With the US Presidential election upon us now, there is much trepidation in that country and around the world. Aside from the usual suspects - Russia, North Korea, Hungary etc - the leaders of most nations do not want a Trump victory. In addition to his odious behaviour on the stump, the sheer chaos of another such administration strikes genuine fear in sensible and thoughtful people around the globe.

But there you are, the contest is statistically deadlocked with a better than average chance that Trump will win a second term. The polls themselves are difficult to discern - a point up here and a point down there for either candidate - with much hand-wringing about 'shy' Trump voters (are they counted in the polls?) and tiny last minute swings in key districts.

I confess that after weeks and weeks of election watching and listening to the pundits, I have no idea who is likely to win, though I have a suspicion who will win. I hope that I am wrong.

The last day of October. Birds are diligently and somewhat urgently gathering food for their young, whose plaintive cries can clearly be heard from the stand of trees at the end of garden. Like human parents, the birds respond instinctively to the sound of their hungry offspring.

Now and then I put some food scraps in the garden, especially when we have had little rain and our avian friends are scratching for a meal. Usually they will take whatever is offered, but lately have been getting very choosy. I expect they know what is best for the nestling diet. But today a satin bower bird swooped on a half a slice of toast, skilfully taking it out of reach of some adult magpies.

You can spend a lot of time gazing into the garden at this time of year and its never gets boring.

Tom found himself in ER at Katoomba two days ago with a collapsed lung. I don't know how lungs 'collapse', but he seems terribly young to be in this predicament. Further tests are pending at Nepean tomorrow. He has moved back home too, at least for the time-being and I am very happy to see him.

I don't blame young people for getting lost in social media and drugs - lamentable as it is - given the world they find themselves in. It may not be all that different from the world I found myself in, but the volume of noise generated is much, much greater. The foundations of truth are constantly undermined and voices clamour for attention from all directions.

Who is the one to teach discernment, how to distinguish between right and wrong, worthwhile or junk? Where are those clarions and can they be heard amidst the din?

A few days ago I received a second hand copy of the 'Selected Poems of RS Thomas' from a well known pre-owned book supplier. I could see no evidence of its having been read or perhaps even opened, so I count it as almost brand new, even though it was printed 20 years ago.

Thomas is a very interesting and a very good poet, an Anglican priest whose parishes ranged the Welsh countryside. He learned to speak his native tongue so he could better talk with his parishioners and understand their lives. His writing has the very blood and bones of the Welsh countryside in its making, peopled with lean, lonely but determined characters. I am half-way into the volume, and I am left, quite often, with a sense of the grim, the sparse, the forgotten.

Consider this stanza from 'The Welsh Hill Country' and you will see what I mean.

'Too far for you to see
The moss and the mould on the cold chimneys,
The nettles growing through the cracked doors,
The houses stand empty at Nant-yr-Eira,
There are holes in the roofs that are thatched with sunlight,
And the fields are reverting to the bare moor.'

It is not that Thomas does not love Wales and its people, but rather, that this is the truth of what he sees.

Vis a vis my last post about visa applications, I am compelled to note the final section of the tourist visa form. There are a large number of questions about character followed by a stern series of inquiries about criminal activity. One is invited to answer, hand-on-heart, whether one is a terrorist, a slave trader, a child molester, a bomb maker, a money launderer - well, you get my drift, I'm sure.

I can't imagine any actual terrorists answering this truthfully, unless they are very dim. Ditto for pretty much every other nefarious activity that is listed and about which actual miscreants would surely answer 'no'. I guess it doesn't hurt to ask, but I cannot fathom its practical purpose other than saying 'we don't want these kinds of people in Australia.' Or perhaps they are trying to psyche the applicant out of going any further.

I don't really know how we get any tourists from countries whose citizens must complete a visa application to come here. It is long and intrusive and at times impertinent. I know we have to protect the citizenry, but where is the hospitality?

I had quite forgotten the joys of completing visa application forms on behalf of others for the Australian Government until I opened up Ann's ImmiAccount again today. My mind flew back half a dozen years to a period where collecting seemingly endless amounts of data - documentation - to support the already enormous process of completing an application, was my bread and butter for what seemed like months. For all I know, it might have been years.

At that time I had been applying for permanent residency for Ann and JJ, one after the other, followed by citizenship a little later. This time Ann's son Aran wants to come for a holiday, which is great, but it falls to me, as it must, to go into the breach once again. 'Surely a mere tourist visa will be a knock over?', I thought, as I nervously tapped at the keys to open the account on my computer.

How wrong can a man be? I had forgotten about the needless information gathering, the lack of auto-fill, the one-size-fits-all questions and much else besides. And I haven't even got to the section where data must be collected, translated, certified and uploaded.

I remember saying to an immigration officer once that the amount of effort expended completing the residency applications was deserving of a PhD, if only for the quantity of time spent on the project and the arcane nature of much of it. He thought I was joking.

But no, I was not.

I swing between viewing the world today as being a worse, more dangerous place, or the pretty-much-the-same place of my youth. If I look closely at the 1970's, for example, I note that there was a continuing war in Vietnam, a number of proxy wars in Asia and Africa, a massive number of nuclear weapons, wars in the Middle East, as well as high inflation and unemployment in the West. Military juntas had seized power in Chile and a number of African states. There was actually a lot of bad stuff (did I mention Pol Pot?) going around, to coin an academic phrase.

Today we know much more about climate and how we might prevent making it unbearable in the future, there are fewer nuclear weapons though more nuclear powers and there are wars but not as many as before. Living standards across the globe are higher, medicine is better - in fact there is much to like about how things have improved, by certain metrics.

On the other hand, public behaviour and discourse has declined, crazy conspiracy theories are believed and a new form of extreme thinking has emerged on both the left and the right, heedless of the historical record. Mental illness seems to have exploded and there is little doubt that mainstream popular music is poorer melodically and lyrically. I just threw that last one in.

I'd like to get a set of old fashioned scales and set them up to see which era has the worst (heaviest) record. But this is all too subjective anyway and tomorrow I might come back with a different list altogether.