Aaah, 33C, cloudless blue sky, almost no breeze. Noice! I was saying to someone the other day that I predict Xmas day to be the same as this, a prediction even from 18 days out. We can do that in WA. Mind you, I remember fierce 40-44deg Xmas Days some years ago.

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My headline refers to the USA. The “United” States. What a joke. This is a deeply divided country, more than ever after four years of that lunatic president. The Dump, and I don’t mean rubbish dump, I mean the thing you leave in the toilet. What a nasty, racist, misogynist, divisive, mendacious, repugnant, unintelligent fool he is. Yet the Republican Party lick his shoes because they hope he’ll be electable again. What a disgusting rabble of corrupt fools. They should be ashamed.

Trump should be charged with culpable homicide, negligent homicide. He disbanded the previous president’s pandemic taskforce right at the beginning when they could have acted to prevent the incredible total of 280,000 deaths and climbing daily. All these deaths can be laid at his door.

This morning I’ve been writing to my two cousins and my second cousin who all live in the USA. One is in the NE, Rhode Island, and the other two are in California.

I was saying that they must be nervous even to go out Xmas shopping for presents and food. The chances of catching the virus are quite high over there because people, fools, have this attitude that “Nobody tells me what to do!” Even when their lives and the lives of others depend on it, they won’t wear masks or socially distance. This is sheer craziness. And if I objected, I would risk being shot, with a gun! Or at least physically assaulted.

Yet Australia has now achieved virtual elimination. There is not a single case of COVID in intensive care anywhere in Australia. There’s zero community transmission, except for the odd case of quarantine workers. It’s because Australia has an “obey the rules” attitude, most of us. We’ve accepted the health authorities’ strictures and done the right things. Look at Victoria: a raging hot spot in June, and now zero transmission three or four months later. People accepted the rules. I think we as a country can be proud.

There’s an article in The Guardian today by an epidemiologist https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/07/arriving-in-the-us-from-australia-during-covid-was-like-walking-through-the-looking-glass which is worth quoting from:

“Both the US and Australia are responding to the same pandemic, but you would hardly know it. In the US, magical thinking and the elevation of individual freedom above the public good have squandered precious time. The number of deaths each day in the US quadrupled in just the four weeks after I landed in New York. Today it is up 30% in the past 14 days. Hospitals are reaching capacity and beyond.”

“Australia has shown that the response to a pandemic needs to be strict. Lives and a nation’s economy hang in the balance. The response needs to be evidence-based. Precise. Coordinated. Thorough. Caring. Impartial. Transparent. Legally enacted and enforced. Strongly led and clearly communicated. Tough. Really tough. Because that’s what it takes to control a pandemic.”

As I said, she’s an epidemiologist and teaches courses in public health. In this country, we listen to the experts. I pity the USA and hope my cousins stay safe.

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I’ve just received an A4 envelope from my cousin Stephen in the USA containing about a dozen handwritten letters my father wrote to him starting in the late 1980s and going through to around 2000. I’m extremely pleased.

I can now add them to the 50 odd other letters I had scanned, before the whole lot was somehow taken from me and given to the Battye Library by my dear sister, without my knowledge, permission and behind my back. I hadn’t finished!! A bit later, she asked me to return that big envelope to her, forgetting that she’d made this unauthorised donation. As this was at the time in 2010 when I was under enormous stress in trying to pack all my things to move to Bali to live, it nearly sent me crazy. I knew I’d had it but I couldn’t find it. No wonder.

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Like mother, like daughter. In the whole nearly eight years since I moved to this new house, my sister’s son and daughter have not bothered to pick up the phone to enquire about me, their uncle, even though they must know that I’ve had some serious health problems in that time. We used to get along famously so I don’t understand what I’ve done to deserve this treatment.