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Sodom and Gomorrah, by Marcel Proust

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Cependant, rien que par mes rêves quand j’étais endormi, j’aurais pu apprendre que mon chagrin de la mort de ma grand’mère diminuait, car elle y apparaissait moins opprimée par l’idée que je me faisais de son néant. Je la voyais toujours malade, mais en voie de se rétablir, je la trouvais mieux. Et si elle faisait allusion à ce qu’elle avait souffert, je lui fermais la bouche avec mes baisers et je l’assurais qu’elle était maintenant guérie pour toujours. J’aurais voulu faire constater aux sceptiques que la mort est vraiment une maladie dont on revient. Seulement je ne trouvais plus chez ma grand’mère la riche spontanéité d’autrefois. Ses paroles n’étaient qu’une réponse affaiblie, docile, presque un simple écho de mes paroles ; elle n’était plus que le reflet de ma propre pensée. Meanwhile, if only from my dreams when I was asleep, I might have learned that my grief at my grandmother’s death was diminishing, for she appeared there less oppressed by the idea I had been forming of her non-existence. I saw her as an invalid still, but on the way to recovering; I thought she looked better. And if she alluded to what she had suffered, I stopped her mouth with my kisses and assured her that now she was cured for ever. I would have liked to make the sceptics acknowledge that death is in truth an illness from which we recover. Only I did not find in my grandmother the rich spontaneity of old. Her words were only an enfeebled, docile response, a mere echo almost, of my own words; she was no longer anything more than the reflection of my own thoughts.

When I first read this a decade ago, I wrote:

I’m more than half way through the seven-volume epic now, and sufficiently engaged to be sure that I will indeed finish it in due course. Sodom and Gomorrah puts homosexuality front and centre; at the very beginning, we discover that the monstrous Baron de Charlus is in fact perpetually on the lookout for attractive men; and throughout the second half of the book the narrator is tormented by the idea that his girlfriend Albertine is having affairs with her girlfriends. Proust is himself a gay but very closeted writer, putting words in the mouth of a heterosexual narrator who observes but is horrified by homosexuality, and for today’s reader there is more of the fascination of watching the author’s mental train wreck than the idea that we are learning anything.

There is other stuff going on as well. At first I was afraid that we would have yet more bitchy and superficial social events, but we have the interesting compare and contrast between two key relationships – the narrator and Albertine, and Baron de Charlus and the young plebeian musician Morel – which drives the narrative. There are a couple of interesting confrontations with modern technology – the elevator, the motor car, the aeroplane. There are reflections on art and how people respond to it (a discussion continued from earlier works). And the significance of placenames is a major sub-theme of the last third of the book. All quite fascinating, and yet again I feel will reward re-reading in due course.

A couple of things struck me more strongly on second reading. Most obviously, I should have spotted that Sodom and Gomorrah respectively are male homosexuality and lesbianism; the plot moves from one to the other, and in fact it’s crystal clear that Albertine’s fun with her girlfriends is real and not just in the narrator’s paranoia. What Proust captures very well, however, is precisely the paranoia of someone newly in lust who cannot cope with the idea that the person they are obsessed with may perhaps have other interests – and of course the hypocrisy of his narrator also getting it on with several of Albertine’s friends himself, even if that happens mainly offstage. So the final twist (the set-up for the next volume) is entirely believable, when the narrator decides that rather than dump Albertine, he will marry her, the better to continue his fascination with her./

I’m a bit more familiar with the Dreyfus case than I was last time round, and so am more appreciative of the way attitudes to it weave through the social set-up and the complex intersection of Dreyfusards with respectability and homosexuality – not completely orthogonal, but not strongly aligned either. I also appreciated the minor character Brichot’s obsession with the origin of place names, pointing to hidden histories among humans as well as villages.

On the other hand, I felt there were a few too many soirées of rather unpleasant people being unpleasant to each other here, and the class mockery of servants is getting a bit tedious. So although I still think it’s a great read, it has its limitations. You can get it here.

Onwards! To The Prisoner and the Fugitive!

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Seychelles: The Saga of a Small Nation […], by Sir James Mancham

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Second paragraph (and first paragraph of embedded quote) of third chapter:

This is what the cover page of Seychelles Political Castaways stated when it was published in 1976, the year of our independence:

Seychelles: ninety-two islands and atolls lying 1000 miles east of the Kenya coast in the Indian Ocean, and often described as the world’s most beautiful archipelago. Each of the coral banks or islands has a beauty of its own that is captured rarely by camera and almost never by pen. Straight palms, white sands, vari-coloured seas and clear lagoons with their patchwork of coral form a backcloth to a nation that was, until 28 June 1976, listed in the guide books and the ledgers of Whitehall as a British Crown Colony.

Four years ago I attended a conference in Florence, Italy, and fell into conversation with an elderly gentleman with a spring in his step and a glint in his eye. He whipped out a copy of his latest book, signed it with a flourish and handed it to me. I am sorry to say that it sat on the shelves for some time before I read it, and in the meantime Sir James Mancham has shuffled off this mortal coil. But I really appreciated the gesture.

The book is mainly about the geopolitics and economics of the Seychelles, but that is a subject deeply entangled with its author’s life. He became President of the Seychelles when the islands became independent in 1976, and just a year later was overthrown by his own prime minister (while he himself was in London attending the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations). He was still pretty sore about that, but on the other hand had relished the opportunities opened up by his return from exile in 1992 to promote the interests of his homeland, particularly since the invitation to return came from his usurper.

The Seychelles is a really small place, with a population of less than 100,000, but that clearly leaves plenty of room for local politics and palace politics; Mancham hints at the effects of high net worth individuals coming in to buy individual islands, a phenomenon he himself was sanguine about. He’s much less sanguine about what he still sees as his betrayal by the British and Americans in 1977, facilitated by the French and culminating in the islands becoming a Soviet satellite. (It would be interesting to read an account of those events from another source.) I was amused to realise that I know most of the EU officials he mentions in the relevant chapter.

I doubt that this is the best book ever written about the Seychelles, or even the best book written by Sir James Mancham, but I learned more than I had expected from it. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a non-white writer (Sir James was proud of his Chinese grandfather). Next on that list is And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hossaini.

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The Sound of his Horn, by Sarban

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Apart from the slight pain in my hands I have rarely felt so well and tranquil and at ease in my body as I did that morning when I first began to speculate about where I was. It was not by any means my first day of consciousness. I knew that I had been in that bright and airy room, with its scent of flowers mingling with the fainter odour of drugs and disinfectant and floor-polish, for quite a number of days. The white painted door and window-frame, the pretty curtain and the white wood furniture were all familiar to me, and I knew the faces of my two nurses quite well; they had been looking after me for a long time. It was just that that day I completed a gradual transition from passive perception to active observation.

The only thing I knew of this novel before reading it was that it has a “Hitler Wins” scenario. I hadn't realised that the framing narrative is set shortly after WW2 in our timeline, but the protagonist recounts a story of breaking out of a PoW camp in Germany and getting somehow zapped forward to a different mid-21st century where the Allies were defeated. It's a very short book, and the key point is that the future Nazis have bred genetically modified young men to hunt women through the woods for sport. This is, needless to say, a really icky set-up, and I think the best point of the novel is that it doesn't especially dwell voyeuristically on the ickiness, but on the practicalities of getting the hero and his young female ally out of immediate danger. (Defeating the system isn't an option.) Even so, there are a number of loose ends, and I can't agree with those who rate it among the greats. However, I'm glad to have read it. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2013. Next on that list is Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O'Driscoll.

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Doctor Who: The Women Who Lived – Tales for Future Time Lords, by Christel Dee and Simon Guerrier

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

After that terrifying encounter, Adelaide had starlight in her soul. She knew she would follow the Dalek into space – not seeking revenge for the loss of her parents, simply to get out among the stars. Adelaide sacrificed everything to lead the first off-world colony to Mars, leaving her daughter and granddaughter behind on Earth. Heremotional detachment made her a severe and formidable leader.

This is a lovely book produced in time for the new Doctor, celebrating 100 (plus a few more) of the strong women characters of both Old and New Who (Pauline Collins is in it twice, for characters she played 39 years apart). It is gorgeously illustrated by 21 different artists (none of them men, as far as I could tell by the names), with the standout being Valentina Mozzo, also the most frequently used. It would be a great gateway drug to get fans of the Thirteenth Doctor to take an interest in the previous 55 years of the series. Just nice to have on the shelves too. You can get it here.

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Monday reading

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Current
Words of Radiance, by Brandon Sanderson

Last books finished
Doctor Who: The Widow’s Curse, ed. Tom Spilsbury
The Cloud Roads, by Martha Wells

Next books
Earth Girl, by Janet Edwards
Retour sur Aldébaran, tome 1, by Leo
The Vampire’s Curse, by Mags Halliday

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Class: The Audio Adventures: Volume One, by Roy Gill, Jenny T. Colgan and Scott Handcock

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As previously mentioned, I enjoyed both the short-lived Doctor Who spinoff TV series Class and its associated novels; Big Finish have now done two series of audios based on the show, using all the lead actors, though not all at the same time. I’ve listened to the first and will report on the second in due course. Each consists of three stories.

Gifted by Roy Gill picks up the April/Ram relationship (as played by Sophie Hopkins and Fadi Elsayed) and tests it against a rather excellent villain played by Deirdre Mullins with a sidekick played by Rhys Isaac-Jones. There’s decently done nasty fairy tales and adolescent angst. It’s a good start.

Life Experience, by Jenny T. Colgan, has Ram (Fady Elsayed) again with Tanya (Vivian Oparah) and the biggest guest cast of the three plays, led by Lu Corfield as mad alien scientist Marta Vanderburgh. Ram and Tanya have been sent to a local laboratory as work experience; the mayor (a fantastic performance by Jasmine Stewart) turns up as well; it turns out that the lab is carrying our some very non-standard experiments and all hell breaks loose, almost literally. Great fun.

Tell Me You Love Me, by Scott Handcock, is one of those stories that works much better in audio than it could on screen. Charlie (Greg Austin) and Matteusz (Jordan Renzo) are enjoying a romantic moment after school when they are assailed by an alien that propagates on sound alone; they call in Miss Quill (Katherine Kelly) who as usual gets all the good lines and deals ruthlessly with the problem.

The slight disappointment for fans of the TV show is that none of the three bring the full cast together as a team. At the same time of course this allows the better performers to shine a bit more. Certainly the three plays are fully in the spirit of the show, but also I think would be fairly accessible to listeners who had not seen the original. One other disappointment is that in the behind-the-scenes interviews with the cast, the sound balancing is rather poor and some of the actors are pretty inaudible. Nonetheless, you can get them here.

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Ringworld, by Larry Niven

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Come off it,” said Louis Wu. “You can’t breed for luck the way you breed for shaggy eyebrows!”

The archetypal “Big Dumb Object”, the Ringworld of the title is a million miles wide and 600 million miles across with a star in the middle and atmosphere trapped inside by rotation. Throw in some aliens and a girl who is always lucky and you have the story. The setup is very good – Niven’s universe is nicely depicted, with the two sentient alien species sharing space with humanity, and then the Ringworld itself is a truly fantastic concept. The story runs out of steam a bit in the second half, as having reached the Ringworld, our heroes don’t have all that much to do except try and get off it again, and the emotional investment that readers may have made in the girl isn’t really paid off. Myself, I first came to Ringworld after reading its sequel, The Ringworld Engineers, and also after having read Rendezvous with Rama, so it never made the same impression on me that it did on most people. The book was delightfully spoofed by Terry Pratchett in Strata (an early non-Discworld book) and of course to an extent in the Discworld itself, which shows the extent to which it has entered popular consciousness.

Ringworld won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novel published in 1970, awarded in 1971. This was the year that the two major awards agreed on everything, with "Slow Sculpture" and "Ill Met In Lankhmar" winning the short fiction categories. Ringworld also won the first Locus Award for Best Novel, and the Ditmar and Seium Awards. Also on both the Hugo and Nebula final ballots were Tower of Glass, by Robert Silverberg, and The Year of the Quiet Sun, by Wilson Tucker. I have not read either of them. The other two novels on the Hugo ballot were Star Light, by Hal Clement, and Tau Zero, by Poul Anderson; and the other three novels on the Nebula ballot were And Chaos Died, by Joanna Russ; Fourth Mansions, by R. A. Lafferty; and The Steel Crocodile, by D.G. Compton. I have not read any of them either. I don't think I have read any of them either. Ringworld has twice as many owners on LibraryThing, and six times as many owners on Goodreads, as all the others combined. As far as subsequent purchasing history goes, the voters got it right this time. Just in case you haven’t read it already, you can get it here.

Next in this series is “The Queen of Air and Darkness”, a novelette by Poul Anderson from the following year (ie published 1971 and awarded in 1972).

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Missing Adventures, ed. Rebecca Levene

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Second paragraph of third story (“The Tunnels to Heaven”, by Andy Bodle):

All was still but for the occasional passing functionary. The Reminder Screens were projecting the same old slogans. The Facilitator at the desk was reciting her Tenets as if today were a day like any other.

A set of short stories about Bernice Summerfield’s life before she joined the Doctor. Most of them are OK; the first (“Biology Lesson on Mal Oreille”, by Xanna Eve Chown, a Malory Towers spoof)) and last (“Thirty Love”, by Eddie Robson, in which she tries to explain tennis) are rather good; the second last (“Blood On The Tracks”, by Andy Lane) is an outstanding tale of searching for an artifact which turns out to be more than we have been told, at least for Benny. For Benny continuity buffs really, but enjoyable. You can get it here.

Next up is Bernice Summerfield and the Vampire Curse, by Mags L Halliday.

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Here’s My Card, by Bob Popyk

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Stress the value of having your phone number handy. Elaborate on the benefit of a business relationship with you and your company.

I am a keen networker, as most of you know, and I occasionally do training sessions for colleagues on the topic. I had been scheduled to do it again the other week, and picked up this book fairly cheap in the hope that it would refresh my thinking. Well, it didn’t really. First off, it’s aimed at people whose business model is very different from mine (and from the younger colleagues who come to my training sessions) – the entrepreneur, selling a particular hard product or service, whose customers generally live within a reasonable travel distance. Since I started in my the line of business where I needed a client base, I’ve barely had any clients based in Brussels. (A lot have Brussels representation, of course, but the relationship is normally owned by headquarters.) Most of the business I pick up are useful contacts in the policy or business world, without much prospect of becoming clients in the short to medium term, and that is the spirit in which I hand mine out also.

Second, the book is barely conscious of the internet, with the injunction to have your email address clearly and correctly on your card almost the only reference. I had to check the publication date in disbelief. (2000.) I think even Popyk’s target audience now would have Facebook pages set up for their business outreach, and frankly will find that much more useful as a driver of business than business cards.

Also one of the pieces of advice given is to go a bit gimmicky with your business cards, scenting them or making them odd shapes or using odd fonts. Personally I find this a bit annoying. You have to explain unexpected scentedness to your partner and colleagues, and it’s tricky to scan oddly designed business cards into the system.

So basically this book was not for me. If you want, you can get it here.

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Putting Up Roots, by Charles Sheffield

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Even so, Josh didn’t have high hopes when they finally reached the dining room. He was used to carryout meals, or eating on the run in fast-food places, because his mother was always rushing off somewhere or too busy rehearsing or studying parts to do any cooking. Uncle Ryan said that Aunt Stacy was a great cook, but it was obvious that he was totally bowled over by his new wife. He probably thought that everything she did was great, no matter how bad it was. In any case, it didn’t seem possible that the reality could live up to the aromas.

This is a YA book taken from the template of Heinlein’s Tunnel In the Skyget it here.

This was both my most popular unread book acquired in 2010, and the shortest unread book acquired that year. Next on both lists is 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem: A Poem for Every Week of the Year, by Ruth Padel.

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About Time vol 8: 2007, Series 3, by Tat Wood and Dorothy Ail

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Second paragraph of third chapter (on The Shakespeare Code):

Firsts and Lasts To disentangle the whole story from various tie-in works and three previous broadcast stories, it's simplest to say that this is the first time Shakespeare has met the Doctor, rather than the other way around. (We'll elaborate later.)

Second paragraph of essay accompanying third chapter ("Why Does Britain's History Look So Different These Days?"):

Rather than just making a big thing of a character coming from Africa and being allowed to answer the phones on a starship, in "The Tenth Planet" (4.2), the minor character of Williams – written as Welsh – was cast so that Earl Cameron could go into space as part of a vision of 1980s life where race was irrelevant.That his co-pilot was an Australian called "Bluey" (all Australian characters who weren't called "Digger" or "Bruce" have that name) and where an Italian character is introduced singing La Donna i [sic] Mobile and shouting "Mama Mia! Bellissima" on sighting Polly's legs in the Antarctic blizzard need not detain us. The script has its lazy stereotypes, as is usual in anything Kit Pedler wrote, an attempt to limn a future where scientists are an international fellowhood.

I've been taking a break from bookblogging, as you may have noticed, so the time has come to clear the backlog. I'm saving my thoughts on the new Doctor Who season for a bit later (in summary, I'm pretty happy so far), but here's a look back over a decade ago now, the 8th in a series of exhaustive commentaries on the history of Doctor Who. (See previous write-ups of volumes 1, 2, 3, 3 revised, 4, 5, 6 and 7.) This concentrates purely on the 2007 series (the one with Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones), starting with the 2006 Christmas special (The Runaway Bride) and finishing with Time Crash, the 2007 Christmas special (Voyage of the Damned) and the animated Infinite Quest. Counting (arguably) three two-parters and not counting Time Crash, at 340 pages that's about 26 pages per story; Counting The Infinite Quest as a single episode, and including Time Crash this time, it's 21 pages per episode. Compare with less than nine pages per story in Volume 4 and a shade over two per episode in Volume 2.

This is the season that includes my personal favourite episode of New Who (the Hugo-winning Blink), Paul Cornell's excellent two-parter based on his own novel (also a Hugo finalist), and the return of the Master in the shape of first Sir Derek Jaobi and then John Simm. David Tennant then encounters his future father-in-law Peter Davison in the first multi-Doctor story of the new era. The low points are the awful two-part Dalek story and the final episode's failure to deliver on the buildup of the two previous ones. It also has to be said that Martha's character arc is not the most elegantly executed (though, come on, at least she doesn't get sent to stay on Sir Charles' country estate), though I rate Freema Agyeman very highly indeed.

I wrote about these stories both at the time they were first broadcast (The Runaway Bride, Smith and Jones, The Shakespeare Code, Gridlock, Daleks in Manhattan, Evolution of the Daleks, The Lazarus Experiment, 42, Blink, Utopia, The Sound of Drums, Last of the Time Lords, Time Crash, Voyage of the Damned) and again when I did my rewatch in 2013 (The Runaway Bride, first half of main season, second half plus Infinite Quest, Time Crash, Voyage of the Damned). In general, Wood and Ail's assessment of the stories is pretty similar to mine – they are even tougher than I am on the Dalek one, saw more in The Infinite Quest than I did, and perhaps less enthusiastic about the high points than I am. As usual, the commentary is pretty brutal about the Things That Don't make Sense plot-wise, but normally sympathetic to the constraints of production (grim accounts of David Tennant struggling with a heavy cold but still putting in long days and night shoots).

There’s surprisingly little exploration of the roots of individual stories, a strength of earlier volumes, but I did gain a new appreciation for the extent to which Paul Cornell draws on Neil Gaiman. The big gap here is that Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures were already well under way, and it’s a bit tricky to analyse Tennant-era Who without bringing them into the mix as well. However, the accompanying essays as usual are well worth the cover price in their own right, tackling inter alia New Who’s (or at least RTD’s) approach to race and sexuality as displayed on screen, and also a fascinating piece about the online extras.

My usual gripe, magnified this time: 65 endnotes (I hate endnotes), including two numbered 14, the first of which is located between notes 7 and 8, so that it’s not at all clear what text it is referring to.

I haven’t yet read any of the Black Archive books (and am frankly a bit intimidated by them), but I still think the About Time series is the standard by which other critiques of Who should be judged. You can get this one here.

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Monday reading

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Current
Words of Radiance, by Brandon Sanderson
Doctor Who: The Widow’s Curse, ed. Tom Spilsbury

Last books finished
Seychelles: The Saga of a Small Nation Navigating the Cross-Currents of a Big World, by Sir James Mancham
The Sound of his Horn, by Sarban
Sodom and Gomorrah, by Marcel Proust
Larque on the Wing, by Nancy Springer

Next books
The Cloud Roads, by Martha Wells
Earth Girl, by Janet Edwards
The Vampire’s Curse, by Mags Halliday

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Election results in Oud-Heverlee

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From the Vlaanderen Kiest website…

Party Votes % Seats Change
N-VA 2,199 28.4% 7 +1
CD&V 1,903 24.6% 6 +1
Groen 1,819 23.5% 5 +2
Open Vld 1,007 13.0% 2 +2
sp.a-plus 813 10.5% 1 -1
7.741 100% 21

If sp.a had got three more votes, they would have got the last seat instead of CD&V, so the balance between them would have been 5 to 2 instead of 6 to 1.

So all three parties in the ruling coalition gained seats, in fact to the point that any two of them can now form a coalition excluding the third. I imagine that the deal will be done this evening over a pintje or two.

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Dreams of a Life (2011)

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

For all those years before she married Dan Needham, my mother never had a real job, or pursued a higher education; and although she never lacked money—because my grandmother was generous to her—she was clever at keeping her personal expenses to a minimum. She would bring home some of the loveliest clothes, from Boston, but she would never buy them; she dressed up her dressmaker's dummy in them, and she copied them. Then she'd return the originals to the various Boston stores; she said she always told them the same thing, and they never got angry at her—instead, they felt sorry for her, and took the clothes back without an argument.

A slow and intricate novel of life in the 1950s and 1960s in a small New Hampshire town, where the narrator's mother is accidentally killed by his best friend in a sporting accident and the whole story is told as a flashback from Canada in 1987. There are two brilliant comic set pieces, first where Owen Meaney takes command of the town's Christmas Nativity play, and then later where he inspires the removal of a hated teacher's car from the schoolyard to the stage of the assembly hall. It has a grim and not totally plausible ending; it goes on maybe a bit too long; but it's a nice chunky read about friendship, growing up and family secrets. I had read it years ago but had forgotten enough to enjoy it again. You can get it here.

This was the top book on my shelves that I had not already reviewed online. Next up is The Master and Margerita, by Mikhail Bulgakov.

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Dreams of a Life (2011)

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I had been intrigued by this film since I first read Carol Morley's 2011 Guardian article about making it. In 2006, housing officials making a repossession order broke into a London flat to make a grim discovery: the skeleton of its tenant, propped on the sofa, surrounded by Christmas presents with the television still on. Joyce Vincent had died in 2003, and nobody had noticed. Morley set out to tell her story, advertising in hopes of finding friends and relatives who might help her to understand what had happened. This film is the result.

The story is a simple enough one. Joyce had had a normal enough background, parents from Grenada, born in 1965 in London always lived there, had an unremarkable professional admin career but dabbled in the music business (one boyfriend, Alistair Abrahams, is a moderately successful music promoter who introduced her to Gil Scott-Heron and, I'm not making this up, Nelson Mandela; she once had dinner with Stevie Wonder). And in 2001 it all came to a halt; she dropped out of her City job, spent some time (how much? not clear) at a refuge for domestic abuse victims, checked into hospital a few weeks before her death giving her bank manager as her next of kin (her bank manager), and then was not seen alive again.

The film cuts between interviews with people who knew Joyce, and were shocked to realise that she had dropped out of their lives so rapidly, and scenes from her life re-enacted by Zawe Ashton (as an adult) and Alix Luka-Cain (as a child). Both are very good in their roles. (Zawe Ashton also played Journey Blue in the 2014 Doctor Who episode Into the Dalek. This seems to be Alix Luka-Cain's only screen role known to IMDB.)

The star of the film is Martin Lister, Joyce's ex-boyfriend who stayed friends with her long after their relationship ended, and who obviously struggles with the fact that when she dropped out of his life completely in 2003, it wasn't because she had decided to move on but because she was dead. Lynne Featherstone, who was the local MP, provides a sort of official narrative to the extent that that is possible. Joyce's family declined to participate. (One has to wonder: who were the wrapped but unsent Christmas presents for? And what about the bank manager?)

There are flaws in the piece. We linger perhaps a bit too much with Zawe Ashton as Joyce singing. The reconstruction of her family life is of course speculative. We linger a bit too eagerly on the repossession of the flat and Joyce's last moments intercut with the forensic examination of her belongings (all of course also reconstructed). There's a bit too much of the "she was there for three years!" when in fact it seems to have been just over two, fom December 2003 to January 2006. But the central theme is immensely powerful: loneliness and death, two things which we all fear. Joyce seems to have chosen to live alone; there are conflicting versions of why she left her last professional job; there's a general agreement that in her final years she moved around so much that even those who thought they were her closest friends lost touch, though they welcomed her when she did make contact.

The final shot of the film is tremendously moving – after 90 minutes of Ashton and Luka-Cain playing Joyce, Carol Morley found her in four seconds of footage from the Nelson Mandela concert in 1990, when she would have been 25 or so. We catch her in the crowd and then we have a brief glimpse of her face; all that's left of a vibrant person who touched a lot of people's lives and then fell out of them. Do watch it. Though you will cry.

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Voting time in Belgium

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Municipal elections take place every six years in Belgium – an unusually long term by European standards (though NB Irish local councils had seven-year terms in 1960-67 and 1967-74, and an eight-year term from 1934 to 1942). The appointed day is actually tomorrow – very sensibly, Belgians vote on Sundays, between 8am and 3pm; voting is compulsory, unless you have a good excuse. Non-Belgians who have taken the trouble to enrol on the electoral register must also vote. (We have been Belgian since 2008 anyway.)

In our commune, there are 21 local councillors, and five parties are standing full lists of candidates. I don't know what the total number of voters is, but last time we had a turnout of 7,713, more than 1% of the voters are actually on the ballot paper. In 2012 we had a major shift of power, as the outgoing mayor lost his bid for a seventh six-year term (yes, he had had the job since local government was reorganised in 1976) to a coalition of the New Flemish Alliance (NVA), Christian Democrats (CD&V) and the Greens (Groen); with the former mayor's coalition of residents (Fusiebelangen) and Socialists (SP.A) in opposition. The main Liberal party, Open VLD, had never actually stood for elections here, it being understood that the mayor's coalition included a lot of their activists. (It's worth noting that the Belgian liberals are somewhat to the right of liberals in the UK, Canada or the US; and that the Flemish Christian Democrats are to the left of the German CDU/CSU and other European People's Party members.)

This year, Open VLD are standing in their own right for the first time, and the mayor's Fusiebelangen coaltiion has disintegrated. So my choice is between Liberals (Open VLD), New Flemish Alliance (NVA), Christian Democrats (CD&V), Greens (Groen) and Socialists (SP.A). Well, we can rule one of those out immediately. NVA are a hard right party who don't like immigrants and have been responsible for ramping up xenophobic rhetoric. They don't want votes from people like me, and I have barely skimmed their election literature. Their participation in the coalition at local level raises questions for me also about the Christian Democrats and Greens. (Of course, the same can be said of the Liberals at Belgian federal and Flemish regional level, and the Socialists have also been in coalitions with NVA in the past; but my interest here is to hold the local parties accountable.)

I contacted the other four parties to ask two or three questions on the local issues that I particularly care about. First, about public transport provision – I am a regular commuter from here to Brussels, my journey takes a minimum of 80 minutes each way, and I often get fed up with the lack of options to get home quickly and safely later in the evening. Second, our local branch of the library was closed by the current council's ruling coalition, and library facilities centralised at the civic centre 2 km away – I personally regret this, as it was nice to have library facilities nearby on a Saturday, particularly for F when he was younger, but I asked each party if they felt the move had been a success. And third, I asked CD&V and Groen how a foreigner like me can feel comfortable voting for a party that has gone into coalition with the xenophobic NVA. I wrote in English but made it clear that I would be happy with responses in Dutch, and I'm not using linguistic competence as a criterion for my vote. Responses received in Dutch are Google-translated to English below.

In reverse order of my preference, the answers were:

CD&V:

Public transport:

As a small community influencing the schedule of train or bus is nearly impossible. The city aldermen for CD&V have more than once tried to convince De Lijn to provide such connection from Oud-Heverlee to Haasrode, for now without succes. The answer of De Lijn is that if the community of Oud-Heverlee pays more than 200k€/year they will provide the offer, that is hardly a satisfying offer.

Library: no answer.

Coalition:

We would like to stay in a future coalition. For us that can change and it doesn't need to be the same coalition. However, we do need a stable majority. Up to the other parties to show their value and if we're lucky will accept their offer to participate in a new coalition. I personnally don't feel the same presence on the xenophobic area in the local party as there is on the national playing field.

Comment: Lack of answer on library disappointing. No real attempt to reassure me on NVA. Only public transport issue mentioned is the east-west bus connection (which is fair enough, it's a big issue for the commune, but I wouldn't use it myself), and basically no action is promised because they've tried it all before and it hasn't worked.

Further comment: One of the CD&V candidates did score brownie points by sending a handwritten note complimenting me on this blog post.

SP.A:

Transport:

in general better coordinate the bus and train connections, as well as coordination with school start and end times;
at de Lijn and at TEC to insist on improving public transport from Blanden and Haasrode to Leuven and vice versa, by making the transport more direct (eg via the Naamse steenweg) and on a better bus offer. Even after 7 pm and at the weekend;
the provision of better bus connections to Vaalbeek (town hall, library) and a bus connection to the De Kouter project;
the conclusion of an agreement with De Lijn around an improved third party payer scheme to offer the residents a cheaper round-trip ticket at events or to give a discount when purchasing a Lijnkaart (municipality card) with which you can enter a certain area. to travel. This municipality pass is for sale at presale points in the municipality concerned;
negotiate with De Lijn to allow the existing student bus pass, with which students can make use of buses all year round in and around Leuven, also for students living in Oud-Heverlee;
to urge the road authorities to improve the traffic flow (flow traffic for the buses so that they arrive on time) and more capacity for bus connections to schools;
at the higher authorities to insist on improving the reception infrastructure of the two train stations (eg secure bicycle parking places, the number of bicycle thefts is still too high).

Library: No answer.

Coalition: Not asked.

Comment: This reply reached me yesterday, two days before the election. I had emailed the local lead candidate at the same time as the others, on 26 August, over six weeks ago, and joked with him at the Dorpfeest on 2 September that I looked forward to his reply. Eventually I got a handwritten note asking me to send my message again to a different email address – I had used the one on the party website, but clearly it hadn't reached him. The transport policy proposals are all fine, but I'm unimpressed by the mode of engagement. Again, no comment on the library.

Groen:

Public transport:

Especially in Haasrode and Blanden there is still a lot of growth margin for public transport. We want a faster and more frequent bus connection with Leuven, by driving the bus over the Naamsesteenweg. You can also rely on us to strengthen for the current train offer and bus offer, and to improve the transfer possibilities. Think of better bicycle parking at stations, Park & ​​Ride possibilities, …..

Library:

a successful operation. We have looked intensively at how we can use municipal buildings as well as possible. The free space of the former libraries in Oud-Heverlee and Sint-Joris-Weert is now used intensively by the music school. The new library provides more life in the Roosenberg. We want to make this site a real cultural hub in the municipality.

Coalition:

At the national level, we indeed have very different points of view, for example about migration. At local level we have been able to cooperate properly with each other, although of course we also encounter different views on mobility and climate, for example. Politics wants to say for us: to enter into dialogue with as many people and opinions as possible. In that sense, we do not veto NVA.

Comment: Interesting defence of the library move. Again, not reassuring on NVA. Generally nice on transport, but not so great on the specifics for us train travellers – the problem with bicycle parking at the two railway stations is not capacity but theft, and it's difficult to see how a park and ride scheme could become relevant given our geography; each of our villages is effectively already a large park and ride zone.

Open VLD:

Transport:

Public transport in Oud-Heverlee must improve. Here is a selection of the measures that Open-VLD wants to put forward:
– Extend Line 5 from Vaalbeek to Zoet Water so that the inhabitants of Oud-Heverlee and Sint-Joris-Weert can reach the town hall by bus.
– Extension of timetable line 5 so that Haasrode, Blanden and Vaalbeek are also served until 22:00 in the evening.
– More familiarity with the timetables and more and better bicycle parking at all stops.

There are quite a few problems with public transport in Oud-Heverlee. There is a lack of good train and bus connections at weekends, to reach Zoet Water and the villages. The state of facilities at and around the stations can be much better. There are no bus connections from the station in Oud-Heverlee to the residential areas Vaalbeek, Blanden and Haasrode, and Zoet Water. There is no bus transport between the east and west sides of the municipality. There is no bus connection between the Zoet Water and Vaalbeek. This means that the residents of Oud-Heverlee and Sint-Joris-Weert do not have a direct regular bus line available to reach the town hall in Vaalbeek. After 19.00 there are no more buses from Leuven to Haasrode Blanden and Vaalbeek.

Better bus connections in the evening and at weekends are an absolute must. There must be dialogue with De Lijn to improve public transport in Oud-Heverlee, especially at night and during the weekend. It must also be investigated to set up a full bus connection on the East-West axis (line 5 continues from Vaalbeek to Zoet Water).

Library:

Combining the different small libraries of Sint-Joris-Weert with that of Oud-Heverlee was not a bad idea. Financial means are limited and their use should be optimised. The issue at stake is, however, that the libraries should be easily accessible also with public transport. Luckily there is the bus 337 that relies Sint-Joris-Weert with Leuven and there is a bus stop at the Zoet Water not far from where the library is located. However, the library can not be reached by public transport from Vaalbeek/Blanden/Haasrode bringing us back to our point of public transport.

Coalition: Not asked.

Comment: Interesting defence of the library decision – and this from a party that was not even represented in the council when the decision was taken. Much the same points on public transport but I like the specific mention of trains at the weekends. Replied on 27 August to a message sent on 26 August, which indiciates a welcome enthusiasm. (Groen replied on 29 August, CD&V on 24 September.)

So, in conclusion I think Open VLD have my vote this time around.

We also have provincial elections tomorrow, for those of us outside Brussels. I have searched in vain for an explanation of what the Belgian provinces actually do. (NB this is the Flemish Brabant level – the regions such as Flanders have very real powers.) I am tempted to spoil my ballot (cast a blank vote), as I don't really know what I'm voting for. But I know what I'm voting against, which is NVA and the extremist Vlaams Belang (who have a list of candidates for the province but not for our municipality), so I guess I'll probably vote Open VLD at provincial level as well.

Incidentally, I had not realised that for municipal councils in Belgium, the Imperiali method rather than the D'Hondt method is used to allocate seats – in other words, parties' votes are divided not 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…, but 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3… – this is very deliberately to discriminate against small parties, and explains why in our last elections, Groen got only 3 seats out of 21, and NVA got 6 seats, though Groen had more than two-thirds as many votes as NVA (so most systems would have given them 4 and 5 seats respectively). Marquis Pierre Imperiali des Princes de Francavilla, the Belgian senator who gave his name to the Imperiali method, would have been pleased.

Edited to add: I’m grateful to Tim over on Facebook, who explains:

The provinces in Flanders have lost significant parts of their competences earlier this year. Person-related matters (welfare, sport, culture, youth) went to the regional and/or local level. So they are now left with stuff like maintaining provincial roads and provincial parks (e.g. Provinciedomein Kessel-Lo or Bokrijk in Limburg), emergency contingency planning, and tourism. They also play a role when it comes to agriculture and energy policy.

N-VA and Open VLD wanted to abolish the provinces (in Flanders, as provinces fall under the regional government), claiming it is a superfluous subdivision. CD&V blocked the abolition, claiming that there is a real need to have a proper link between the region and the local level, and to assist smaller towns with e.g. waste collection, supporting the local economy, renewable energy etc.). So the compromise was to downsize the province (e.g. number of provincial representatives is being cut by half, the number of executive offices per province goes down from 6 to 4)

I must say that inclines me to feel that they should be abolished (Kessel-Lo and Bokrijk could as easily be run by Flanders or the municipalities), and since there’s no way I’m voting NVA, I may as well stick with Open VLD for my provincial vote.

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