Across the pond

8 AM GMT

My day opens to steam radio with the Today programme, BBC Radio Four. The first item is by anchorman Jim Naughtie, who, of course, is in Washington. His opening words:

‘It is dark and very cold here’.

Dark, because it is 3 AM in Washington. But hundreds of thousands are up and about:

‘you can barely move in these streets’.

Naughtie is at his most eloquent. He moves from the darkness of the night to the blackness of Obama. Reminding us first that Washington is a black city, 95 per cent populated by not very well off blacks, which even I forget because the Washington pictures I see regularly on the television are all of the Government buildings and the Lincoln memorial.

He reminds us all have history has moved on at hectic pace in the two years of this campaign. America has elected Barack Obama, who was born in Chicago to a black father and a white mother in 1961. Their marriage would have been illegal in many southern states, where segregation still insisted that the buses were divided,

‘whites in front, blacks in the back’.

The excitement is conveyed in the voices of the blacks on the streets whom Naughtie interviews, but

‘even conservatives are dancing on the streets’.

The polls are showing an 80 per cent approval rating, compared with just over 50 per cent for Bill Clinton on his Inauguration Day.

Naughtie finds quotes to explain this surge in Obama’s ratings we have seen over the closing months of the campaign and since.

‘He is a man who knows history and is acting it out.’

 ’Obama has the ability to ride the waves like a surfer’.

Above all it is

‘the serenity he brings to the field’.

The second item on the Today Programme was John Humphreys who told us that

‘bank shares fell off a cliff yesterday’,

 and went on to ask the question as to whether Britain was going bankrupt.

Americans are asking the same question about America. And that, of course, is one major reason why conservatives are rallying behind the President they have got, hoping he will be able to unify the nation and find solutions to the credit crunch and the financial meltdown.

In Dorset was pretty cold at 8 AM. The decorator had to scrap the ice off his windscreen before he drove here to paint my study. But as I write this in a corner of living room I have had to draw the curtains in order to see the computer screen.

The sun is blazing away hotter than it was last August. The outline of Portland Bill and Chesil Beach on the other side of Lyme Bay is clearly visible. The sun warms my body and cheers my soul. I am full of hope for today’s new dawn.

But, by the time I write my next blog commenting on what Obama actually said in his speech it will be dark in UK I shall be in a more sombre mood. Already I am remembering the waves that Obama will have to surf: the slaughter in Gaza, the unfinished and unwon wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, all this in addition to the worst recession in the world since the Great Depression of the 1930s.