by On Monday morning I got an email from Dad. He’d been round someone’s place for dinner, with Mum, despite having a migraine. At the dinner table he was on the verge of passing out, and excused himself so he could lie on the sofa. For the next day and a half, he felt really shitty. He never should have gone, obviously, but for Mum there’s always this bizarre loss of face. There’s massive shame in admitting that her husband suffers from migraines. That’s assuming she believes Dad is suffering in the first place and isn’t just being awkward. I really don’t know what she thinks. All I do know is that over the years, her attitude toward Dad’s obvious extreme pain has been unforgivable. It’s making me angry just thinking about it. Dad emailed me because he has nobody else he can talk to. I was careful to send him a very short separate email, without replying to his original message, because Mum often reads the emails he receives but never looks in his sent items as far as I know.
This morning I called my parents, and as luck would have it Mum was out playing tennis, so I was able to have a good chat with Dad. He said that Mum was very good when it came to his bowel cancer last year, I guess because it had the potential to kill him, but she has a blind spot when it comes to his (very frequent) migraines. When Mum got back from tennis I chatted with her for a bit. We get on very well these days. Mum really just wants the best for me, and she can see I’m much happier now. I just wish she wouldn’t make Dad’s condition even worse thanks to her lack of sympathy.
If you even half-believe the polls, the US election right now isn’t close. With under two weeks to go, Biden is up by about ten points on average and has biggish leads in the swing states. It’s not over just yet – there’s still time for Biden to get Covid or some other huge bombshell to shift the numbers enough to push Trump over the line, especially if there’s also a sizeable polling miss. If Trump loses by three points, he’s about 50-50 to win the Electoral College. But please please please no.
