{"id":1626,"date":"2021-01-20T20:52:43","date_gmt":"2021-01-20T20:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=1626"},"modified":"2021-01-20T23:12:27","modified_gmt":"2021-01-20T23:12:27","slug":"wednesday-20th-january-2021-day-310","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/01\/20\/wednesday-20th-january-2021-day-310\/","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday, 20th January, 2021 [Day 310]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today after a somewhat delayed start we wondered whether to brave the elements for our daily walk or not. Instead, we decided to compromise so we took the car down to collect our newspapers and then headed for the park. It was spattering with rain as we are still on the edge of Storm Christoph, which seems to be hitting parts of the North of England more severely. Having got to the park we decided to seek the\u00a0shelter of the bandstand where, almost alone in the park, we met up with our Birmingham University friend. We braved the wind and rain together, surveying an almost empty park but still glad of a chat with each other. As we had the car, the journey home was relatively swift so we we did not get soaked\u00a0through which is always a danger.<\/span><\/p>\n

Today is the day which we thought would never come but here it is at last – the\u00a0Inauguration Day for Joe Biden to be installed as the 46th President of the United States. Evidently, it was going to be a very\u00a0different inauguration – for a start, President Trump vacated the White House (without being prised out!) and made his way to the Andrews Air Force base where he was greeted as president for the very last time. After a fairly perfunctory speech he wished the new regime well without referring to the name of his successor by name and eventually to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s ‘I’ll do it my way!<\/em>‘ then AirForce 1, the presidential\u00a0plane, took off for Florida and Mar-a-Lago, the Trump retreat where he stay closeted with members of his\u00a0family for a while. Meanwhile, back in Washington, DC the\u00a0inauguration organisers had to make the best of bad job, in the absence of any crowds. So instead of a Mall filled with flag-waving crowds, we now just had the flags placed at strategic intervals but fluttering nicely in the January breeze. The overall effect was\u00a0visually quite effective. Then we had the arrival of the members of the political elite, principally all the ex-Presidents and their wives. The one exception, for understandable reasons, was Jimmy\u00a0Carter who is 96, a survivor of both liver cancer and brain cancer, and whose health was too frail even for an inauguration. We had the normal\u00a0patriotic songs and prayers\u00a0followed by the swearings-in and the oath of office by Kamala\u00a0Harris and Joe Biden, then to be followed by the inauguration speech. This was full of appeals to unity (and was in marked\u00a0contrast to that spoken by Donald Trump four years ago) To my mind, this was quite an effective\u00a0call for national unity in the face of a raging pandemic, a faltering economy and a democracy\u00a0whose\u00a0fragility had been exposed by the invasion of the Capitol Building a fortnight ago, on January 6th. A theme of the Biden speech was that ‘democracy has triumphed<\/em>‘ which is evidently the case after the earth-shattering events within the last fortnight. Normally, there would be an\u00a0inauguration ball in the evening after a day full of ceremonies – I suspect that they have decided to cancel this in view of the pandemic. If my memory serves me correctly, Bill Clinton went off and played his saxophone on the occasion of his own\u00a0inaugural ball years ago. The Biden presidency has started off with three acts of\u00a0presidential\u00a0empathy which must have hit the right tone. Last night, he went with Kamala Harris to the Lincoln Memorial, lit by an avenue of lights, and paid tribute to the 40,000\u00a0Americans who have died in the pandemic. He then paid tribute to them again in the midst of his presidential address by\u00a0calling for a moment’s silence where people could offer their thoughts and their prayers for the dead. Finally, he went straight off to the Arlington National Cemetary again to pay tribute to past\u00a0American\u00a0heroes (and the burial place of past\u00a0presidents). I suppose one has to say that if any presidential hopeful was capable of\u00a0riding the huge divides in the\u00a0American political life, then Jo Biden as a\u00a0centrist who has often worked ‘across the aisle’ in the Senate is the best-placed person to do it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, we have more grim news from the home front. The number of deaths is now at an all-time high of 1,820 (and a total of above 93,000 in total). Just to compound this diet of bad news, it is\u00a0also a source of concern that the South\u00a0African variant of COVID may be resistant to the latest vaccines – in time, of course, they\u00a0could be tweaked like the ‘flu virus but there is still\u00a0more time for more deadly\u00a0mutations to arise. Meg and I are still awaiting the\u00a0call for our vaccination which we suspect may still be at least two weeks off, amidst some reports of shortages of the vaccine in\u00a0various\u00a0places (who would have thought that?)<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today after a somewhat delayed start we wondered whether to brave the elements for our daily walk or not. Instead, we decided to compromise so we took the car down to collect our newspapers and then headed for the park. It was spattering with rain as we are still on the edge of Storm Christoph, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1626"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1632,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1626\/revisions\/1632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}