• The Pensions myth
  "there’s a solid argument for spending money while you have it, because deferring gratification now for gratification later on is intrinsically something of a gamble."
  (tags: economics)
• The WBN 2012 Top 100
  Yet another book list.
  (tags: books)
• BBC News – Pushing the boundaries
  (tags: northernireland)
• Science fiction and religion
  Looking mainly at Doctor Who and Star Trek.
  (tags: religion sf doctorwho)
• 531 – A Rio Runs Through It: Naming the American Stream
  Brooks, runs, branches, rios, etc – fascinating.
  (tags: maps languages)

A friend of mine recently asked me for recommendations of books on the Balkans – not textbooks on history or politics, but more interesting stuff, novels for preference. This was my reply.

Dear X,

When we were on the phone earlier, I strongly recommended the classic Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West – not really fiction, and madly pro-Serb, but the Macedonian and Bosnian bits are very good – and Bosnian Chronicle/The Days of the Consuls by Ivo Andrić. A few other thoughts:

Contra my hasty statement on the phone that there is no worthwhile fiction about the conflicts of the 1990s, Joe Sacco has written two excellent graphic novels about the Bosnian war: Safe Area Goražde and The Fixer. Also Bosnian, not quite fiction but rather unusual, is Zlata’s Diary by Zlata Filipović  – she was 11 when the war started and is of course now almost 30 and living in Ireland.

Kosovo politician and intellectual figure Veton Surroi wrote a novel looking forward to the independence negotiations called Azem Berisha's One and Only Flight to the Castle – you won’t find it in shops but I can lend you my copy (which I will want back, as it is autographed). It’s very short.

I’m a big fan of the world-famous Albanian writer Ismail Kadarë, and have read his Three Elegies for Kosovo, The General of the Dead Army, The Successor, Chronicle in Stone, and particularly recommend The File on H.

I’m also a big fan of the Serbian magical realist writer Zoran Živković, whose books are more difficult to get hold of than Kadarë’s (though Forbidden Planet on Shaftesbury Avenue always seems to have them in stock); see especially Impossible Stories and Hidden Camera. Unlike Kadarë, there is not much overtly about his country in his work (though I think it’s always there implicitly).

Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy takes place in Romania and Greece so I suspect is no good for you.

Lawrence Durrell wrote several not terribly good books about Serbia (his muse was better inspired farther south); I have read his comic short story collection Esprit de Corps, which is set in the British embassy in Belgrade in the 1950s, and a James Bond ripoff called White Eagles over Serbia.

On similar lines a rather dim CIA agent wrote an account of spying in Macedonia during the 2001 conflict, Lindsay Moran’s Blowing My Cover. Harvey Pekar wrote a graphic novel about the same conflict simply called Macedonia but to be honest the main interest for me was spotting the characters based on friends of mine.

I still can't think of any mainstream fiction based on the more recent Balkan conflicts (even Veton Surroi's book has magical realist elements), at least none that is worth reading; any suggestions?

Edited to add: rightly suggests Fitzroy Maclean’s Eastern Approaches in comments; kicking myself for forgetting it. Over on Facebook, a Croatian correspondent has the following suggestions:

Sarajevo Marlboro, a short story collection by Miljenko Jergović. Amazon has it. Just like his novels Ruta Tannenbaum and Buick rivera. Haven’t read any of them, but he won awards for the books. A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, a short story collection by Danilo Kiš. “A portrait of a country and a people in turmoil, a portrait of how Communism both creates and devours its sons.” Read it a long time ago, don’t remember anything except that it was great. Also on Amazon. BTW, there’s also a SSC by Andrić on Amazon, Damned Yard and Other Stories. That might be more accessible than The Bridge. The stories are really good. That’s for mainstream. Fantastic… Possibly Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife. Then, there’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić on Amazon. They also have her The Ministry of Pain, a novel about exiles from Yugoslavia in Amsterdam, which obviously is not fantastic.

I take “not fantastic” in that last sentence to mean “not sfnal” rather than “bad”. I also endorse Andrić’s The Damned Yard and Other Stories ahead of Bridge on the Drina. And I seem to remember reading a recommendation from Stephen Schwartz for A Tomb for Boris Davidovich.

Here is my projection of the three most recent election results in Northern Ireland – the 2010 Westminster election, the 2011 Assembly election and the 2011 local council elections – onto the sixteen proposed new constituency boundaries. For each constituency I note the old constituencies from which its voters have been drawn, the changes proposed, the projected results and the likely consequences for Westminster and Assembly representation.

(See also my BBC commentary here.)

North Belfast (89% from old N Belfast, 11% from old W Belfast):
Takes in three Shankill wards.

DUP position consolidated at Westminster. For Assembly, SF and DUP have two safe seats; last two are between SDLP, 3rd DUP, UUP, Alliance.

South West Belfast (71% from old W Belfast, 29% from old S Belfast)
Loses Shankill, takes in whole of Balmoral electoral area and central Shaftesbury ward.

SF dominance of the old West Belfast preserved at Westminster; SDLP strong second but very much second. For Assembly, 4 SF, 1 SDLP, last seat probably DUP though could be SDLP.

South East Belfast (65% from old E Belfast, 35% from old S Belfast)
Loses Dundonald, takes in rest of South Belfast apart from Carryduff.

Very tight between Alliance and DUP for Westminster; Alliance just ahead on 2010 figures, and though behind on 2011 votes have tactical potential. For Assembly, 2 DUP seats, 2 Alliance, probably 1 UUP and 1 SDLP.

South Antrim (82% from old S Antrim, 18% from old E Antrim)
Loses Glenavy, takes in all of Newtownabbey not in North Belfast and three Greenisland wards from Carrickfergus.

DUP Westminster position slightly consolidated. For Assembly, 2 DUP seats, one each for UUP, SF and Alliance; last seat probably 3rd DUP though could be UUP in a better year.

Lagan Valley (91% from old Lagan Valley, 5% from S Antrim, 4% from Upper Bann)
Gains Glenavy from S Antrim and Aghagallon from Upper Bann.

DUP remain dominant at Westminster. They have three Assembly seats and UUP one; last two could go to a Nat candidate slightly more likely SF), Alliance, fourth DUP, second UUP in that order.

Strangford (65% from old Strangford, 18% from old S Belfast, 17% from old E Belfast)
Regains Dundonald from E Belfast and Carryduff from S Belfast; loses Ards Peninsula to N Down.

DUP remain dominant at Westminster. 3 DUP seats in Assembly, 1 UUP, 1 Alliance, last could be SDLP, fifth Unionist.

Mid Antrim (59% from old E Antrim, 41% from old N Antrim)
Unites most of Larne, most of Carrickfergus, and 17 Ballymena wards from North Antrim. Poor Ballymena separated from its northern hinterland.

DUP hold all Antrim seats at Westminster and will continue to hold this one. For Assembly, three DUP, 1 UUP, probably 1 Alliance, and probably 1 Nationalist more likely SF) though 4th DUP has a chance.

North Antrim (59% from old N Antrim, 36% from old E Londonderry, 6% from old E Antrim)
Loses Ballymena, gets back three Moyle wards and gains Carnlough, gets three of four Coleraine DEAs leaving Coleraine separated from its western hinterland.

Merges good DUP territory in N Antrim with better end of E Londonderry, so DUP keep Westminster seat. 3 DUP at Assembly, 1 UUP, 1 SF, likely last is TUV but poss SDLP in a better year.

Glenshane (52% from old E Londonderry, 48% from old Mid Ulster)
Limavady, Magherafelt, two Derry wards, three Cookstown wards and Bann DEA from Coleraine.

SF well ahead for Westminster; single Unionist candidate, though just ahead on paper, would likely provoke tactical vote by other Nats. For Assembly, 2 SF, one each for DUP, SDLP, probably UUP and last seat awfully tight; probably third SF, could be second DUP.

Foyle (93% from old Foyle seat, 3% from old W Tyrone)
Takes three Strabane wards 100%as it had before 1996)

Durkan is OK for Westminster. But new territory from Strabane is enough to put SF neck and neck at other elections. For Assembly, 2 SDLP, 2 SF, 1 DUP; last seat most likely goes to more transfer-friendly SDLP but Eamonn McCann still in with a chance.

Mid Tyrone (61% from old W Tyrone, 39% from old Mid Ulster)
Comprises most but not all of Cookstown, Strabane and Omagh, with Torrent DEA of Dungannon.

SF dominant at Westminster 100%this seat from parts of two they hold). For Assembly, probably 3 SF, 1 DUP, 1 UUP, 1 SDLP, though SDLP a bit shaky and dissidents did well in local election; and UUP at risk.

Fermanagh and South Tyrone (88% from old FST, 12% from old W Tyrone)
Gets six Omagh wards added to current boundaries.

SF reinforced here at Westminster level. For the Assembly they probably get three seats, and UUP and DUP one each; last seat should go to the stronger or smarter Unionist party but SDLP have a chance.

Newry and Armagh (all from old Newry and Armagh)
Loses Tandragee to Upper Bann.

SF consolidated at Westminster. No change at Assembly, 3 SF, 1 SDLP, 1 UUP, 1 DUP.

Upper Bann (97% from old Upper Bann, 3% from old Newry and Armagh)
Gains Tandragee from N+A, loses Aghagallon to Lagan Valley and Loughbrickland to S Down. Banbridge now rather isolated at southern end of constituency.

DUP remain in front for Westminster, though UUP not that far behind. Assembly remains 2 DUP, 2 UUP, 1 SDLP, 1 SF.

South Down (97% from old S Down, 3% from old Upper Bann)
Gains Loughbrickland from Upper Bann.

SDLP lead reinforced. But Assembly seats unchanged at 2 SDLP, 2 SF, 1 UUP, 1 DUP.

North Down (83% from old N Down, 17% from old Strangford)
Gains Ards Peninsula from Strangford

Lady Hermon remains dominant at Westminster; without her, DUP are much the biggest party. No change at Assembly level – 3 DUP, 1 UUP, 1 Alliance, 1 Green.

So, I give the DUP 7 Westminster seats (down 1), SF 5, the SDLP 2 (down 1), Lady Hermon 1 and Alliance 1 (just). At Assembly level, while there is much more margin of error to my calculations, I put the DUP on about 33 seats (down 5), SF on 27 (down 2), the UUP on 14 (down 2), SDLP 13 (down 1), Alliance 7 (down 1) and Greens and TUV keeping their single seats; I think David McClarty is in trouble. (Edited to add: I may be wrong about the TUV seat in North Antrim being salvageable – certainly Jim Allister seems despondent.)

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth to come, I think.

• SpongeBob 'may impair concentration'
  What a load of nonsense!
  (tags: children)
• BBC News – New Borders, new names?
  Notes from my radio appearance on Sunday.
  (tags: northernireland)
• Five Paradoxes of Peace Operation, by Richard Gowan (PDF)
  1)  Military peacekeeping has grown in scale … yet lost operational impact. 2)  Peacekeeping is cheap …  but it is also still too expensive. 3) All peace operations are political … but not all are guided by credible political strategies and few peacekeepers are good at politics. 4)  Peacekeepers promote democracy and justice … but democracy and justice don’t always promote peace. 5) Emerging non-Western powers play a major role in peacekeeping … but may not want it.
  (tags: war peace)
• Interpeace – The first of its kind – a constitution-making handbook for peace
  A modern constitution needs to be legitimate in the eyes of the people, but achieving this is a challenge. Often national and international constitution-makers feel out in the cold as there has been no comprehensive resource on the options for constitution-making and reform. The design, implementation and management of these processes, in an inclusive way, create the foundations for lasting peace. The stakes are high. If the process goes wrong the seeds of future conflict and violence will be sown.
  (tags: war peace)

SpongeBob ‘may impair concentration’ – What a load of nonsense!

New Borders, new names? – Notes from my radio appearance on Sunday (and there is more to come on this).

⁠
Five Paradoxes of Peace Operation, by Richard Gowan (PDF): 1)  Military peacekeeping has grown in scale – yet lost operational impact. 2)  Peacekeeping is cheap – but it is also still too expensive. 3) All peace operations are political – but not all are guided by credible political strategies and few peacekeepers are good at politics. 4)  Peacekeepers promote democracy and justice – but democracy and justice don’t always promote peace. 5) Emerging non-Western powers play a major role in peacekeeping – but may not want it.

The first of its kind – a constitution-making handbook for peace: “A modern constitution needs to be legitimate in the eyes of the people, but achieving this is a challenge. Often national and international constitution-makers feel out in the cold as there has been no comprehensive resource on the options for constitution-making and reform. The design, implementation and management of these processes, in an inclusive way, create the foundations for lasting peace. The stakes are high. If the process goes wrong the seeds of future conflict and violence will be sown.”

Here, now.

Today the Flemish government is having an Open Monument Day, with hundreds of normally inaccessible historical sites on display to the public. Our commune’s contribution to this event is two squat structures in Sint-Joris-Weert, which I have driven past on numerous occasions without giving them a second glance, now revealed as bunkers built by the Belgian army in the late 1930s and actually used by the British in May 1940 shortly before the retreat to Dunkirk.

This was part of the KW-line, integrated into the so-called Dyle plan, using the river Dijle as a defensive barrier. You can see the river on the left in the first photo below, and it’s pretty obvious that it’s not much good as a defensive barrier.

Local volunteers dressed as British soldiers had staffed up one of the bunkers to give some idea of what it would have been like, watching for the Germans coming from the east.

A Bren gun inside the bunker with bullets artistically scattered below it:

And the volunteers tried to explain how it would have worked. (Would have been very bad for the hearing of anyone firing it in such an enclosed space.)

Outside another volunteers waits for the German planes by his Vickers machine gun:

In real life I imagine the equipment would have been rather more chaotically arranged.

The other bunker, across the road, was unlit inside; apparently it is now a nesting place for bats.

And there was a small exhibition around the corner about the impact of the war in our area. It’s open today as well.

A lot of people will be thinking about a different conflict today. But it was sobering to reflect that the elderly ladies and gentlemen unsteadily sipping glasses of wine as they looked at the exhibition of faded wartime photographs had lived through a time when our peaceful village was the front line in the war between Hitler and the Allies.

The daily linkspam function from Delicious still isn't working, so here's a few things that caught my eye:

Things that distract me from Writing – Good overview of latest Orson Scott Card controversy

A history of conflicts – Brilliant on-line atlas of the history of war.

A new Libya must also be for women

The Fall & Fall of Scottish Conservatism  – The future for the political Right in Scotland. (Bleak.)

The ISS: Threat or Menace? – The International Space Station as bringer of doom.

Set in Northern Ireland during the 1970s; at the same time as the human conflict unfolding on the streets of Belfast and Derry, there is a supernatural conflict being waged between the Church and the Otherworld. It would be very easy to do this badly, but Leicht has avoided almost all the obvious pitfalls; the two plots reinforce each other rather than seeking clunky parallels. Her viewpoint character, Liam Kelly, is swept by circumstance into the IRA and co-opted by his supernatural paternity into the less visible war, and both he and the grim circumstances of 1970s Ulster are memorably portrayed.

The author kindly sent me a manuscript to review for the Northern Irish equivalent of Brit-picking, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to respond in time for her deadline. Considering that she apparently has never been to Ireland, there are surprisingly few points that I would have flagged up – I am a bit sceptical about the use of “BA” rather than “Brit”, but there is good authority for this from Tim Pat Coogan; I wouldn’t have called a fictional detention centre near Belfast “Malone”; and there were a couple of points of ecclesiastical detail (use of first names for priests, church attitude to abortion) that rang slightly false. Just goes to show that if you bother to do the research rather than resort to cliche, you will reap the rewards.

Flicking through other reviews, I see a couple of Americans making the point that by getting inside the head of a Christian English-speaker who is involved with the IRA, Leicht has got them to reflect a bit more deeply and critically on the current “war on terror”. More power to her if so.

And I really must update my list soon.

I fear I am probably not in the right demographic to appreciate this novel of a privileged New York teenager who discovers that she is even more privileged than she had realised, and, in a revelatory moment at the end, also discovers that the popular boy in the class is a jerk. It’s not really in the same league of self-realisation as Catcher in the Rye (which I didn’t like anyway) and the humour failed to grab me.

I’m way way behind with these, so can’t really put time into doing them justice. As usual I’m posting in order of internal Who chronology rather than either release order or listening order, which means the one I listened to most recently actually comes first.

In John Dorney’s Companion Chronicle, The Rocket Men, William Russell tells the story of how Ian Chesterton saves Barbara from certain death when space pirates with jet packs attack the holiday resort where they are staying with the Doctor and Vicki. I was a bit underwhelmed by it, to be honest; for some reason the plot was chopped between two different time lines, and would I think have worked just as well as a linear narrative; also Russell carries more than 90% of the story, which he is great at, but makes bringing in another actor to speak the villain’s few lines seem rather a waste.

A triumphant return for Victorian heroes Jago and Litefoot, as played by Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter, with added energy from Louise Jameson as Leela, sent to 19th century London from Gallifrey to heal mysterious time rifts. The four stories are rather different in format, with Justin Richards’ Dead Men’s Tales a fairly standard horror adventure (with nice character moments for our heroes), Matthew Sweet’s The Man at the End of the Garden typically dense with literary references (particularly to E. Nesbit) and intricately constructed (with an excellent guest performance by child actor Eden Monteath who was also in The Eleventh Hour with her sister), and John Dorney’s Swan Song also nesting narratives between our present day and Jago and Litefoot’s era. Sad to say I was a little disappointed with Andy Lane’s finale, Chronoclasm, which seemed to me to be camping it up without really delivering a coherent plot – Nikola Tesla? Turkish baths? what??? Lane is usually much better than this. But the casts’s heart is fully in it, with shouts especially to Lisa Bowerman as Elly, Philip Bretherton (who played Judi Dench’s son-in-law in As Time Goes By) as Professor Payne and Joanna Monro in a couple of different roles.

I assumed at first that from Leela’s point of view this story is set not very long after her first recruitment by Romana as a security expert; but the brief appearance of an actor from Classic Who in what may or may not be a new role at the end of Chronoclasm may indicate that in fact these stories follow the end of the most recent Gallifrey mini-series. Looking forward to finding out anyway.

I very much enjoyed Tony Lee’s Rat Trap. Lee has written some excellent Who comic strips, but I think this may have been his first audio script, and I hope it will not be his last. It’s a claustrophobic tale of Five, Nyssa, Tegan and Turlough exploring tunnels under an English fortress, and encountering two rival groups of humans and for added excitement some superevolved intelligent telepathic rats. The plot is decent enough but what really makes the audio is the sound design, which superbly conveys the inhumanity of the rats (brilliantly brought to life by former Davros Terry Molloy) without making them incomprehensible. A great example of what audios can do.

Big Finish’s 150th regular release was a set of four short stories by different writers, all of whom I think are new to Who audios, and all with a common theme of loss of identity for the Sixth Doctor, Peri or both. In Recorded Time by Catherine Harvey, Peri falls into the clutches of Henry VIII who is incidentally trying to rewrite history; Paradoxicide by Richard Dinnick is a more standard space opera tale but with some interesting twists; in A Most Excellent Match by Matt Fitton our heroes find themselves both battling a telepathic parasite and trapped in classic nineteenth-century literature; and in Philip Lawrence’s Question Marks, what appears at first to be a case of mass amnesia on an endangered spaceship turns out to be much worse. The four stories are all individually good but become very strong as a group; the whole is even better than the parts. The rotating cast includes Philip Bretherton (again) and Raquel Cassidy who I have been enjoying as the Labour minister in Party Animals.

The Big Finish seasons of ‘Lost Stories’ have often struggled a bit, and unfortunately Animal by Andrew Cartmel and Earth Aid by Cartmel and Ben Aaronovitch, the latest two Seventh Doctor tales with Ace and new companion Raine Creevy, are not exceptional in this regard. Animal does bring back Angela Bruce as Brigadier Winifred Bambera from the TV story Battlefield, but suffers from having a very similar story line to Rat Trap without being as good. Also the risk of having aliens who are simultaneously boring and menacing is that the boredom will win out. Earth Aid had some serious internal improbabilities (one character turns out to have been shut in a box for a long period of time; how they got there and how they survived was not explained to my satisfaction) and my unsuspended disbelief overwhelmed my interest in the story; poor Paterson Joseph seemed wasted in his role. It is surprising that Cartmel, who must take a lot of the credit for the marked upswing in quality of the last couple of seasons of Old Who, has not really been able to transfer that magic to the audios, and unfortunate that Beth Chalmers, who I think has potential as companion Raine Creevy, hasn’t hjad better material.

Last in chronological sequence, but definitely not least, Nicholas Briggs’ Robophobia is an excellent sequel to Robots of Death, whose events are only dimly known to the crew of the robot freighter where the Seventh Doctor lands. It’s an sfnal murder mystery, with a good script and excellent delivery, the cast including Nicola Walker from Spooks, Big Finish regular (and TV Dalek operator) Nicholas Pegg, and Toby Hadoke of Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf