It was 9.23pm, Eastern Standard Time, on my cheap but reliable Swatch watch, when the TV networks began calling Ohio for Barack Obama, ending the last vestiges of suspense about this most extraordinary of presidential elections.

It is now a couple of hours later, which is not much time to absorb, let alone digest and analyse, the scale of what this country has done. But I suspect, notwithstanding all the myriad problems that confront the president-elect, that it has done the right thing.