For Britain the joy was always short lived. For America, the river of laughs flowed deeper and ran longer.

But now it is over.

The Office - whether in Slough, England, or Scranton, Pennsylvania - has closed for business.

What became a wildly successful series in the US almost died at birth. A six-episode run in 2005 garnered calamitously low ratings and generally poor reviews.

But broadcaster NBC persevered. The style of the show was tweaked and by the second season The Office had become that rarity - a huge network hit showered with praise by the critics. It also changed the way that television, or at least some television, was made.

The original concept, as executed in the UK, was a hugely unlikely mass-market show for the US - a single-camera "mockumentary" about life in the administrative office of a paper products supply company.

The humour is deadpan ("refreshingly laid back", the regional manager described himself, "for a man with such responsibility"). There is neither studio audience nor laugh track to remind viewers that it is a comedy or simply to indicate when to laugh.

It worked in America. But it was different. And the differences speak - perhaps a little uncomfortably at times - to the differences between the country that gave birth to the show and the one that so enthusiastically adopted it.

Some of the changes were superficial - Wernham Hogg Paper Merchants (where "life is stationery") became Dunder Mifflin Inc, a regional paper and office supply distributer.

The UK version ran for 15 episodes. The US version, with nine seasons and more than 200 episodes, had a larger cast and vastly expanded storylines. And Slough, of course, became Scranton.

For Office fan Michelle Dempsey, that almost became a problem.

"My husband is British," she says, "and the night we met we bonded over The Office, the UK version.

"The American version had just started, and I had to swear to him that Scranton, where I lived, was not Slough."

Tim Holmes, of the Scranton Times, picks up on the theme.

"Even though we are a little slow-paced in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and they really played that up, there's always this endearing quality that came out," he says. "For that we were always very thankful. They were very kind."

Endearing. Kind. Not words you associate with the UK version. Dark, bitter, quite often lacerating. But really not endearing, or kind.

You rarely wince watching the American Office. The cubicle farms of the US, where tens of millions spend their white-collar working lives, are deeply conventional places, heavily represented (and ever-so-lovingly mocked) in advertisements.

The US version of The Office may have seemed risque to some, but that is because American workplaces are more regimented affairs than in many countries, with written and unwritten workplace etiquette rules often stifling spontaneity and horseplay.

So in the US version, a stapler does get embedded into jelly. But the foul-mouthed misogyny of near-sociopath Chris Finch? The unflinching mordancy of anti-hero Gareth Keenan? None of it made it to the American screen.

The US version of The Office is a kinder, gentler thing, with more slapstick laughs and more relief for the audience from the forensic dissection of life amongst the grey partition walls.

"In the first season of the American show, we were trying to create the despicable boss and the despicable employees, and I guess we just couldn't follow through on it," says Hank Steuver, TV critic for the Washington Post.

"We needed something to hang on to, some sliver of hope. We kind of turned them into loveable teddy bear people who still had all their flaws and were not always nice to one another but somehow wormed their way into our hearts."

The Office in America became a funny, sometimes awkward piece of the television furniture. And when the end of the final season drew near, the people of Scranton threw a parade. Stars of the show sat on the back of pick-up trucks and the band played and played. Small town life had been mocked in the show, but gently.

It is difficult to imagine Slough, back in England, doing the same for The Office that made its trading estate home.

One critic wrote of the British version that "nobody is working, nobody has a happy relationship, everyone looks terrible and everyone looks depressed". That's not Britain - either at work at play.

But it might just be that the kinder, gentler American TV show reflects a kinder and gentler country.

That may change. Presidencies only have a certain amount of political energy. Firefighting two or three rumbling scandals diverts precious time from the White House agenda.

And the people currently baying for the administration's blood in Congress are the very same people the president needs to move his agenda into legislation.

Time is short in the "graveyard of presidencies", as second terms are sometimes known. The White House will hope the fires burning up and down DC can be quickly doused.

But it is the residents and neighbours who are most surprised. Aurora Marti, 75, has lived across from 2207 Seymour Avenue for 27 years. Ariel Castro used to come and sit on her porch and chat with her. He took her granddaughter out for bike rides at a nearby park.

When the nearby area was being dug up in the search for Amanda Berry's remains, he talked to her about it. All the while he is alleged to have held Amanda and two other women just across the road.

But it is the residents and neighbours who are most surprised. Aurora Marti, 75, has lived across from 2207 Seymour Avenue for 27 years. Ariel Castro used to come and sit on her porch and chat with her. He took her granddaughter out for bike rides at a nearby park.

When the nearby area was being dug up in the search for Amanda Berry's remains, he talked to her about it. All the while he is alleged to have held Amanda and two other women just across the road.

Where else would you find workshops entitled "Home Defence Concepts", "Refuse to be a Victim" and, my own personal favourite, "Advanced Sausage Processing"?

There was a lot of politics at the NRA convention in Houston, Texas, and a lot of fundraising. But most of all there were lots and lots of guns - handguns, shotguns, rifles, airguns, vintage guns, lady-guns, guns, guns, guns and more guns.

For the outsider it is a plunge into an unknown world populated almost entirely by white, very well-mannered and extremely opinionated NRA members.

On the convention's first day, there was raw politics, and lots of it. Texas Governor Rick Perry was transformed - no longer the laughing stock of the Republican presidential primary race, instead he had the craggy looks and homely discourse of a young(ish) Reagan.

Governor Perry talked of the first gun he owned, using a loving tone that his audience nodded along to but would leave much of the rest of the world utterly baffled.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a darling of the right wing of the Republican party, led the charge against what he called Obama liberals, striding the stage and whooping up the crowd as only a law professor knows how.

And onetime Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum lauded the "heroic people who love this country for what it is and what it has been".

For those who had the good fortune to follow the Republican presidential primaries and the Mitt Romney campaign, it was deja vu all over again. Obama liberals, media elites and Washington insiders were all in the firing line, while the faithful clapped and cheered. They were, the speakers told them, the real America. And if America is entirely white and very conservative, that is very true.

In few places are the divisions between "red" and "blue" America, and America and much of the rest of the world, more sharply highlighted than at a convention like this.

By midday on Saturday the vast exhibition floor was packed with NRA members. The air was full of the sound of guns being cocked, of bolts being slid and of eager salesmen explaining the new features of this or that weapon.

It was a family day out for many as children took their turns target shooting and admired the matt-black stocks of weapons that, if they were lucky, would one day be theirs.

NRA-world is a comforting place at a time of bewildering change, where what one is constantly reminded are traditional American values reign supreme and modern life only intrudes in the form of biometric scanners for gun safes and laser-targeting on high-velocity rifles.

Outside the convention centre, a pathetically small group reminded a largely uncaring world that guns are not just about hunting and self-defence but are part of the reason for the staggering loss of life on America's streets, in its homes, and in its schools.

Some had come a long way, bringing the ghosts of their murdered relatives with them. Erica Lafferty, 27, worked in sales until mid-December last year. Her mother, Dawn Hochsprung, was the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School and was gunned down trying to protect her young students.

Now Erica Lafferty's life is spent trying to cajole lawmakers into extending background checks to all gun purchases - something the NRA and its Republican allies managed to defeat in the Senate last month.

"Stand and Fight" was the theme of the final rally of the convention, hosted by right-wing talk show host and rhetorical bomb thrower Glenn Beck.

Before he even spoke he had received the longest standing ovation of the convention. "They want to regulate us until we comply," he told the adoring audience. "I will not comply." The crowd went wild.

"The freedom of all mankind is at stake," he added.

Erica Lafferty sees things differently. "My mother chose to stand and fight on December 14th," she says, "and she was brutally, brutally murdered in the hallways of her elementary school. Now I am going to stand on the opposite side of the road, to stand and fight."

But the NRA is a canny and powerful opponent, able simultaneously to project enormous strength and to persuade its members that they are the downtrodden victims of liberal elites disconnected from the real America.

Underestimating the NRA is a mistake that few politicians are now prepared to make. This weekend's convention was many things - political gathering, gun fair, social outing. But it was also a victory rally, and it will not be the last.

The conservatives seem more concerned about why the Obama administration is not defending a federal law. And in the middle, as is so often the case, is Justice Anthony Kennedy. His beef with Doma appears to be that it intrudes too deeply into states' rights. He has warned of the "risks" of federal overreach into what is the states' prerogative.

There is still a chance that the court will decide it has no business hearing the case. But if the four liberals are joined by Justice Kennedy, Doma will bite the dust. It may not be the prettiest judgement intellectually, but for same-sex marriage campaigners, it will do.

The court that ended school segregation and legalised abortion appears to be shying away from a ground-breaking decision on gay marriage.

All eyes are on Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote in a court generally evenly divided between liberals and conservatives. This morning he seemed to have been uncomfortable with the case, describing the issue as "uncharted waters" and asking whether the case should have come to the Supreme Court.

The court may decide simply not to rule on the case. That would leave same-sex marriage effectively legal in California. But it would not be the sweeping change some gay rights campaigners were hoping for.

The protestors who interrupted the opening of the hearing served a purpose for John Brennan. They misunderstood, he said, the care we take on the drone programme.

Mr Brennan spoke clearly and often with vigour. Even so, he ducked and weaved at times, leading to the accusation of stonewalling from Senator Ron Wyden. Had "enhanced interrogation" techniques led to the capture of Osama Bin Laden? Back came a long answer that really didn't address the question.

He said "enhanced interrogation", i.e. waterboarding and sleep deprivation, was something that he had objected to in private at the time, though back in 2007 he had said it saved lives. Now, in the light of a Senate Democrats' report, he wasn't so sure.

"At this point, senator," he said, "I don't know what the truth is."

John Brennan hopes to make his way from his windowless office (bunker, if you like a bit of drama) in the White House where he is President Barack Obama's counter-terrorism chief to Langley, in the state of Virginia, where he hopes to occupy the director's office in the CIA.

He will be at home in Langley: Mr Brennan spent 25 of his 57 years working for the Agency. He is an Arabist, was station chief in Saudi Arabia in the 90s and chief of staff to Director George Tenet in the years after 9/11.

After time in the private sector during president George W Bush's second term, he was tipped to be Mr Obama's nominee to lead the CIA in 2009.

But his time with Mr Tenet, and the CIA's involvement in what the administration called "enhanced interrogation" but what much of the rest of world saw as torture, put an end to that.

Instead he has laboured in the shadows in the White House, hugely influential, as a president who picked up a Nobel Peace Prize on pretty much his first day in office has expanded the programme of drone-killing with an aggression that has surprised friends and enemies alike.

It is that drone programme, acknowledged by the US government but never detailed, that will fall under the Senate spotlight. And it will be Mr Brennan's role in the expansion and running of it that will be up for examination.

The hearing comes as the use of unmanned aerial combat vehicles to winnow the ranks of America's enemies is attracting unprecedented domestic attention.

On Tuesday came the leak to NBC News of the justice department's white paper giving its legal justification for killing an American citizen.

It is widely believed to be the briefing paper given to members of Congress in the light of the drone-killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen killed in Yemen in September 2011.

On Wednesday came the news - apparently long-known to some parts of the US media, who chose not share it - that the US is operating a drone base out of Saudi Arabia.

And drones are on the front page of the magazines Time and New York Review of Books.

Much of America's drone operation is hidden from view, carried out by the CIA and thus away from public gaze and accountability.

The New America Foundation estimates that between 1,953 and 3,279 have been killed by drone attacks in Pakistan alone, of whom roughly one in 10 were civilians.

Mr Brennan is believed to have been at the heart of trying to formalise the rules of this new war through the creation of a "playbook": a set of criteria and methods for how decisions of life and death should be made.

The organisation he hopes to lead will not, however, be bound by the playbook.

"Why not?" asks Georgetown University Professor of Law David Cole, in the New York Review of Books.

How, he asks, does the administration decide whether or not capturing an enemy (rather than killing them) is feasible? What are the criteria for targeted killing? Just how many civilians have been killed?

The questions roll on.

How much we will learn from the Senate hearing is difficult to guess. Senators have received many confidential briefings.

They are often shy of talking about national security matters. The hearings themselves can descend swiftly into publicity seeking and point scoring, rather than probing questioning.

In a speech last year, Mr Brennan acknowledged that many questions have yet to be answered about the drone programme - questions much like the ones posed by Mr Cole.

But he said that in amongst the struggle over the moral questions thrown up by the drone programme, he was certain about one thing:

"We are at war. We are at war against a terrorist organisation called al-Qaeda that has brutally murdered thousands of Americans… with the help of targeted strikes, we have turned al-Qaeda into a shadow of what it once was. They are on the road to destruction."

There are many questions to be asked as Mr Brennan makes his way from one dark corner of the administration to another. But for most Americans, Mr Brennan's words sum up all they want to know about the war being played out in the shadows.

The man standing in front of me in the lobby of my hotel was not in the slightest bit aggressive, but he was very clear.

"It's unbearable. What do you all want? I know four or five of the families who lost kids and it's too much for them, with all the media here. What do you all want?"

Most of the rest of the lobby - and much of the hotel - was taken up by notebook-wielding, fleece-wearing, camera-toting journalists. But that's just the start.

The village of Sandy Hook, the centre of which is little more than a crossroads, has been transformed.

It seems like a nice place - a classic little New England village, with white wooden houses and good-looking shops.

But it is difficult to know what it is actually like because, early on Saturday, it had been transformed into a set, a backdrop for the vast swarm of journalists that had descended on the place.

The main street, Church Hill Road, that leads towards Sandy Hook Elementary school, was grinding with bumper-to-bumper cars that it is difficult to imagine are there every - or any - day.

In the small car park in front of the Methodist church, satellite trucks belted out noise and exhaust fumes; up and down the street cameramen roamed, filming the traffic, filming the shops, filming each other.

At the bottom of Church Hill Road, where the hill begins to climb up toward the firehouse and the school, there were more satellite trucks and live positions for television correspondents.

On Saturday a few shops had pinned notices to their doors, and one or two lampposts had messages of sorrow and condolence.

Today, a shrine of candles and teddy bears and messages attracts a steady flow of visitors, many filmed and interviewed by the omnipresent camera crews.

Up by the firehouse, by the sign for Sandy Hook Elementary School ("Visitors Welcome"), there are more TV live positions.

In the overflow area are dozens and dozens and dozens more satellite vans.

Normally we journalists are the ones pressing our noses to the glass, reporting on what we see. Here it is the residents of the town who, driving very slowly in the staggering traffic jam look on, amazed at the freak show that has descended.

I have covered stories for 15 years in the field, some of the biggest, and have never seen anything like this, nor felt so uncomfortable about being part of it.

There are hundreds upon hundreds of journalists here, all of us searching for a new angle on a story that, really, came and went in a few terrible minutes on Friday morning.

How much more is there to say about such horror?

Perhaps not much.

On Saturday, in the space of 10 maybe 15 minutes, whilst I tried vainly to persuade members of a Newtown women's club to do an interview, I saw a placard-carrying woman by the roadside approached, filmed, photographed by more than a dozen different cameramen and journalists.

For good or ill, I do understand the machinery of news. The BBC alone has four 24-hour news channels (two radio, two TV, one each respectively for domestic and international audiences) along with three TV news bulletins a day, four radio news programmes most days, radio news bulletins, summaries and our online operation.

None of these outlets is catered for without correspondents and producers, cameramen and technicians.

Throw in ITN, Sky, Channel 4 and the newspapers - one broadsheet sent four correspondents - and British outlets alone must have sent 100 people to this tiny place.

And the American networks and cable new channels must each have sent dozens of staff here, for their news bulletins and their programmes; CNN has rolled from Newtown pretty much non-stop since the massacre. On the networks, programme after programme has been anchored from the town.

There's no denying that this is an astonishing event that audiences want to know about.

But our footprint in tiny Sandy Hook is exceptionally heavy. And after a while, you have to wonder what more there is to say.

The children have gone. Their poor parents are grieving. The police are saying very little.

Some reporting comes close to repeatedly ripping a sticking plaster off. Watch or listen or read too much, and it feels as if we are wallowing in other people's pain.

Go home, the man in the lobby said, go home. And very soon, I will.

UPDATE: Jonny Dymond left Newtown on the night of 17 December, shortly after posting this blog.

Wrong, wrong and wrong. The answer is everywhere you go in America, sold over-the-counter and consumed in astonishing scale and quantity.

Americans are drowning in unhealthy food and tottering under the obesity that that food - and lack of exercise - creates.

And, staggering alongside them is a healthcare system paying out of tens of billions of dollars a year to deal with obesity-related illness - heart disease, strokes and Type 2 diabetes.

America is the fattest industrialised nation on earth - the UK is very close behind. And where it leads, the developed - and now the developing - world has followed.

The good news? The tide of obesity can be turned. The curiosity? For a country that believes in light-touch government, America seems to have taken pretty serious official intervention to start to turn things around.

Litter is scattered over the streets around Issac Sheppard school in north Philadelphia. The terraced housing nearby is run down. Here and there windows are boarded up.

The place feels deeply uncared for. Groups of young people gather on street corners to no apparent purpose.

Issac Sheppard's head teacher, Jim Otto, half-jokes that officials from the school district do not come to the school much, so concerned are they for their physical safety and that of their cars.

Inside one of the classrooms of the grey 19th Century stone school building, there is a different kind of lesson going on.

Led by a video projected on to a whiteboard nine children, a mix of Latinos and African-Americans, walk or jump on the spot, swing their arms, stretch and reach in an exercise class that lasts around 15 minutes.

"We tried a walking club," says Mr Otto, smiling, "but we got shot at."

Children at the school do the exercise class at least once a day, some of them twice. It is a voluntary initiative enthusiastically embraced by the school.

"Our children want to run," Mr Otto says. "They want to play, they want to compete. But it's just not practical, it's not possible, it's not safe for them to do that."

"If we don't give them the opportunity to do that here then that opportunity is going to slide by."

But maybe the exercise lessons will go beyond the classroom: "Our hope really is that our kids are going to want to say to their parents, you know, 'we could play this game,' or 'we could go to the park,' or 'we could walk,'" he adds.

What is happening at Issac Sheppard is part of a Philadelphia-wide movement led by the city government: Get Philly Healthy.

In 2010, a city health department report noted gloomily that obesity had become "a norm and a public health crisis" in the city, with 64% of adults and 57% of children aged 6-11 overweight or obese.

In north Philadelphia, 70% of children were overweight or obese.

Get Philly Healthy has disconnected deep fat fryers in every Philadelphia school, removed sugary-snack vending machines, built bike lanes, encouraged exercise in schools and businesses and sponsored fresh-produce fridges and fresh-fruit racks in 650 corner stores around the poorest parts of the city.

And Philadelphia's obesity rate is falling - not just levelling out, but falling - down 5% from 2006 to 2010, with the greatest declines amongst African-American boys and Hispanic girls.

The city's health commissioner, Dr Donald Schwartz, is careful not to take the credit. It is too early, he says, to make a link between the city's efforts and the drop in the obesity rate.

"We're convinced that we really are seeing a reduction in childhood obesity in the city," he says, "and we have a hint, although no confirmation yet, of the first turn in adult obesity in Philadelphia."

There are limits to how far the city can go. A proposed tax on sugary drinks - identified by the city's health department as one of the key drivers of obesity - was defeated.

There are structural barriers to get around as well. Dr Schwarz says that when the city of Baltimore tried to get fresh fruit into its corner shops it failed because the single distributor that served the shops refused.

And, according to Dr Schwarz, national policies produce perverse and deeply harmful incentives.

Subsidies for the corn that goes into the sugar substitute, high fructose corn syrup, have seen the inflation-adjusted price of sugary snacks fall, whilst that of fruit has risen.

Food - harvesting, processing and distributing - is a huge and profitable business, and not without lobbying resources.

By opening many different fronts in the fight against obesity, the city may have begun to turn things around. But Dr Schwarz sounds a note of caution.

"This is not a battle," he says, "This is a very long war."

The American republic, say Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, is heading toward the edge of the cliff. Without a deal on tax and spending "we have no idea where it will go".

Perhaps 40 members of Washington's press corps are in the room. Under four huge chandeliers a long table is littered with audio recorders and notepads. TV lights illuminate the scene to an almost maddening brightness. Silverware shines, and light bounces off glasses of iced water.

Both men are softly spoken - the journalists lean in to catch their words.

Mr Bowles is a former White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton. Mr Simpson was a Wyoming senator for almost two decades.

Together they chaired a commission that came up with the last plan - never adopted - to cut the US budget deficit and send its debt in a more stable direction.

They are sounding the alarm over the crunch that will come on 1 January if Congress and the White House can't come up with a deal on tax and spending.

Economic gains threatened

The crunch - the "fiscal cliff" to those who eat and breathe this sort of stuff - is a combination of tax rises and spending cuts that would suck more than $500 billion out of the economy.

The impact of such a sharp reduction in government spending and individual income, reckons the Congressional Budget Office, would be to shrink the economy by 0.5% of GDP (compared to 1.7% projected growth) and add more than a percentage point to unemployment.

It would undo, in short, the rather meagre gains of the past three years.

Mr Bowles sounds almost impossibly gloomy about reaching an agreement on tax and spending to avert the automatic tax rises and spending cuts. He sees a one-in-three chance Democrats and Republicans in Washington can reach a deal.

Mr Simpson talks about about the US reaching a "tipping point" when creditors see a "totally dysfunctional government kicking the can down the road" and decide they want more in return for their loans. And who gets hurt? he asks. "The little guy."

He likes this kind of language - folksy, sometimes pungent turns of phrase. Some Republicans are "as rigid as a fireplace poker but without the occasional warmth". Leaders need to "go big or go home". Playing politics with this issue is "like betting your country".

Everyone around the table - and everyone in political Washington - knows the kind of deal that would avert the fiscal cliff: some tax rises, some tax reform, some spending cuts, and some reform to the giant social programmes to trim future spending.

But the consensual middle has been sucked out of Washington in the past decade or so. Sometimes it seems people have forgotten how to make a deal.

Mr Bowles speaks with less flourish, but is stark about the risks of continuing disagreement.

Already, he says, businessmen are delaying investment and not replacing workers.

Consumer confidence will begin to dip without a deal, and even if a deal is reached in the days immediately after the deadline there will be damage to the economy.

"I'm really worried," he says. "I believe the problem is that we are going over the cliff. It will be horrible for the economy."

There are some signs, both men say, of compromise at the edges. Some legislators have renounced a "no tax-rise" pledge they made. The election has given both sides a bit of wiggle room.

But neither man came to breakfast to give a pep talk. You can almost reach out and touch the gloom they feel about the process. Time is running out, says Mr Bowles, and there's still a big distance between the sides.

From Mr Simpson, the former mountain state senator, comes a populist cry. Americans, he says, "are thirsting for someone to tell them the truth, rather than the hogwash from both parties".

But from Mr Bowles comes a cold dose of Washington realism, and what seems to be the prime driver of his pessimism.

"There's been no punishment," he says, "for intransigence in this town."

A civil war may be about to break out between fiscal conservatives and what remains of the more moderate wing of the party, but it will be the wrong battle to fight.

The comment came around the time that then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his team seemed to be sliding to near inevitable defeat. The convention hadn't gone well, and the Romney campaign seemed unable to land a punch on the resurgent Democrats.

It was pretty much the first time that Republicans spoke openly about defeat.

Which is part of a Republican problem, and which is worth coming back to - seeing the world as you would like it to be (the opinion polls are wrong, everyone believes that cuts should come before tax rises, the president isn't actually an American at all) rather than how it actually is.

Republicans had a lot of electoral wind in their favour this time around: a weak economy with anaemic growth, a president who seemed unable to regain the magic of his first campaign, unemployment at 8% or more for what felt like forever.

Perhaps more important than all the economic statistics in the world was the sense that the country was leaderless and going the wrong way. As I pointed out in a blog early on election night, back in September last year, more than three-quarters of the country felt that America was on the wrong track.

But from late spring and early summer, the economy started to show signs of sustained, if slow, life. Housing - which had done nothing but drag the economy down for the whole of the Barack Obama's time in office - started to contribute to growth. Employment grew enough to make small dents in the jobless rate.

It may have been despite, rather than because of, the Obama administration's policies; that's for economists to mull.

But the turnaround, did, surprisingly quickly, change the perception of the electorate about the way the country was going.

Meanwhile, the Republicans had a candidate whose claim to fame was that - whilst he may have had little or no charisma - he was a businessman who knew how to make the economy work.

In 2010, that alone might have been enough. But Mr Romney's back-story in corporate turnarounds and wealth creation (his own, as well as other people's) was ruthlessly mined by the Democratic campaign machine and used against him.

A long summer of campaign advertising threw him entirely on to the defensive.

"I just have trouble voting for someone with an overseas bank account," said an auto worker in Cadillac, north Michigan, who told me that he swung between the Democrats and the Republicans. He also described one of his chief concerns as being the national debt and the way the government spent so much on people who did too little.

Republicans spent the summer fighting the impression that Mr Romney was a corporate asset-stripper who cackled as he merrily shipped jobs off to Mexico and China.

By the autumn, the election was no longer a referendum on four hard and seemingly fruitless years of Mr Obama; it was a choice between two flawed candidates.

At which point, with the benefit of that wonderful thing, hindsight, the election was Mr Obama's.

Back in the brutal primary battle early in the year, when Republican activists chose their candidate, Mr Romney was forced to paint himself as a tough guy on immigration, so as to outflank his rivals.

"Self-deportation" (a term used by Mr Romney in one of the Republican primary debates) might have seemed like a humane option - and Republican vote winner - to Mr Romney. But to the Republican Hispanics I spoke to in Florida in late January, it was an electoral disaster waiting to happen.

"He can't talk like that. It has to stop," one Hispanic businesswoman told me at a Republican debate watching party in Orlando, Florida.

America is changing at a revolutionary pace: the white majority is hurrying towards minority status. And the electorate reflects that. Non-Hispanic whites were 87% of the voters in 1992. Exit polls suggest that they were 72% this time around.

Hispanics were 2% of voters then. They are 10% now. But over a long summer and autumn of Republican events - the convention, rallies, meetings in diners and homes - I searched in vain for any sign of them.

Republicans opine that there is more to the Hispanic vote than just immigration; they are right. There are plenty of Hispanics who rather like the message of the party on business, on self-reliance and on social issues. But the tone - driven by the immigration debate - is wrong, at local, state and national level.

There is more to Republican electoral discomfort than just the Hispanic vote. Halfway through Tuesday night, renegade conservative commentator David Frum tweeted: "Upper class TV commentators think the only change the GOP needs is on immigration. Of course they all have health insurance."

He was pointing, rather sharply, to the lack of policy ideas that might excite on the Republican side. It was just not good enough to try for a referendum. The Republicans needed more.

But without the increasing Hispanic share - Romney won 27%, down from an already low 32% in 2008 - the Republicans will not win nationally, however good their ideas.

Early on Tuesday evening, a shocked-looking Bill O'Reilly, a firebrand conservative talk-show host, went on the Republicans' favourite news broadcaster, Fox News.

"The white establishment," he said, "is in a minority".

"The demographics are changing. It's not a traditional America anymore."

The challenge for Republicans now is simple: change or die. Because, with or without you, America is changing fast.

The chat died too as everyone watched the first results come onto the screen flanking the stage where Mitt Romney will at some stage appear.

The people here have been living and breathing the electoral numbers for years. They won't have been surprised by the Republican gain in Indiana or President Obama holding on in Vermont.

More chewy is Virginia for the Romnulans. As is the case in so many swing states, it's a place that President Obama can afford to lose, but that Mitt Romney really has to win if he is going to put his curtains up in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Republicans would have been looking for a clearer indication that they are going to take the Virginia - a state that Mr Romney has visited repeatedly over the last few weeks. A dead heat is not good news.

For a first clue as to why this election may not swing Mr Romney's way, look at the ABC/Washington Post exit polls, not on voting intention but on the "track" question - whether voters think the country is going in the right direction.

A year-and-a-half ago, when I was talking to a pollster, he said that it was that number that gave the clearest indication of the trouble Barack Obama was in.

In September 2011, a whopping 77% said that the US was one the "wrong track". By July this year, it was 69% - still enough for people to be seriously unhappy with the president.

But by the end of October, it had plummeted to 55% and on election day - 52%. The mood has changed, quite possibly just in time to save President Obama.

On his office wall, posters for Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. On his television, the left-leaning news channel, MSNBC. On his desk, a choppy sea of reports and to-do lists.

Faux is the executive director of Hamilton County Democratic Party. Hamilton County takes in the city of Cincinnati, tucked deep into the south-west corner of Ohio.

In this bitterly fought-over state, that nearly everyone believes will decide the US election, Hamilton is one of five or so swing counties that will decide Ohio.

So, I ask him, if your boss were to call now and say, "have we got the county, have we got the state?", what would you say?

He smiles through what are, for an American, impressively crooked and stained teeth.

A quiet and fairly intense man, clearly not prone to overstatement, he replies, simply, "I'm pretty confident".

And then he explains; early voting turnout is good, the polls have consistently run in President Obama's favour, the bipartisan display during Storm Sandy, where the Republican Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie heavily praised Barack Obama, has helped and, of course, there's the small matter of the auto-bailout.

Eight hundred and fifty thousand jobs are related to automotive production in Ohio. The bailout of Chrysler and General Motors in 2009 by the Obama administration may have been an apolitical attempt to halt the meltdown of the entire automotive industry in the US.

But no-one doubts that it has brought a huge political payback. And few independent observers doubt the damage wrought by Mitt Romney's opposition to the bailout - and the infamous line, "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" that headlined his plan to save the industry.

Romnulans are articulate and detailed in their defence of his position. But however much time the Republicans spend explaining that the bankruptcy Romney suggested is not the same as closing down the industry (it is a different form of restructuring) it has wounded Romney - perhaps mortally - in a state that was always going to be tight.

Which is why, late on Sunday, thousands of people streamed into a field in the state of Pennsylvania, about 40 minutes from the city of Philadelphia. Just an hour before Mitt Romney arrived the crowds were 15 or 20 deep outside the security barriers, trying to get in to see the Republican standard bearer.

Pennsylvania is supposed to be firmly in the Democratic column; but the Republicans have been pouring resources in. They insist that the ground is shifting. And whilst scorning their opponent's maths, the Democrats have responded, sending former President Bill Clinton into the state on Monday to address four rallies.

If - and it seems an enormous if at this late stage - the Republicans could take Pennsylvania, it would turn the electoral arithmetic on its head, more than making up for the loss of Ohio.

The theme from Rocky boomed out as Mr Romney's coach pushed through the crowd at Stoney Brook Farm - and, deep in amongst the huge crowd, you could feel the excitement rippling around.

It was Romney's eighth rally of the weekend. He has over the past few months offered a preposterously easy target for the Democrats - a plutocratic asset-stripper, unable to connect, wooden on the stump. And his shape-shifting on policy has served him ill.

But he has given his all. And in the bitterly cold night air, as he climbed onto the stage to rally the faithful, and once again explained patiently and carefully how he would make things better, they whooped, and cheered, and chanted his name.

It was a message that had he been able to hew to since the primaries - well, who knows where he would be right now, or where he might be on Wednesday.

The setting did not bode well. A crowd of around 20,000, 20 minutes drive or so outside Cincinnati.

A singer warmed up a bitterly cold night, belting out stadium rock under a cloudless sky.

A speech of forced-bombast beckoned - a style that sits unhappily with Mitt Romney - one intended to fire up the troops for one more weekend of crazed canvassing, winkling out the voters who might tip Ohio over the edge and into the Romnulan camp.

When he came, once again there was the glancing reference to Storm Sandy, and an appeal for donations: "We're a generous people, don't forget 'em, thank you," was so perfunctory as to make grown men wince.

But late, late in the game, the speech had changed.

Gone was the anger that never quite rang true.

The criticisms of President Obama - for partisanship, for the healthcare law, for the deficit, for the petrol prices that have gouged so many wallets - came quietly, heavy with regret that so much time had been wasted, so many people let down.

The president had "never led before, he'd never worked across the aisle, never truly understood how jobs are created in the new economy".

Mr Romney spoke repeatedly of bipartisanship, of the need to work with the Democrats.

"I learned as the Governor of Massachusetts that the best achievements are shared achievements, that respect and goodwill go a long way and are usually returned in kind. That's how I will conduct myself as president," he said.

"I'll reach out to people on both sides of the aisle… do big things for the common good. I won't just represent one party, I'll represent one nation. I'll try to show the best of America when only the best will do."

Quietly, as if he couldn't quite believe it, he told the crowd that the president had "asked his supporters to vote for revenge". He paused without melodrama. "For revenge."

"Instead, I ask the American people to vote for love of country," he said.

And the crowd loved it and they loved Mitt, roaring back, and chanting "USA! USA! USA!"

"If there's anyone worried that the past four years are the best we can do; if there's anyone who fears that the America dream is fading; if there's anyone worried that better jobs and better pay cheques are things of the past, I have a clear and unequivocal message," he said.

"With the right leadership, America is coming roaring back."

Gone were the personal stories repeated so often that their original lustre was worn and dull. Instead, there was a glimpse of promise, in a quiet voice that, for once, seemed to come from the heart.

"We've known many long days, and short nights," he told the crowd, "and we are so very, very close. The door to a brighter future is there. It's open to us, waiting for us".

"I need your help. I need your vote. Walk with me. Walk together."

Walk together. What a message it is, and how late, how late it is that it has come.

The counter is wooden; the jukebox is broken. There are five or six tables in booths, around the same number along the window.

The "firewall' in question is the one allegedly dreamt up by Democratic strategists to stop dead any advance by the forces of Mitt: it consists of the Midwestern states of Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin (also referred to jocularly as the rust belt, the corn belt and the cheese belt).

As I turned back onto the I-90 towards Toledo and eventually Detroit, after a nutritious burger and fries, a filter took cars onto the interstate across a lane of oncoming traffic.

As Mitt Romney wound up his speech at Avon Lake High School, word went round the media pack, penned in behind barriers from the crowd of bellowing supporters, that his campaign was cancelling any more events on Monday, suspending for Tuesday as well.