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B.ing 2

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indriyani annikmah

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I remember the cold.

I had dragged myself out of bed before dawn. There was nothing unusual about that. It was what
we had to do when working in Washington to cope with the five-hour time difference between
DC and London. By the time I was barely awake, my office on the other side of the Atlantic was
well into its working day.
Drawing back the blinds and looking out of my hotel window down onto the street below I was
amazed at the sight of streams of people making their way up towards Capitol Hill. From my
room high up on the tenth floor they seemed like a procession of Lowry-like figures1 , shuffling
along wordlessly in the semi-dark, in heavy overcoats, thick scarves and gloves. It was, after all,
a January winter’s day in Washington DC.
The event that had brought them to the nation’s capital was hours away, but everyone expected
the crowds to be large and getting there early would be the only way to find a good spot to watch
the ceremony. Only on venturing outside myself much later did I discover how cold it was. A
freeze had set in. First light revealed a clear day and a sky of faultless blue, but when the wind
rose, it showered icicles across the Mall. They hit you in the face with the sting of burning
needles. Toes and fingers went numb.
And yet the weather discouraged no one.
Spirits were high. The mood was celebratory. It was as if the warmth of expectation had blunted
the effects of the cold.
The early risers had done the right thing. By late morning the largest number of people ever to
assemble in Washington had occupied every square inch of the two-mile-long grass runway from
Capitol Hill to the Lincoln Memorial to witness the final act in a political drama that had
transfixed America and the world.
Picking my way through the gathering multitude that day I could almost taste the excitement. A
black man with the unlikely name of Barack Hussein Obama had defied political orthodoxy and
was about to be sworn in as president of the United States. It was happening in a country where
black Americans had only been legally guaranteed the right to vote a little over forty years earlier
after a campaign as bruising and turbulent as the Civil War.
Now this junior senator from Illinois was about to enter the White House of Jefferson, Lincoln
and Roosevelt, of JFK, Reagan, Clinton and Bush – a White House built by slaves. As tradition
required, a huge cast of political and civic dignitaries had made its way stage side up at the far
end of the Mall – decked out in style and living up to its name as America’s Front Yard.
Everything slotted into place for a presidential inauguration like no other and I was there 35 to
watch an extraordinary moment in American history. It was one of the thrills of my life as a
journalist and as a black man.
I had followed the noisy carnival of the presidential election campaign with its twists and turns,
its frothy controversies and its spasms of political spite. Those memories were already passing
into history. They had been superseded by the election result.

Watching the president elect’s victory speech at Grant Park in Chicago late on election night
from my hotel in Washington, I strained to believe what my eyes were telling me. I had
telephoned friends in London to share the excitement but also as a way of checking that I had not
been transported to a distant planet at a time in the distant future. That evening in Chicago,
Obama struck all the right notes in describing to an ecstatic crowd and to the American nation
the historic nature of his victory.
My conversations with friends across the Atlantic had all ended in tears of high emotion and
glorious incredulity.

Answer:
The text is a recount text, because it is a form of text that tells about stories in the past, either
personal experiences, group experiences, or certain events written in English.
General Structure Recount Text
Generic structure of recount text consists of:
1. Orientation: tells about background information about who, where, when the incident or
event occurred.
2. Events: tells an event that happened afterwards told in chronological order.
3. Reorientation: contains a summary or conclusion of all events. This section also contains
the author's opinion or impression about the events being told.