And the winner is...

Welcome, newly elected reader, because this week has been all about the election here. Literally nothing else has happened. As a self-confessed elections fanatic, it's been wearing even for me, but tremendously educational nonetheless.

Timezones play an interesting part in the US elections. With the East Coast being 3 hours ahead of California, and the polls typically closing at 8pm, we start to hear tangible news from the early evening, unlike in the UK where you don't even get an exit poll before 10pm. Another stylistic difference is that the TV networks didn't actually bother to come out with strong predictions in the way that the BBC or others would. Perhaps they were stung by getting it wrong in 2016, or maybe there's something else afoot, but instead it's hour after hour of studio talking heads discussing the results. Again, unlike the UK, there are very few interviews with actual politicians at this point: the spectacle of politicians having to confront the obvious home truths of a large or unexpected loss just isn't something that happens here.

There's also only the tiniest nod to neutrality in the TV coverage. The pundits themselves clearly declare their allegiances and are pretty up-front about their biases. So for instance, on ABC you have George W Bush's former Head of Political Affairs Sara Fagen exchanging views with former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. I actually found this pretty interesting as the results came in - particularly the partially complete results - where arguments about what it actually meant and what the outcomes could be were in fact much more informative than an entirely neutral projection which would probably be wrong anyway.

All that said - hasn't this gone on a long time? We've essentially had wall-to-wall TV coverage of this since 5pm Tuesday, and as of perhaps Thursday morning there really wasn't a lot to report: we'd got to a static position where a lot of states hadn't been called, and were going to be close, but it kinda looked like Biden would get most of them. So instead we ended up zooming in on the details of which counties within those states had more votes to count, how they were likely to go, etc etc.

Of course, shortly before I started slapping the keys on my 1980s-era Model M keyboard to bring this missive to you, Biden was called as the winner in Pennsylvania and now has enough electoral college votes to win. I guess the next thing is to go to the Palace and kiss the hand?

Our culinary adventures on this not-sceptred isle have reached new heights this week: I've declared Sundays to be "American brunch day", and the first such creation from the cookbook was this delectable sandwich consisting of ham, strawberry jam, cheese, and fried egg:

This came out of Helen's USA cookbook, liberated from the Friends of Palo Alto Library for a small fee. And the sandwich tasted better than it looked; a classic American combination of runny, sticky, meaty and sweet.

So - what happens next, reader? I expect the next 70-ish days, until the inauguration, are going to be a bit of a thrill ride, with who-knows-what crazy nonsense coming out of the White House. Given the way COVID is running through the ranks there, let's hope Joe and Kamala give everything a thorough wipe down before they get down to business!