Am waiting for the first Lib Dem gain, and then I’ll go to bed. (Hope it will be fairly soon…)

Hah, Lab 37%/356; Tories 33%/209; LD 22%/54. I suspect the Labour total will fall and the other two increase as a result of targeting in marginal constituencies.

Glad that I made my bet on Labour getting less than 359. (Though wish I’d left it till yesterday when the Buy rate was 364…)

I’ve been thinking about the general elections of my lifetime:

1970, Feb 1974, Oct 1974 I was too young to take in what was going on. (Also for the first 1974 election we were living abroad, a pattern which for me anyway was to become recurrent.)

1979 was during my first year at Rathmore Grammar School. I remember the girls in my class saying they hoped Mrs Thatcher would win because she was a woman. I had (and still have) a certain affection for Callaghan. Little did any of us know…

By 1983 I’d started to get seriously interested in politics, plus the election was during my O-levels and I think in a quiet inter-exam period. I stayed up all night, urging on the SDLP/Liberal Alliance, who of course did very well in terms of votes (quite possibly better than the Lib Dems will do today) but got a miserable tally of seats, their two actual gains being (if I remember right) Paddy Ashdown in Yeovil and Charles Kennedy in the far north of Scotland. In Northern Ireland all the seats were drastically redrawn, so lots of new results.

In 1987 I was a first-year undergraduate at Cambridge and proudly cast my first ever vote for Shirley Williams, standing in her last election for the SDP. She came a rather more distant second than I had hoped. I watched the results come in immediately after the Fisher Society’s annual dinner, in the Catholic Chaplaincy, where most of my fellow watchers were, like Father Chris Jenkins the chaplain, celebrating rather than ruing the result.

The day of the 1992 election I was in Germany with Anne, attending an old friend’s wedding. I’d only recently moved back to Belfast and fell between two stools of the registration process (which still happens). We listened to the results coming in on the radio, and groaned as Major’s inexplicable victory became clear. Though we cheered for Chris Patten’s defeat, something I’m slightly ashamed of now I’ve got to know him.

My political activity peaked between 1993 and 1996, so just at the wrong moment. At the time I moved to Bosnia, I had already been selected as the Alliance Party’s candidate for the 1997 election in North Belfast, though of course I had to pull out; but it did mean that this rather embarrassing publicity shot of me in front of a Big Ben backdrop was on my files, and indeed served as my standard photo for far too many years… (Lord Holme of Cheltenham, on seeing it, snorted “Surely you could have used a photograph taken since your fourteenth birthday???”)

On the day of the election itself I was in Graz, Austria, buying furniture for our office in Bosnia. Anne was still (heavily pregnant) in Belfast, watching the results roll in with a friend. Even in Austria, CNN and Sky News were available so I was able to follow what was going on – the extraordinary thing was not just the huge scale of the Labour victory, but also the Lib Dems winning more seats, despite the lower vote. And then I woke up in the morning with this odd memory of a dream that Anne had phoned me in the very small hours to tell me that my sometime vague acquaintance from student politics, Stephen Twigg, had defeated leading Conservative Michael Portillo. Impossible, I thought, and went in search of a coffee…

By 2001, thanks to my website, I’d become a small-time pundit, and the Belfast Telegraph, God bless ’em, commissioned a series of articles about marginal seats that I wrote. I was in Brussels for the day of the election itself (and oddly enough bumped into my former party leader, John Alderdice, at a reception that evening), and was then flown to Belfast early the next morning to do live commentary on the Northern Ireland seats as they came in for RTÉ, on a panel chaired by Rodney Rice with Duncan Morrow and Margaret O’Callaghan as my co-discussants. The election results, of course, were more dramatic than expected with seven seats out of 18 changing hands; we were also worked less hard than we might have been, as the referendum in the Republic on the Nice Treaty the previous day, being counted at the same time, delivered an unanticipated “No” vote. Still, they kept us there from midday until 8 pm with no food and only tea and biscuits to keep us going, and live broadcasting – even if you’re there as the expert to keep the presenter right, rather than the target of his grilling – is pretty tiring, so we were glad to get out at the end.

And here I am again in 2005, suddenly realising that the only vote I ever cast in a general election was back in 1987!

Here, thanks to the Guardian. (Hat-tip, as so often, to Bookslut.) I got 11 out of 15.

1) The Dancers At The End Of Time, by Michael Moorcock

Edition uniting An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands, and The End of All Songs. A bit of a one-joke book, this: hero from sexually liberated culture falls in love with woman from a much more repressed culture; this basic plot is the making of many stirring love stories, but here it is played for laughs, the repressed culture being late nineteenth-century London. The anarchic, pansexual, abundant society at the End of Time perhaps inspired Iain M. Banks a little, but Banks carries it off much better. Comic policemen and small furry (but vicious) aliens caper rather pointlessly through the timewarps, as do in-joke characters from Moorcock’s other books and from elsewhere. The end of the universe happens but doesn’t seem to make much difference.

Not a political poll, but another orthographic one, now that I’ve worked out how to write it. I myself can see the first five of these but not the second five.

Interesting that the developers of all this sorted out the obsolete Deseret script developed by the Mormons in the early nineteenth century long before they got around to the breathing symbols in Ancient Greek!

(Darn, misspelt Tibetan. And can’t change it now.)

1. The Head Heeb on elections in Niue – two seats may have to be decided by pulling names out of a hat. Chief electoral officer Togia Sioneholo is interviewed by journalist Caroline Tiriman:

   Journalist:	Is that a fair system?
   Electoral Officer:	I’m not sure what is a fair system. Certainly, to the candidate it won’t be a fair system. But it certainly is a very cost-effective system.
   Journalist:	Why do you say that?
   Electoral Officer:	Because we don’t have to conduct another election or by-election to determine a successful candidate – it’s just a matter of pulling it out of a hat.

2. Dan Savage’s readers give advice to 15-year-old girls on how to get dates (with boys, mostly):

   My advice: Sit in their laps. It worked for me. But choose the laps carefully. Sit in one or two laps at most. Any guy you date at 15 is an experiment, not your husband.

3. I once, long, long ago, worked on a Northamptonshire archaeology site with a bloke called David Szondy. I wonder if this is him? He seems to be a playwright and book dealer somewhere in America now.

   26 April 1967 + 20,000,000 minutes
= 26 April 1967 + 333,333 hours and 20 minutes
= 26 April 1967 + 13888 days and 21 hours and 20 minutes
= 26 April 1967 + 38 years and 8 days and 21 hours and 20 minutes
= 26 April 2005 + 8 days and 21 hours and 20 minutes
= 4 May 2005 + 21 hours and 20 minutes after the time I was actually born, so some time in the early houirs of tomorrow morning.

Did anyone else notice that the winning question on Mastermind last night was about the Arthur C Clarke Award?

25 years ago today since the death of Josip Broz “Tito”, ruler of Yugoslavia from the second world war. See here for lots more about him. (Particularly interesting to see the pictures of Margaret Thatcher, Saddam Hussein, Leonid Brezhnev and Yasser Arafat at his funeral!)

Just read through Ellen Klages’ Time Gypsy. I’m obviously a romantic sentimentalist with nostalgia about areas I used to study, because I loved this lesbian physicist time-warp love story!

I was most impressed by ‘s 1% score in this quiz. I wasn’t prepared for my own result…

…but I was reassured!

Letter from this week’s Tablet (a weekly Catholic magazine which used to be more intellectual than it is now):

As a teacher of theology in a Catholic school, I am constantly questioned – or should I say grilled – on the Church’s teaching on contraception. Although I agree that more should be done to educate and inform people of the alternatives to the use of artificial forms of birth control, I am somewhat uneasy that any form of control, be it artificial or so-called natural, is indicative of a contraceptive mentality. It is my opinion and that of many of my pupils that having sexual intercourse during a woman’s perceived safe period diminishes the sexual act, and reduces it to a mere mechanical process which lacks both spontaneity and faith.

[signed]

I’m not completely sure, but I think this is a spoof. The giveaway phrases are 1) the use of “so-called”, and 2) the appeal to the views of his pupils. If you’re well enough informed about Catholic theology to teach it, and you’re the kind of person who thinks that Paul VI conceded too much to the liberals in Humanæ Vitæ, you’re unlikely to invoke a bunch of teenagers as your authority to counterbalance the Church’s magisterium.

Spoof or not, the letter illustrates well what is probably the most glaring weakness in the official church line (which is, of course, adhered to by very few).

One of our Balkan staff, who previously worked with the OSCE mission in his country, has been invited to a high-powered international conference next month. He sought permission to attend from both his boss and me (as his boss’s boss) and we both agreed instantly. He’s just sent us both a very nice thank-you note:

Many thanks for the [conference] participation approval. If I was still with the OSCE – I would never get approval, and by now the bossess would already start being jelous and hating me. Neither of you knows what it means to work for/with normal, nice people and true intellectuals, and not frustrated, self-obsessed control freaks and nutters that their own ministries have sent off as far as possible from home, hoping never to return…

The OSCE is a weird organisation. When it’s good, it’s very good. When it’s not good, nobody much notices.

Embarrassing photo, taken on 21 April at EIAS.

From the fact that I’ve already made two posts this morning (though backdated both of them to before office hours) you can tell that I’m filled with enthusiasm for work today.

Two reports hit my desk last Friday, and I have to do first editing on both before pushing them on to the next stage of the publication process (one on Kosovo, one on Moldova). They’re good reports, but this is the one bit of the job I really hate and which I tend to procrastinate really badly.

Also it’s a short week for most in Brussels as we get Thursday off for Ascension. But with these two tasks to deal with, I’ll probably have to work on Friday, once I’ve woken up after the election coverage. It will be an empty office – almost everyone is doing the pont. (Except our boss, who is waiting anxiously to hear if he’s going to be made the head of UNHCR. Though some think he should aim higher.)

Edited to add: Bah, humbug. One of my colleagues is going to Belfast on Wednesday to Friday this week, just precisely the time of the elections. *jealousy* – especially since he’s Australian and it’s all wasted on him!

BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day this morning:

Thought for the Day, 2 May 2005

The Rev. Angela Tilby

We’ve all been told that television is turning us into mindless zombies and that our children are losing the skills of reading and writing because they prefer computer games. But now an American culture critic is suggesting that we’ve got it wrong. Everything bad is good for you – he says. What we thought was dumbing us down is in fact making us brighter. As evidence, he points to the fact that even telly plots are getting more multi-layered and sophisticated. Well that may be true. I never thought I would be moved by a Dalek, but the altruistic suicide of the last Dalek in the universe on Doctor Who on Saturday almost had me reaching for the Kleenex. Though as far as computers go I have definitely dumbed down. I was top at spelling when I was seven, now I routinely forget how to spell apparently, accommodate and recommend, and need the computer to correct me. The human mind changes over time in response to the world we live in. The last great change in Western Europe was when the invention of printing coincided with the rediscovery of the Bible. This led to a spiritual revolution – people came to see themselves as responsible individuals before God, each with a God-given soul to save and God given gifts to express. The spiritual task meant looking inwards. After the colour of mediaeval Catholicism with its feasts and fasts and angels and demons, the new version of the faith required plain whitewashed churches, built for private concentration on the word of God.

Now as I sit watching the under fives playing confidently with remote controls, and the under sevens programming their own viewing and the under nines showing their parents how to work the DVD I wonder whether we are not in another of those great changes. The future, it seems, will favour not lone souls but those who know they are connected, who can do many things at once and few of them in solitude, who can process material at speed from all their senses. Churches may be on-line, or liquid, or multi-plex, with the message that people belong to the whole and so to each other. This asks us to look into our spiritual treasurers and draw out what we need for now.

And one of the treasures re-discovered has been the Christian doctrine of the Trinity – that God is not only one but in endless relationship within God’s own being. Perhaps here is a mirror of what we are becoming, an image of a God who is not solitary or apart but a community of love. Towards the end of last Saturday’s Dr Who I wondered whether even Daleks could be saved by discovering love. Perhaps that is next week’s plot.

Sorry to see via East Ethnia that Perica Vučinić died last week, aged only 46. I remember him launching his magazine Reporter/Репортер in Banja Luka back in 1997 when I was living there; it was soon the best independent source for news analysis in the entire Serbian cultural space (though as this was at the peak of Milosevic’s power, this is not saying very much). Although these are easier days, it’s still one of the leading media sources in the region. I don’t think I ever met him (and have certainly no idea what caused his early death), but I just wanted to acknowledge his contribution and his courage in opening up the space for political discourse under the peculiar circumstances of Bosnia and Serbia in the late 1990s.

Vaguely wondering where else I’d seen the actress who played Goddard (the evil Van Statten’s assistant), I did a quick IMDB search and realised that a) she’s from New Zealand, not America (which explains one or two slips) and b) she is part of the set-up for one of my favourite lines in a British sit-com, the last episode of the first series of “Faith In The Future” from 1995.

I must say I was not a regular watcher of “Faith in the Future”; it happened to have the Julia Sawalha playing Faith’s daughter Hannah, and I suppose I tuned into this episode by accident one night, realised she was in it and didn’t turn it off. The relevant sub-plot is that Julia Sawalha/Hannah is moving in with her boyfriend. She’s more or less finished unpacking when there’s a knock on the door, and in comes Anna-Louise Plowman/Hannah’s boyfriend’s other girlfriend from Australia, who says something along the lines of “Oh, you must be his room-mate”, grabs the startled duplicitous boyfriend in a lustful embrace, and asks, “Right, which way’s the bedroom?!?”

To which Julia Sawalha delivers, with a venomous glare at the errant boyfriend, the classic line:

The bedroom’s just through there. I’ve finished with it.

I see Anna-Louise Plowman also had a recurring part in Stargate-SG1 (Sarah Gardner/Osiris), but I never saw any of that series; have I missed much?

I’ve spent a little more time playing with Martin Baxter’s election swing site.

As I said before, my own prediction requires (on a uniform swing across England, Scotland and Wales) that the Lib Dems be over 27% and the Tories equal with Labour.

However playing with Martin’s tactical votes mechanism gives a different story. If we assume a (granted, rather massive) 6% “tactical unwind” as LibDem voters in what are currently Con/Lab marginals who voted Labour in 1997 and 2001 don’t do so this time, then my prediction requires national levels of support of only 32.7% for the Tories and 38.4% for Labour, a bit more realistic. (Though it still needs the Lib Dems on over 26% which still seems unlikely.)

The fun bit is that among the casualties would be David Davis and Oliver Letwin of the Conservative Party leadership. Though it would see my former political rival safely returned for Hammersmith and Fulham.

See ‘s latest post.

Best Novel: Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold – Hooray! Good for her.

Best Novella: “The Green Leopard Plague”, by Walter Jon Williams – though I thought Adam Troy-Castro’s nominated story was better, I liked this one as well – at long last, a story which will bring the Transdniestrian conflict into the mainstream (or, er, perhaps not…)

Best Novelette: “Basement Magic”, by Ellen Klages (link doesn’t work at the moment) – a wicked stepmother story, but with a contemporary twist. Slightly sorry not to see Chris Rowe’s wacky “The Voluntary State” get the award. Does anyone know how I can contact the author, for my statistics?

Best Short Story: “Coming to Terms”, by Eileen Gunn – since this was added to the ballot after the preliminary phase, I only got around to reading it just now. A very strong story of loss and death, slightly weakened by its ending (which is, however, the only real sfnal element in the story).

(And Best Script went to ROTK.)

For my own statistics, I note: three first time winners out of four, three women out of four, and three fantasy stories out of four.