November: the penultimate month. Here we are locked down in Confinement #2 in another futile attempt to hold back a virus that will not be confined, fashioned as it is for the follies of mankind with nine parts venom of Yahweh. My Ageing P is beginning to feel that there will never be an end to it, that he will be locked down permanently for however more years he's granted. He told me the other day that he has this image of himself laughing heartily when death finally comes calling for him.
Tilley the Kid made it back home in her usual last-minute manner on the day of amnesty granted by the French government to returnees from the Toussaint holiday. She came by train from England, armed to the teeth with all kinds of disclaimers and attestations, none of which were actually checked. I picked her up on the Saturday night (sha-la-lala-lee), a masked man on the platform waiting for the arrival of his long-lost daughter. I watched her climb down from the carriage like some modern-day Anna Karenina, weighed down with bags and portfolio. On the journey home, she tucked into some aubergine fritters that her mother had prepared for her earlier. There was no one and nothing on the road, giving the floodlit chateau above Turenne a spooky, spectral quality.
A few mornings after her return, I awoke early with a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. The early results were coming in from across the Atlantic on the Good Wife's phone. Biden was ahead, but Trump had taken Florida already. History suggested that he who takes Florida takes America – most notably, I guess, when that other dangerous chump, George W. Bush, swindled Al Gore out of the presidency. So I spent the day with my head buried in the sand, grumpy and demoralised, facing up to the prospect of four more years of a deranged madman.
But my daughter, God bless her youthful optimism, kept at it, determined that the news should be ultimately good. All through the day and the next day and then the day after that, she brought the good news from Ghent to Aix as it dribbled in on her phone. Good news from Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Philadelphia... No one in this household – and I suspect no one in the whole of France – understands the obscure antiquated nonsense of electoral colleges, but we all appreciated how many seats it took to win the election. If and when the sociopathic golfer finally trumps off back to his dysfunctional homestead in Florida or wherever, then another old man with dubious hair can move into the White House and try to clean up the almighty mess left behind. But more importantly, he'll have a dynamic individual – a woman at last, and a dark-skinned one at that – to help him.
However, it's sobering to realise that 70 million supposedly God-fearing Americans were prepared to cast their vote for a womanising, tax-cheating criminal with the morals of a guttersnipe. That's one hell of a lot of the kind of self-interested, moronic individuals who probably don't even notice let alone care that their flaxen-haired leader spells 'polls' in his bilious tweets 'poles'. That's 70 million people who will never change their ways nor surrender their assault weapons in the face of everything that has to be put right in the very limited time available. Can you imagine any of them trading in their gas-guzzler for an electric vehicle or giving up Nutella for the sake of the Indonesian rain forest or swapping their Big Mac for a veggie burger? No, neither can I.
Joe Biden seems like a reasonable human being, although it's quite beyond me that anyone his age would want to go jetting off around the world in a face mask for high-level talks. He's been in a politics for a long, long time, so he must be very ambitious. Ambition is a strange thing. Some people are consumed by it for most of their lives, and would be lost without it. Our own current president is a patently ambitious man, which doesn't endear him to the French electorate – but then they never like their presidents once they elect them. God knows, the little squirt is far from perfect, but I was very gladdened to read that he is very keen on criminalising ecocide. In other words, men like Trump and Bolsonaro would be accountable for their crimes against nature. So let's hear it for Pres Macron.
As for your foreign correspondent here, I was quietly ambitious when I was a younger man, but then I quietly lost most of it and I have to say I'm happier to be largely devoid of it. OK, I'd still like to stumble upon a stash of original Blue Note records at a modest price and I'm looking for some Britains Ltd. mounted Indians of the Swoppet variety to make the Native American encampment on my desk complete. Nostalgia seems to have replaced ambition, but I can reflect on that.
Fortunately, the president elect seems to be rather more forward-thinking. He's big on renewables, which is a good thing. A Green New Deal, if it's half as good as FDR's original programme of public work, is a fine notion. He'll have to get the Big Idea of course through Congress and the Senate, which are half-populated by representatives of the 70 million voters that cannot be serious, but I'm told that he's good at brokering deals. He was, for example, a key player in the Good Friday agreement, dear to my heart as an honorary Norn Irishman.
For now, though, there are more pressing concerns than climate and elections. Now that our daughter is back in the household for the duration, we will be talked into certain home improvements. With her own big ideas and her designer's eye for colour, there are some aesthetic transformations to effect – mainly with paint and rather expensive paint at that. I'm prepared to go along with it, to a degree, secure in the knowledge that one day she can apply some of her more lavish ideas in a place of her own.
But of course that means finding a job, and I recognise how virtually impossible it must be to land anything of note in the current state of affairs. It will require ambition and drive on my daughter's part to get to where she wants to go. Good luck to the girl, because she's half-full of my genes (of the loose-fitting, sloppy kind). Still, she's also half-full of her mother's, so one has to hope – and there's a glimmer of it now that a decent human being is in charge of the 'free world'.
