Election Day in an old port city, the clocks changing in a city of bells and a list of things politicians keep promising
Saturday, The Diner on Election Day
On Election Day I ate breakfast at a diner in Charleston, South Carolina, a place with a long counter, a laminated menu and a waitress named after a month. I wrote the scene up in Charleston diner on Election Day: Missouri turnout, Arizona patience. The televisions on the wall showed early results from several states, and the customers read them with the calm of people who have seen many election nights and learned not to trust the first column.
Patience in Arizona and turnout in Missouri were the themes that morning, in the sense that those places were mentioned by the commentators. I am not in a position to say who was right about anything, and I tried to stay in my seat, drink my coffee and listen. The diner told me more than the screens: a retired nurse said she had voted at seven, a young man in a delivery uniform said he would vote at lunch and a pair of students said they would vote that evening after class.
The Dignity of the Queue
One of the best features of American elections is the queue. Voters stand in the cold, talk to strangers and share umbrellas. Officials hand out stickers. Volunteers offer water. The sight of a line of people waiting patiently to make a mark is, to my mind, one of the quiet glories of public life. Of course, long lines raise legitimate questions about resources and planning, and reasonable people differ about the remedies.
Sunday, The Hour in Philadelphia
The following weekend, as the clocks changed, I found myself in Philadelphia, a city with a fine selection of bells and a long habit of timing its civic events. My notes appear in Philadelphia gains an hour, the Senate gains nothing. The title is a joke about clocks and chambers: a city gains an extra hour on a November night, while the Senate, following the results of the election, seems to add no extra seats to anybody. I will not interpret the numbers. I will only observe that an extra hour is a better gift than most legislation.
I used mine to walk through the old streets, buy a pretzel and stand outside a brick building where a great many arguments were once resolved with a quill.
A Promise Check
Whatever the election results, politicians of every party are in the habit of making promises, and I keep a list. Cut taxes. Fix the roads. Lower prices. Protect the vulnerable. Balance the budget. It is a long and cheerful list, and it can be read in any decade. The London Prat summarised the gap between promise and practice with Socialism Promises Free Electricity, Power Station Requests Actual Fuel. The joke could be rewritten for any ideology, and I suspect it has been.
My own rule is to check promises against three questions: What will it cost? Who pays? How will we know if it worked? An answer to all three is a rare treat, like a warm biscuit in a cold office.
Monday, The Walk to the River
I walked to the river on Monday evening, past a church whose bells chimed a quarter hour that nobody had agreed on. The water was brown and quick. A jogger passed, then a man with a dog, then a couple holding hands. The city seemed entirely unconcerned with the weight of the week. I sat on a bench and ate the second half of my pretzel, and watched the lights come on across the water. They were not a metaphor. They were just lights, and that was lovely.
Tuesday, The Reading Hour
I have decided to treat the extra hour of the clock change as a gift for reading, and I recommend it to everyone. It is the only hour of the year that arrives unclaimed. Nobody has scheduled it. Nobody has assigned it a task. I spent mine in an armchair with a seventeen hundreds travel book, a mug of tea and a lamp. Outside, the rain came and went. Inside, a man in a wig was describing a coffee house in such detail that I could almost smell the beans.
If you are given an unexpected hour, spend it on something that cannot be measured. A book. A walk. A call to someone who has been on your mind. The calendar will not remember, but you will.
Wednesday, The List of Small Things
At the end of the week I wrote a list of small things I was grateful for. The diner coffee. The queue that moved. The extra hour. The pretzel. The unreasonable bell. The librarian who found the pamphlet I needed in less than four minutes and refused to take credit. It is a modest list, and it is the best summary of the week I could produce. Politics fills the headlines, but life fills the days, and the days are where the diary lives.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, The Daily Mash keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/