week (a warmup for England before the five-Test visit of India) Zimbabwe stick around to play South Africa in a four-day game at Arundel. That third and final game on tour is preparation for the Proteas ahead of their World Test Championship final against Australia at Lord’s next month – a competition that Zimbabwe, along with Afghanistan and Ireland, are currently excluded from.

Still, truncated though it is – a far cry from 2003, when they played two Tests and took part in an ODI tri-series along with South Africa – this tour is a welcome development. And in something of a first, the England and Wales Cricket Board is also paying the visitors a tour fee in lieu of a reciprocal trip not sitting in the future tours programme.

This apparent benevolence is in part driven by the England and Wales Cricket Board’s broadcast deal with Sky, which is predicated on delivering six Test matches every season; in the years that bring India or Australia for their usual five-match series, an early summer opponent is still needed. Ireland fulfilled this role before the 2023 Ashes, now it is Zimbabwe’s turn.

But while a schedule-filler, it would not have come about had relations between the ECB and Zimbabwe Cricket not thawed considerably in recent times, nor had the green light not come from the British government. After the dark days of Robert Mugabe’s brutal regime, and a period of considerable turmoil for cricket in Zimbabwe in which corruption was alleged to be rife, relative stability has returned to the country.

How Zimbabwe will fare in Nottingham next week is tricky to call, with their diet of Test cricket so skinny in recent years. There are just 108 caps spread among their 15-man squad (Joe Root, by comparison, has racked up 152 on his own). As the county kids cut loose to post 330 all out inside 72 overs, including half-centuries from tailenders Sebastian Morgan and Jafer Chohan, it did not augur massively well.

Equally, there was a creditable 1-1 draw in Bangladesh last month, one that featured Zimbabwe’s first away victory for seven years, and there are players of some promise in their ranks. Blessing Muzarabani, a towering 6ft 6in quick who claimed nine wickets in Sylhet, could pose some problems for England on the right surface – much as New Zealand’s similarly giant Will O’Rourke did during their last outing.

As well Muzarabani, who nicked off De Caires with a sharp delivery that climbed, there is Sikandar Raza, the Pakistani-born all-rounder who has been a world-class performer in the white-ball formats.

Experience comes from Sean Williams and skipper Craig Ervine, both 39, while Gary Ballance, though retired after a brief return to the country of his birth, is sharing local knowledge as their batting consultant.

This short tour may serve to warm up their opponents in the main but for Zimbabwe, out in the cold for more than two decades, there is sunshine breaking through.