Shit Happens

[The second of our planned scary days on this trip to the States.]

This one really was scary, much more so than Halloween, and a lot less fun. Today was the day of the American presidential election.

Before the shit well and truly hit the fan in the evening, after doing her duty by voting, our host took us out to visit a couple of Virginia’s many vineyards and, boy, were we going to need a drink.

IMG-20241107-WA0001IMG-20241107-WA0002First up was the Fifty-third Winery and Vineyard, so called, apparently, because it was the 53rd vineyard in Virginia. Here we came across the concept of “flights”. A flight is a tasting selection, in our case of four of their wines. We both had two whites and two reds. Our whites overlapped but our reds were different [there were more dry reds than dry whites] so, in effect, we tasted six wines. Our favourite was a white Albariño, just about our favourite Spanish white grape. We bought a bottle for later.

IMG-20241107-WA0003Next up was Keswick Vineyard; over here the “w” is not silent. We had just half an hour before heading back for what promised to be a very scary evening so we just bought a bottle of wine to share between us. Viognier being our favourite French white wine, we chose that from their menu. I have to say that it was almost as good as the Beauvignac Viognier from the south of France … and considerably more expensive.

The rest, by the time anyone reads this, is history. We watched in horror as the earlier results of the American election came in, with Trump over-performing compared to last time and Harris under-performing compared to Biden when he scraped in. I felt I could feel the entire rest of the western world holding its collective breath. It was all far too depressing.

The morning results were even worse. America had overwhelmingly elected an ignorant, narcissistic pathological liar; he’d swept up all seven of the so-called swing states. This was little short of a disaster for sanity, the west and, indeed, the world. It was unbelievable to me that so many people could vote for such an egotistical maniac.

Welcome to America.

Posted in 2024 USA