Is There Life On Mars?

4th November
I feel peculiarly isolated out here in my feverish anticipation of the US election results. My French neighbours are not interested in events happening beyond their borders, in some cases this means their garden gate, for the more cosmopolitan the border can be as far as the departmental edge.  The newspapers here have blurry photos on the front page: a car stuck in a car park or some schoolchildren in fancy dress. For most of the population Europe is a fuzzy blur and the US is a sort of gaudy magazine someone's told them about.

I think this might be the case all over France, I was working in Provence on 9/11 when the Twin Towers were hit, I heard the news on my car radio and stopped to ask a few passersby if the news I was hearing was correct, no-one had any idea what I was talking about. I finally managed to find a bar with a telly tuned into a news channel, I was the only person watching the images of planes hitting buildings. That evening I spoke to the man who ran the local taxi company, he hadn’t heard about the events yet. I looked in the national papers the following day, significant coverage only appeared in Le Monde a couple of days later.

I’d got used to all this woolly introspection - then a couple of weeks ago I went to work for some Americans with access to digital tv, commentary on the US election was constant. It jolted me into a world I used to inhabit - it’s very strange coming back to this bunker.