Long day’s journey into the wild blue yonder

I AM writing this at the kitchen table. The soundtrack in my head is Dolly Parton singing What Ain’t To Be Just Might Happen. The background noise in the room is Today on Radio 4 with Jon Sopel telling me what I already know: that America may—or may not—have four more years of Donald Trump. That the melodramatic story is not over.

I’m 3,000 miles or so from Dollywood outside of Nashville, on a farm in Suffolk, nine miles from the sugar-beet factory in Bury St Edmunds. Last night,