KEY POINTS:
To my left as I write, is the photograph of Barack and Michelle Obama on the front page of Thursday's New Zealand Herald taken, presumably, as they walked for the crowds along Pennsylvania Ave on their way to the White House after the inauguration.
I cannot stop looking
at it. They are both laughing, both supremely happy. Their gloved hands are entwined and Michelle is leaning into him, clasping his arm. They radiate charisma and power, beauty and joy. They are the Kennedys again.
Interesting, isn't it, when we look back, that it was Ted Kennedy, of all the senior Washington machine politicians who saw the potential in Obama first and came out and declared Obama the man for his time.
Most of the world is in love with Barack Obama at the moment and even in the many places where people hate the United States, there must be a new expectancy. He is intensely charismatic. He is young, he is tall, he is movie star handsome, he has wonderful teeth and a smile to calm the world and bring it hope.
Hope, I guess, is what Barack Obama is about. Hope is what the world wants from him. He is deeply cool. When he is not smiling, his face is serious, considered and grave, yet he seems unfazed by the burdens he has assumed. We have seen during the campaign he does not rattle in the face of severe provocation. He ignores it and rides above it. There is nerve there, and steel.
One commentator said of his inauguration speech that it was stern. Yes, stern about the true values, the good values, not only the values of decent humanity but stern about the old values of the United States itself. He may just be absolutely the right man for the age.
His speech, after the Oath of Office, was, as we have come to expect, masterful.
It was not as simple or as surely delivered as the one he gave in Chicago the night he claimed the Presidency, where Jesse Jackson wept in the crowd and when all round the world we hushed and listened and watched with wonder and pride, but you cannot blame a fellow for being a little nervous in front of two million faces stretched as far as the Washington Monument.
It was beautifully written, nevertheless. Read this and fail to be moved: "As for our common defence, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations.
"Those ideals still light the world and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend to each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity and that we are ready to lead once more."
As the old preacher said in his inauguration prayer, "he's got the whole world in his hands". Yes, he does, in so many ways.
Whatever becomes of his presidency, whatever happens, Barack Obama will forever be a symbol of the miraculous ability of the US to reinvent itself.
And how beautiful Washington looked in the bright blue winter's morning! The New Zealand Herald foreign editor expressed it so well when she wrote of the day there: "For once, this time, the better angels had the skies to themselves."
Washington is a wonderful city, steeped in history, not old European princely history but young history, modern history, history that we can all relate to. I have been lucky twice to stand at the door and look into the Oval Office at the White House, where Lincoln sat lonely and under-rated and struggled to win the Civil War and where Roosevelt brought to bear the might of his nation to defeat German and Japanese fascists.
This is where Truman sat after becoming President and had to decide, within just a few months of taking office, whether to use the atomic bomb. Is there a more famous, more historic room in the world?
I could not watch the inauguration at the farm. I watched it at my neighbour's place because I cannot for the life of me work out how to turn our television set on to Sky. My boy can do it, my wife has no trouble and visitors staying the weekend seem to manage it. I called my wife in Auckland the night before but even with the benefit of her instruction the task defeated me.
After the speeches, with Obama and Michelle on their way to their new home, I went home and started to read the new Jack Reacher novel, Gone Tomorrow, an advance copy of which the publisher had sent me.
Lee Child, an Englishman who writes with an American voice, has invented a brilliant outsider in Jack Reacher, a man alone against a wicked world. I mention this only because at one point in the story, Jack Reacher mentions rats.
He says he likes rats because rats are shy and keep to themselves. Then he says a curious thing, that sightings of rats are rare. I thought about this. I think he is right. Leaving aside pet rats or laboratory rats, I do not know if I have ever seen a live rat in the wild, as it were. So I researched rats. It is true.
You do not often see a rat. If you do see one, it is a sign that the rat population near you is huge. What is more, the big ugly rat you see will be the weakest in the colony. And he will be hungry, because the more dominant rats have forced him to leave the security of the darkness to look for food and the rats you cannot see will be bigger and nastier.
Rats live in colonies of 60 or more. Rats have poor eyesight but they can smell and hear and taste and feel everything. A rat can go without water for longer than a camel. A rat can get almost anywhere. It can collapse its skeleton and squeeze through a hole as small as its head, about 13mm.
In New Zealand we have three types of rat, the kiore, the ship rat and the Norway rat, although the Norway rat does not come from Norway.
The Norway rat is the larger of the two European rats but they share the same habitats: sewers, tips, waterways and cropland. The Norway rat can swim against a strong current in sewer pipes and in the open water can travel for up to 72 hours in freezing temperatures before exhaustion sets in.
A rat becomes sexually mature between two and three months old.
A dominant buck rat may mate with 20 females a day. Gestation is three weeks and the female can produce up to 10 litters a year, each litter being up to 12 pups.
Courtship and copulation take two seconds. It is estimated that the single mating of a pair of rats can cause the production of 15,000 rats a year. It is thought that in towns and cities, we are never more than two or three metres from a rat.
Rats colonised the world. We enabled them to do it. They love to explore but their exploratory instinct is qualified by caution. The rat is neophobic. It has a fear of new things in its environment. It takes several days before a rat will go near a new object in its territory.
So, quite an amazing creature the rat. And they are everywhere, as we all learn to our cost, at some stage, eventually. And it is true. Rarely do you see them coming.
