How to get a life

Lovely blog post by Sean French who — like me — spent far too much time thinking about the US Presidential election.

I’ve spent way too much of the last year checking up on the latest Ohio polls, debating inside my own head whether Florida has decisively switched into the Romney camp, whether Obama’s decisive victory in the foreign policy debate will have any effect in the battleground states. 

I sometimes wonder what I would think if I heard of someone roughly like me sitting in somewhere like New Zealand, constantly checking the UK opinion polls for the swing seats, wondering whether Ed Miliband was a plausible leadership candidate and what the effect of the improved employment figures was. I know what I’d think: that he should get a life.

Does anyone read Dr Johnson’s wonderful novel Rasselas any more? There’s a character, an early meteorologist, who has been observing the weather for so long that he believes he controls it. I suppose I’m a bit like that, except that I’m not even observing my own weather, I’m observing American weather.

Ouch! Just when I had decided that I must read this, I will have to postpone it to read Rasselas. Sigh. That’s the trouble with blogs: they give you ideas.