America is back to normal

For the first time in I think six weeks the astonishing spectacle presented itself last Tuesday morning on the mat outside my kitchen door - the New York Times, its usual front page six columns, seven stories, not one of them even mentioning the words Bush or Gore.

In other joyful words: America is back to normal. We read again the stories that are routine at this time of the year.

So, first thing, a normal southern tornado. This one eight miles long, half a mile wide, it ran through a small Alabama town with the whiplash of a machine gun and in 10 minutes left 120 houses piles of sawdust, planks and trash.

Luckily the inhabitants of such places always have a deep basement storm shelter and once the smoky, whirling spiral is spotted on the horizon everybody retreats and always the human wonder of the aftermath is that nobody is dead.

Tornadoes in the south are balanced as usual by many stories about the descent of Arctic weather across two thirds of the country - the worst in 20 years.

The late fall and early winter have been a bitter time this year. Everywhere the high daily temperatures have been 10-15 degrees below normal, massive snows from the high sierra of California, all across the inter-mountain empire - the Rockies - on across the plains to bury the Midwest as usual - but as usual only in the past five or six years there's been a drastic switch in the path of the prevailing westerlies, the Pacific wind.

Instead of staying close to Canada and sweeping across the Great Plains and then sailing due east and bringing snow, blizzards, wind to New England and the north east, for several years now the westerlies have been ducking up into Canada and then in midcontinent suddenly wheeling south and plunging through the Midwest into the South, into the Deep South - the unlikeliest states like Georgia, Alabama, even Louisiana ravaged by blizzards and ice storms.

A 450-mile stretch of Arkansas is today without power and Dallas - as the old song says "That Texas town that never seen ice or snow" - well it had 20 inches yesterday.

Here we in New York city have had so far a mere dusting of snow, it's been much too cold for snow. And every evening the television warns very old folks, asthmatics and other respiratory sufferers to stay indoors.

Winter visitors to the United States are always puzzled by the weather bulletins saying: "Low temperature tonight 28 degrees but the wind chill factor makes it feel like seven below zero".

Next night you hear that with that the strong northwesterly wind: "The wind chill factor makes it feel like 16 below."

Visitors must wonder what exquisite mechanism inside the bodies of New Yorkers makes them able to distinguish between what seven below zero feels like as against 16. The answer is, they don't know.

Finally the United States Weather Bureau has confessed that the whole phrase and system is a fraud.

The wind chill factor is, it says, an unsatisfactory attempt to measure the difference between what it is and what it feels like.

Feels like what? Well the whole problem is the loss of skin heat and how to measure it and once you recognise that then you should adopt the Canadian scale which measures skin heat loss at - wait for it - 1,370 watts per square metre. I hope that explains everything and everybody's feeling better...

Apart from the weather, which really does overwhelm the news since it hobbles or paralyses the lives of so many millions of Americans, what else is normal?

Well there's bound to be, one day a week, and there was, a shooting - in a school, a lunch counter - by some fired employee or other disgruntled male - usually a male - gone berserk.

The announcement of Mr Bush's nominees for his cabinet have already passed on into the inside pages, except for one: A conservative right winger for attorney general whom the Democrats have sworn to fight in his confirmation hearings.

You know do you not that the president doesn't have the power to appoint his cabinet officers, any more than he can appoint ambassadors, judges, justices of the supreme court.

He names them first. They can only be appointed, the Constitution says, with the advice and consent of the Senate.

And how does he acquire the advice and consent of the Senate? Through public hearings for each of the nominees before an appropriate committee of Congress.

A person picked, for example, as secretary of state must sit, usually for two days, and answer all questions put to him or her by the Senate foreign relations committee.

You may be sure that most of Mr Bush's present nominees had their names put up weeks ago to the FBI - this is called "the check" and it starts by nominees receiving a hundred-page booklet of questions about their public and private record - everything from jobs, political opinions, private life and on and on.

Eight years ago the circulating questionnaires didn't quite go on long enough, for Mr Clinton put up for attorney general, a brilliant - incidentally beautiful - woman lawyer - Yale Law School, impeccable credentials, apparently impeccable private behaviour. The incoming president, Mr Clinton, was fussy about such things before he named anyone.

Unfortunately in the confirmation hearing before the judiciary committee it came out that the lady had somehow forgotten to pay her cleaning woman's weekly mite into the social security or pension system.

What? The committee was horrified, the president was regretful and withdrew the lady's name.

But no need to weep for her, Argentina - on the basis of her fame as a beauty rejected for high office she was offered lots of law jobs and wound up dean of a law school.

One item of increasing prominence in print and on the tube is of course the economy.

For the longest time in history as it happens the economy has provided daily pieces of rhapsody and congratulation.

It's just bad luck for Governor Bush that practically dating from the election the economy has been sliding down, leaping down, up a little, then down and down.

All the experts admit the slump - there's no way of ignoring a 40% drop in the value of high technology stocks since the spring.

But avoiding the dread word "recession", they now argue whether the economy is to achieve a soft or a hard landing. They all pray it will be soft and that next week the national wizard - the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Mr Alan Greenspan - will lower interest rates and put an end to all our woe and loss of Eden.

The shuttling of the great election topic on to the inner pages has left room for several stories that would have grabbed our attention at any other time - what you might call character stories.

There was a beaut came out of a small town in Massachusetts the other day. Seems a shaggy middle-aged man sauntered into town about a year ago and set up in this quiet, rural, conservative, small town a tattoo parlour. Not exactly what most of the city burghers would have prescribed.

What did alarm them was the tattooist himself. You had to guess at the appearance of his body but every inch of his face was covered with elves, dragons, writhing fearsome objects.

He began to do a brisk trade and the citizens rose up - the local council met and passed an emergency ordinance making it illegal for people to practice tattooing unless they took a nine-month course in the medical aspects of tattooing - sterile needles, safe procedures, anaesthesiology, after effects and so on.

Not only did the shaggy one not protest, he took the course and some others at a nearby medical school and became, in fact, the teacher. The citizenry was not merely flummoxed it was greatly impressed. It gave him a second thought and while deploring his trade decided he was a quiet responsible citizen.

"Ah," he said, "I was always a punk."

A city councillor said: "Well he doesn't act like one."

Happy end of story.

For some obscure reason - obscure to me - the end of the year always rounds up very old folks and have them tell us all their recipe for a long, long life.

Mankind (I don't know about womankind) but mankind's belief in every old person's theory of longevity is apparently undying.

Well, a couple of new ones.

A man in San Francisco who founded and ran a Swedish restaurant retired recently, he was 106, and he didn't wait to be asked, he told everybody who came through the door that what had saved and preserved him was "my special steak sauce."

My favourite recent longevity story is about an old Englishman - a dapper, racy type right out of Wodehouse. He was a 1914-18 war veteran named Captain Riley and he wrote for years and years a racing column in the old New Yorker magazine.

Came the day when his copy began to weaken. Sometimes it wandered into nonsense. The fact was Captain Riley was well along in his 90s and the editor said: "Let's face it, he's gaga, he has to go."

He was fired. But he didn't know either that he was gaga or that he'd been fired. He kept on at the track and he filed his unpublished stories, and on New Year's Eve he phoned the magazine and he said to a young man: "Now you be sure to tell my editor to wish all my readers a Happy New Year."

"But Captain Riley," the young man stumbled, "your editor has been dead for six months."

There was a long, crackling pause at the other end of the phone and then Captain Riley said: "Ho, ho, ho."

A Happy New Year to you all.