It most surely is a grave matter to be disrespectful to the administrative choice at the very highest level of the affairs of another nation, particularly one that is situated geographically contiguously to one's own, but in the matter of the duly elected and now fully invested President of the United States, it is beyond difficult not to heave a shudder of apprehension.

When, on the morning after the U.S. presidential election, my husband awoke me to the news that Donald Trump had prevailed, when we had gone to bed confident in all the pundits' assurances that that could not possibly be the outcome of the presidential election, I was in disbelieving shock. That shock has moderated of necessity, yet whenever I hear the man speak and listen to the content of what he has to say and its manner of delivery, I shudder anew.

Like most outsiders and many Americans I had no especial regard for the other person contesting that election. In my opinion, as a rank political amateur but someone curious enough to follow the political byways of the world, her election as president would not have been much of an improvement over the disappointment of President Obama's tenure under whose watchful eye and wasted opportunities the world fell into violent chaos and limitless people lost their lives, while the world's millions of refugees fleeing war and instability grew impossibly.

Not that the United States should be expected to, nor would be capable, of solving all the ills in the world that we human beings impose upon one another, but that self-appointed task of global watchdog and intervenor was one that the United States of America, for good or for ill (with obviously mixed results) undertook in the absence of any influential and powerful other source, given the abysmal failure of the United Nations, and did manage to impose upon the world order much that was useful in the past.

Now, the people have spoken. They have elected a man who, in their opinion, will adequately represent the kind of government they want and feel they deserve. A government for the people, of the people, by the people. If only. At noon this day, a charlatan gesticulated with his grubby little hands and pompoustulated an address to give assurance to the American public that they did well when they took him seriously, as out of his egotistical little mouth came the confident claims that he was more than capable of addressing himself to and solving the ills that stalk his country in his most inimitable manner.

During this significant, celebratory event worthy of the installation of a global monarch, a good part of the world which has always valued cordial relations with the United States, shuddered. While I set about baking an apple pie. For legend has it that there is nothing as American as apple pie.