Sunday August 16th 2020

09:30 A typically quiet lockdown morning and afternoon – starting with a typically anarchic zoom call with Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia, also Francis her husband, and their two 7-year-old twin daughters, Lily and Jessie. The twins want to show us all their art work as usual – how cute they are!!!

We talk on zoom with Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia,

also with her husband Francis, and their 7-year-old twins, Lily and Jessie

Sarah and Francis are very happy that their state, Western Australia, is still refusing to open its borders to visitors from abroad plus the other Australian states, despite legal action from other parts of the country. Life in WA has completely returned to normal, with no restrictions – oh blessed state! Lois and I are so pleased that Sarah and her family are living there in comparative safety –it’s one less thing to have to be anxious about, that’s for sure.

10:30 Lois spends the rest of the morning and early afternoon taking part in her sect’s 2 Sunday services on zoom. After my usual gigantic afternoon nap we take the car out for a 10 mile round trip to Bishops Cleeve to keep the car’s battery in good nick.

The petrol tank is now only one quarter full, so the time is fast approaching when we’ll have to stop at a petrol station, put our gloves and masks on, fill up the tank and pay with our credit card – yikes, scary! We haven’t done that for about 5 months.

15:00 When we get back there’s message on our phone from Alf, a member of Lois’s sect. Alf is going to be in Birmingham on Tuesday, and he won’t be able to give his usual weekly zoom talk to the Iranian immigrants’ group. He wants Lois to fill in for him, including showing some zoom slides in Farsi – this is going to be a bit scary for Lois. But Lois is nothing if not plucky, and I’m more or less sure she will agree to give it a shot  - but we’ll see!

19:00 We get onto zoom and try our best to get Alf’s slides (on “adult baptism”) to appear in the right format, with Farsi on the slides themselves, and English for Lois to read out at the side of the screen – but we don’t have any luck, I’m afraid. I must admit I was pessimistic about this from the start. Alf is no expert on zoom, and neither are we, so it’s a case of “the blind leading the blind”. But we agree to have another go tomorrow – yikes!

20:00 We settle down on the sofa. We see there’s a programme about Derren Brown the magician, but it’s a bit long and it all goes on well past our bedtime, which we normally set at 10 pm unless we’re feeling very adventurous. Oh dear!

Also we don’t like magic shows – oh dear (again) !!!

I see the picture of Derren Brown in the Radio Times, and I can’t help noticing the resemblance between Derren, and Jen’s boyfriend in “The IT Crowd” – the one who “looks like a magician”.

Derren Brown

Jen's boyfriend in "The IT Crowd"

I wonder if they are perhaps related???

21:00 We listen a bit to the radio, the third and final part of an interesting series by Ben Wright on “The Crisis of American Democracy”, containing interviews with Americans from across the political spectrum.

Wright starts with the familiar issue of the popular vote for the Presidency, and the fact that the results returned by the Electoral College  often hand victory to the runner-up, as with Trump over Clinton.

We hear complaints from the “non-swing states” or “non-battleground states” that Presidential candidates ignore them during election campaigns.  The swing states also get more attention from government when it comes to the awards of federal money, it seems, which again creates dissatisfaction in the non-swing states. These kinds of issues are a familiar problem in all countries which have a “first past the post” system, as the UK also does.

Systems not based on proportional representation tend in general to hurt parties like the Democrats, as their support tends to concentrate itself in limited areas, i.e, in the big cities, but some of Wright’s experts think that the Democratic Party needs to react to this disadvantage more positively, by broadening their appeal to voters in rural areas.

One contributor thought that the US had become too large to encompass the complete range of the states that it has, with all their very wide differences, a bit like the way in which the EU has become unwieldy, linking together countries and economies that are quite fundamentally different from each other.

We hear about seminars and working groups where discussion has centred on what could be done to resolve the situation in the case of various “worst case” scenarios, where, for instance, Trump calls in the army to confiscate postal votes, shuts down the post office, or allows the intimidation of voters etc, or (perhaps more likely?) embarks on lengthy legal processes to challenge the results.

Wright himself is optimistic about the coming months. He believes that although US democracy is in crisis, it will be the sort of crisis that acts as a catalyst to achieve better mechanisms for the future. He compares the situation now to that of the time of FDR’s “New Deal”, although Lois and I have a suspicion that the jury is still out on the pluses and minuses of the New Deal.

Well, we’ll see!

22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzz!!!!!