Steph and William’s wedding:

Preparing to make their vows

Just married

Caroline playing music (sorry for darkness)

Caroline, Ken, Ian, Deirdre

More Dublin folks (or at least the backs of their heads)

Steph’s friend making a speech

A lovely ceremony; we wish them many happy years together. Just sorry I didn’t take a few more pictures but no doubt there will be more. Meanwhile William’s own photo of the wedding party leaving the scene is here.

First full day in Boston, so of course we had to go to the Boston Children’s Museum. Full of many exciting opportunities for intellectural exploration, but the only thing F was really interested in was the new big exhibition on Clifford the Big Red Dog, which wasn’t even supposed to open until the following day. Some readers may not be aware of Clifford the Big Red Dog; he is a cartoon character whose name is Clifford and he is a red dog. Also quite big.

U had a chance for some heavily supervised water play as well:

And even Anne had fun with bubble mixture (though I have to say the results here reminded me of a giant condom):

The tasks for the day seemed simple: return the hire car from yesterday’s journey, and then go whale-watching with Boston Harbor Cruises. The first bit was achieved with no difficulty, but the bloody useless Boston Harbor Cruises had booked us on the 10 am sailing rather than the noon one, and then cancelled the noon trip, and of course I found out at 10.30 am. So sharp words were exchanged. Then a desperate scramble to deliver, as promised, F’s whale-watching trip, which in the end meant booking a cruise out of Gloucester, 40 miles away, and renting another car to get there. Full marks by the way to 7 Seas Whale Watch who were excellent.

It all ended up much more expensive than I had thought, but there are some things you can’t put a price on.

Seeing real whales, really up close, is just fantastic. Difficult to capture on camera but I think these are the two best shots, of a long sleek body and then of the flukes (both humpbacks – though we did see fin whales as well)

Even U appeared sufficiently impressed to shed her usual apprehension of the camera:

So all ended well.

A rather quiet morning as we got sorted for the journey to Boston. We got out to the Riverside Park and met up with my old friend David Feige for a pre-lunch drink.

Then rapid sorting out of rental car – the last time I drove an automatic was in Bosnia in 1997; I had to call the company to ask how to get the key out of the ignition once I’d stopped. they asked, rather sweetly, “Have you put the car in Park, sir?” I hadn’t. All was well.

So we set off, from the Island At The Centre Of The World to Cambridge, Massachusetts. It took, to be honest, a bit longer than the train would, even though I did not try the pointless detour to Providence, Rhode Island. The traffic in southern Connecticut was awful, and poor U, having been happily gnawing an apple for the first half of the journey, then brought most of it back during the second half, which meant more stopping.

Then arrived in Cambridge at R and T’s, getting slightly lost in the final stages but T talked me through the final stages in the manner of the grizzled veteran talking to the tyro pilot in an air disaster movie. And we slept very well.

Just pictures so far – will fill out with text later

Anne and FDR

F and small friend Ben

Family and dinosaurs

F at playground

Family meal at Serendipity

4) Iron Council, by China Miéville

Will write this up properly when I do my planned review of all the Hugo nominees for the website. (NB that the short fiction nominees are now all available on-line). Now on The Algebraist, with Iron Sunrise waiting for when I’ve finished that.

We're staying on West 83rd St, so nice and handy for Central Park, basically the first place we went to explore. There are of course many things to do there, but we concentrated on the Diana Ross playground (presumably named for the singer):

F at playground

Then a bit of a walk, and the Natural History museum, first of all for food in the cafe (which Anne was very impressed by) and then of course to look at the dinosaurs:

Family and dinosaurs	Dinosaur on its own

I hadn't realised that the entire museum was a memorial to Theodore Roosevelt.

A wander on my own in the afternoon gave me no joy as I attempted to cash a cheque drawn on Citibank of South Dakota – Citibank New York didn't wan to know, and even Western Union turned up their noses at it, obviously suspicious of the issuer's credit rating, understandably enough. But I bought the four-volumes-in-two edition of Wolfe's Book of the New Sun at the nearby Barnes and Noble. Also decided to travel to Boston on Wednesday by car rather than train.

In the evening we went out with S and E to a restaurant called Serendipity, and met there my cousin A. The kids are not in fact particularly used to restaurants but the restaurant was used to children and happily provided F with the requested plain pancakes and plain ice cream.

They also provided us with a fright wig which had to be tried on in turn by most of us present:

The fright wig
Me	Anne (with nestling U)	F	S

And so to bed.

Isn’t it a bit snobbish to describe certain species as having “advanced” features while others are more primitive?

I did a presentation yesterday on the Balkans – my only work-related engagement this trip. F was most amused that I went to a place called “Foggy Bottom” to do it (and in fairness, Foggy Bottom is a very funny place name).

The reason I agreed to do it was that the people in Foggy Bottom offered me a decent honorarium which would go some way to defraying the costs of this trip. They duly presented me with a pleasantly-sized cheque drawn on Citibank of South Dakota. (Why the good people of Foggy Bottom, which is quite a long way from South Dakota, do their banking there, I don’t know.) So I left the building and more or less jumped straight on the train to New York having picked up the rest of the family en route.

So this morning I went to the nearest Citibank, on Broadway, to cash the cheque. But they told me that you can’t cash a cheque drawn on Citibank of South Dakota anywhere except South Dakota, if you don’t have an account (and of course I don’t have an American bank account of any kind). So effectively the people of Foggy Bottom have given me a useless piece of paper, with a fictitious sum of money written on it. I’ll see if my bank at home in Belgium will accept it, but I suspect I already know the answer…

It seems there is no H.P. Lovecraft museum in Providence, Rhode Island.

I’d been vaguely wondering about driving the next leg of our journey from New York to Boston, since the express trains aren’t running, and four and a half hours on a train with two small children just seems qualitatively different from the three and a half hours from DC to NY. But if there’s nothing to stop off for en route, then why bother?

“Look at those buildings, F – aren’t they tall!”

Deadpan response: “That’s because this is New York.”

Anne's birthday; we all woke up very early, and did the long long walk from the hotel past the White House, along the reflecting pond and past the WW2 and Vietnam Memorials, and then the Lincoln Memorial and finally down to the FDR Memorial.

We both found that really moving – F was less impressed, being very tired from the long walk. Totally different in concept to the other big Washington monuments, flowing water and a dynamic sense of history, and the kind of statement that one doesn't expect to hear from today's generation of politicians – apart from the famous lines like "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" and "Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Freedom from want. Freedom from fear", I was struck by

No Country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order.

and

Men and nature must work hand in hand. The throwing out of balance of the resources of nature throws out of balance also the lives of men.

and

We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.

and

I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded.I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

All stirring stuff; though of course I'm aware that he didn't always live up to these noble sentiments I'm glad to see them highlighted.

The afternoon passed at the hotel in a jet-lagged haze, but in the evening we went out to Friendship Heights for dinner with my former colleague B, her husband J and their son Ben; joined also by another former colleague G and her partner P. B is from Turkey; J, G and P are all Americans and all lawyers. (This country has 8% of the world's population and 50% of the world's lawyers.) But we had fun.

F and Ben

Brought F downstairs so as to let the others sleep, and been doing a little surfing via the terminal in the lobby.

Very good flight (once again, thank you, United Airlines); awful queue at immigration; long taxi ride; staying at Holiday Inn on Rhode Island Ave; had a little walk yesterday evening as far as Jury’s in Dupont Circle for family-friendly dinner. Sightseeing today will start soon. But I’ll see if we can get anothe couple of hours sleep first.

Frantically trying to ensure things are more or less in order as we set off on our grand US tour. Anne, F, U and I will be in the US from tomorrow until the 23rd; two days in Washington DC, two days in New York, and then in Boston for ‘s wedding. I doubt very much if I’ll be updating here, except for the occasional brief post by text message; I’m pretty sure I won’t be reading much livejournal while we’re away. So if anything interesting happens, save it for my “Did anything happen last week?” post in ten days time!

Answer: This 6-time Hugo-winning sci-fi writer’s last name was near the end of the phone book.

Question: Who was Roger Zelazny?

Looking through the local council election results, the general pattern seems fairly clear – massive stampede of voters to DUP from UUP, SF consolidate their position ahead of SDLP, but made no gains at all in their strongest areas, which suggests they may not be able to go much further. Particular local peculiarities that jumped out at me were:

Lisburn – UUP down from 13 seats to 7; DUP up from 5 to 13. Obviously this is a reflection of Jeffrey Donaldson’s defection at Westminster level. The DUP’s most dramatic gain; they now have more seats than the UUP on 18 of 26 councils, and fewer on only 5.

Moyle – always a weird case, the only council where the DUP lost a seat, in this case the one previously held in Ballycastle by Gardiner Kane but lost in a by-election after his assault case. On paper SF went up from 1 seat to 4, but two of the three gains were previously local independents, one of whom is a long-serving councillor.

Cookstown – two weirdnesses here – first of all, in Ballinderry only six candidates were nominated for six seats, so there was no election; second, the five seats of Cookstown Central went DUP 1, UUP 1, SF 1, SDLP 2 despite the SDLP having fewest first preference votes – a combination of poor balancing by SF and (probably more important) only two Unionist candidates but almost three quotas of Unionist votes. That led to the SDLP’s only gain from Sinn Fein (they did gain one other seat, from retiring independent Davy Kettyles in Fermanagh, but lost out overall.)

Some interesting indications around the fringes. The first is that the smaller parties, apart from Alliance, were in general crushed. 20 self-declared independents elected this time, compared to 34 in 2001; the PUP lost half of their four councillors, the last elected representatives of the UKUP and Women’s Coalition lost their seats, the Conservatives failed to regain any, and the three small lefty groups made little impact. Two micro-parties which are basically brading mechanisms for successful local councillors held their ground.

On the other hand the Greens won three seats (one sitting independent councillor who joined them, one former independent councillor, and another who inherited the seat of an independent councillor who had joined them a couple of years ago), and will presumably now be challenging for Assembly seats in North and South Down, even though both the co-chairs failed to get elected. There are some interesting lessons here for the centre ground which I’ll be thinking about over the next few weeks.

Shifts across the divide – not a lot of these. Ballycastle (SF gain from DUP) has been mentioned above. In two Ballymoney DEA’s, the Nationalist vote went from just under to just over the next quota, and SF duly picked up from the UUP in both cases. They also picked up from the UUP in Downpatrick, but there the UUP didn’t even have the votes last time and won the seat only on poor balancing from the SDLP and SF.

On the other hand the DUP picked up from the SDLP in Craigavon Central, and (by virtue of poor Nationalist vote management) from SF in Mid Tyrone. In Belfast Alliance’s gain from SF in the east of the city was off-set by SF’s gain from the SDLP in Lower Falls (where they won 5 seats out of 5, with 88% of the votes cast). The SDLP lost one of their Newtownabbey seats to Alliance.

The total number of seats held by councillors from the two Nationalist parties increased by only 2, from 225 to 227, compared with the surge over the last electoral cycled from 194 to 225; and several gains not noted above were from independent Nationalist councillors. In addition, the total vote for SF and SDLP in the Westminster elections was actually down slightly, from 42.7% to 41.8%. This suggests that the Nationalist vote as a whole may have reached a plateau. (Similarly in last year’s European election the two-party total was down from 45.4% in 1999 to 41.9%.)

The outlook generally of course is pretty poor. Both the DUP and SF can claim to have had their policies endorsed by the electorate, both with justification. From my own informal contacts with both sides, I don’t see any real readiness to compromise; oddly enough, each expects the British government to force the other to make the key concessions. In addition, the SDLP and to a lesser extent the UUP are not eager to facilitate any new deal for which others will get the credit. The fact that the new Northern Ireland Secretary of State will also apparently be doing Wales two or three days a week tells its own story about the level of interest from Blair’s third government.

One of my former party colleagues back home shares a local council constituency with a much-disliked but long-serving councillor from another party, who I will refer to here as Joe McPrick. This was what happened at the count:

My “funny moment” was while we were checking the spoiled ballots.

We were all crowded round the table as the officials went through them one at a time to agree they were spoiled.

I was beside one of the young DUP counting agents who, amazingly, had quite a sense of humour.

As they turned over the ballots one surfaced which said “End Sectarian Politics NOW!!!” and he said to me, “Now, surely that’s one for you!”

The next paper had a large and detailed phallic drawing on it and, without missing a beat, he said, “And there’s one for Joe McPrick.”

It was hilarious – everyone heard it but nobody could bring themselves to look round and see if Joe was in ear shot. Even the staff struggled to keep straight faced and professional.

So, folks, the lesson is that if you spoil your ballot, people will read it. And remember it for about thirty seconds.

Thanks to the practice of holding local and Westminster elections on the same day, and because the local elections use the single transferable vote (because unlike the Westminster elections, local elections in Northern Ireland have to be fair), the final results of last Thursday’s voting back home have only just come through.

DUP on 208278 votes, 29.6%, up 9%; won 182 seats, up 51.
Sinn Fein on 163205 votes, 23.2%, up 3%; won 126 seats, up 18.
UUP on 128381 votes, 18.1%, down 5%; won 115 seats, down 39.
SDLP on 121991 votes, 17.4%, down 2%; won 101 seats, down 16.
Alliance on 35149 votes, 5.0%, down very slightly; won 30 seats, up 2.
Greens 5703, 0.7%, won 3 seats (two of whom were sitting independent councillors who had joined before the election)
PUP 4591, 0.7%, 2 elected (down 2)
Newtownabbey Ratepayers 1897, 0.3%, held their 1 seat
Socialist Environmental Alliance 1321, 0.2%, won nothing.
Conservatives 1164, 0.2%, won nothing. Hooray!
Workers Party 1052, 0.1%, won nothing.
Socialist Party (Northern Ireland) 828, 0.1%, won nothing.
Women’s Coalition, 738, 0.1%, lost their last elected representative so I guess that’s the end of that.
UK Unionist Party 734, 0.1%, lost both seats they were defending. Hooray!
and
Independents 27677 votes, 3.9%, 20 elected

Shift to the extremes confirmed. But some cause for consolation in the middle and lower reaches of the table.

We’re going to be away for the next two weekends (in America for my brother’s wedding). Could someone tape the next two episodes of Doctor Who for me, on Saturday night (14th and 21st) on BBC 1 at 2000/8 pm? We can then arrange to pick up the tape once we’re back.

The Sandzak of Novi Pazar is chiefly remembered as one of the smaller pieces in the game played by the Great Powers before World War I, an obscure place which doomed those who got too closely involved with it.[1]

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[1] See, for instance, “The Lost Sanjak”, a short story by Saki (H.H. Munro) published in 1910, whose protagonist’s failure to remember the location of Novibazar (Novi Pazar) proves fatal; and Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, in which a minor character, Lord Blatherard Osmo, “occupied the Novi Pazar desk at the Foreign Office … for on this obscure sanjak had once hinged the entire fate of Europe”, and similarly comes to a very sticky end.

Novopazarski Sandžak se uglavnom pamti kao jedan od manjih figura u diplomatskim igrama koju su velike sile vodile pre Prvog svetskog rata – izolovano mesto koje je osuđivalo na propast sve one koji bi mu se previše približili.[1]

---

[1] Vidi, na primer, “Izgubljeni Sandžak”, kratku priču autora Sakija (H. H. Munro) objavljenu 1910. godine čiji protagonista ne uspeva da se seti lokacije Novibazara (Novog Pazara) što se ispostavlja kao pogubno po njega; i roman Tomasa Pinčona, Gravity’s Rainbow, u kojem jedan sporedni lik, Lord Bladerard Osmo, koji je “radio u odeljenju za Novi Pazar u Ministarstvu spoljnih poslova… jer je od ovog nepoznatog sandžaka nekada zavisila sudbina čitave Evrope”, na sličan način doživljava veoma neugodan kraj.

I’m sorry to lose “sticky” as part of the footnote – “neugodan” doesn’t quite have the same meaning, and I wrote it as a coy reference to the fact that Lord Osmo is found drowned in a bath of tapioca – but I guess it can’t be helped.

Both the Kyrgyz and the Albanian elections are in early July, so there may be more openings for international election observers via the OSCE than usual. I posted details for how to apply here.

Review now up at my website.

This exotic blog has linked to my (rather negative) review of Asimov’s The Gods Themselves. I had to blink a couple of times before I realised what language it was in.

(Also reminds me it’s about time I wrote the next piece in that series.)

Interesting to look through the list of new MPs – there are four who I knew from my days in student politics, two Conservative and two Lib Dem (this was not an election when my Labour contacts would have been much use). The two Tories were both called Greg and both Cambridge contemporaries of mine, Greg Hands (Hammersmith and Fulham) who I beat in the election for Deputy President of CUSU, and Greg Clark (Tunbridge Wells) who in those days was one of the remaining cheer-leaders for the David Owen’s post-split SDP. The two Lib Dems are David Howarth, who was (and I guess still is) a Fellow at my college, now elected for Cambridge, and Tim Farron, who was the sole success of the “decapitation strategy” defeating shadow education secretary Tim Collins up in Westmorland. (Hey, Quarsan, I know you’ll have been pleased by that.) Tim Farron’s star rose rapidly in the student Lib Dems in my time of involvement, and he was always in his element.

Other new MPs who I know slightly include some of the Northern Ireland ones who I vaguely knew in my time in politics there (specifically Sammy Wilson – DUP, East Antrim – and Alisdair McDonnell – SDLP, South Belfast) and also the two Lib Dems who have switched from the European Parliament, Chris Huhne (Eastleigh) and Nick Clegg (Sheffield Hallam). Indeed, Nick Clegg was also an exact contemporary of mine at Cambridge, and remembers me though I don’t remember him from university.

Naturally, it makes me think what might have happened if I had pursued my own vestigial political career. I’d be now waiting to hear if I had been elected to my third term as a local councillor in Newtownabbey, probably, with a miserable result in North Belfast announced yesterday. A lucky escape.

I’ve found a web comic to replace the hole left in my life when Queen of Wands ended a couple of months ago.

I do like that “describe yourself in twenty words or less” question from . I’ve copied my own answer into my user info.

If you want questions, comment.

From :

1. Where have you lived in your life? Belfast, until I was 17, apart from a year when our family lived in Massachusetts and another year in the Netherlands. County Down for my last year at school. During my year off, Northamptonshire, Armagh and Germany. For five years of BA, students union and M Phil, Cambridge. For another five years of PhD and political activism, Belfast again. Sixteen months in Bosnia; eight months in Croatia. Then the last six years in Belgium (two and a half years in Rhode-St-Genese, since then in Oud-Heverlee).
2. What’s the last cd you bought/listened to? I don’t buy music as often as I’d like. I think the last one I bought was a set of eight cds by the Finnish composer Sibelius, and I’m sure the last cd I listened to was the one out of that set with my favourite piece, The Swan of Tuonela.
3. Describe yourself in 20 words or less? Husband, father of three, Irish, European, UK citizen, liberal, Catholic, political analyst, science fiction fan, psephologist, lapsed medievalist, aspiring polyglot.
4. Worst injury suffered? Surprisingly difficult. I’ve never had to spend a night in hospital, thank God; I’ve had an ingrowing toenail cut out, but that’s not quite an “injury”; I think the pathetically minor incident that counts as worst must be when I walked into a lamp-post one night in summer 1988 at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and they took me to the local hospital to be checked up. But I don’t think that even needed stitches.
5. Favourite type of food? Indian. One of my aunts is married to a Bengali, so as children when visiting we were introduced to the authentic cooking of the sub-continent; also my wife is from Birmingham; also absence makes the heart grow fonder, as it’s very difficult to find a decent curry in Belgium. (God bless , for introducing me to the delights of the lunchtime buffet at the Grapevine on Place Luxembourg. But it’s too far from my office to casually drop in, and not sufficiently up-market for a business lunch, which means I can only go there if meeting actual friends for whom the location is convenient.)

Here. (Hat tip to , who claims he isn’t even a Doctor Who fan.)