Today will probably be one of those days that will stay in the memory for ever, like the assassination of Kennedy in 1963 and then Martin Luther King in 1968, President De Klerk announcing the end of Apartheid in South Africa in 1990 or the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989. I know that this is not the normal kind of topic I blog about, but I think it is too monumental to go by with out comment.
Before we come to the importance of the day I did notice that some of the Chaffinches in the garden were becoming positively spring like in their garb.
Down in Dover Harbour some wind driven Great Crested Grebes also seemed to have their fancy head gear getting into spring order.
It was however across the other side of the Atlantic that the main event was taking place. The first thing I noticed was that they'd copied our Monument, but, as it was in the USA, it's much bigger than ours, of course.
President Barack Obama is sworn in, thus bringing to end the most incomprehensible eight years in world history. How did the most powerful nation in the world elect as its leader a man whose age is probably double his IQ, and then four years later make the same mistake again. While Barack Obama was being sworn in I thought of the time when I first became aware of segregation in America and the the protest songs that Bob Dylan wrote about various incidents, for example in the songs "Oxford Town" and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol" and only recently I bought a CD by Billie Holiday with the song "Strange Fruit" on it. It was obvious from some of the comments from people in the throng that they are still not sure that what is happening is real, and they looked as though they were pinching themselves to make sure they weren't dreaming.
I thought that Baracks speech was inspiring and had a great deal of positive content for the world. Now he has to deliver.
At the end George W clapped, but since Obama used words with more than one syllable it is hard to believe he understood much of it.
Soon after the Presidential coverage the BBC ran an advert for David Attenborough's programmes about Charles Darwin, and it reminded me that America may now have a President who believes in science and will not be shackled by some of the fundamentalists that seemed to pull W's strings.
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