Meandering in Malta

Yes, another travel post... well gosh, I have been busy, haven't I ?

Yes, yes I have. And I'm very glad to have an entire month of staying put before I need to go anywhere else again. I actually quite like being in different places, I just hate going between them. Especially on this particular trip, where out of the total of 10 days away, three of those had 10-12 hours of travelling apiece. That's a bit much for my liking.

Anyway, at the end of the last post I was just about to embark to Malta. This was an uneventful but boring trip : 6am start for the taxi to the bus stop, two hours on a bus (quiet a scenic route in daylight, lots of barren rocky mountains), two hours in the airport, couple of hours or so flight to Rome, 2.5 hours layover, 1.5 hours or so to Malta, half hour taxi to the apartment. It was indeed a full 12 hours of just moving from place to place interspersed with long bouts of absolute nothingness.

Worth it ? Yeah, I'd say so. First because the conference (and it was a proper conference this time) was useful, but also because Malta is a fascinating place with history in every step. I'd definitely come back.

 

Melting in Malta

Why Malta ? The "Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems" conference was recommended to me at last year's All Hands (the same meeting as in Granada this year). Everyone there really seemed to like my code – though predictably I had exactly no feedback on it in the intervening year – and someone suggested ADASS would be a good venue to promote it to a wider audience.

This year's event, the 34th in the series, was hosted by the University of Malta. I'd booked my trip for the day after the All Hands, figuring it would be better to have a spare day somewhere I'd never been before. A wise decision. I should also mention (and I swear nobody's sponsoring me for this) that this included a free taxi from booking.com (with whom I found accommodation) to the apartment. That's undoubtedly the most useful free perk a travel site has ever offered me. Especially since the taxi driver was good enough to give me details for booking the return trip.

Both Granada and Malta were about the same temperature, roughly 10-20 C, slightly warmer but much, much more humid in Malta. The ADASS website says, "the weather in Malta is usually cold and wet at this time of year. Warm jackets and umbrellas are recommended" which is plainly ludicrous. Everyone was dressed for summer, and rightly so because wearing a "warm jacket" would have been like wearing a sign which said, "please hurt me". Umbrellas would be helpful : one day it did nothing but rain, and the rest of the time there were occasional light showers. I managed just fine with my light summer rain jacket. On occasion I even needed a jumper.

I arrived in my apartment at about 7pm, when it was already dark. This turned out to be thoroughly deserving of its 7.3 rating on booking.com. Basic, to be sure, but in an absolutely first-rate location. 10 minutes walk (or less) from the tourist centre with, thank goodness, not a single intimidating street gang in sight (unlike Padova). In fact it was right next to St Elmo's fort. The area itself was largely quiet. Inside it was certainly... standard, and things could do with some plastering and a lick of paint, especially the stairs; the instruction not to wear shoes inside was very much a case of shutting the door after the horse has bolted. But the most important things were all perfectly fine. The bed was comfy, the fridge and microwave worked, the shower was surprisingly good (if small), there was a kettle and... a huge supply of Tetley tea. I'd go there again.

Basic, to be sure, but quite comfortable all the same.

The ceiling beams would however make this unsuitable for anyone taller than 5'10" or so. I'm short enough that this wasn't a problem for me, though I did have to stoop a little in the shower. The air conditioning was very effective though, not needed so much for the temperature as the humidity.

Mind you, I do sympathise with people complaining it wasn't suitable for its advertised maximum of 4 people, though it does clearly specify it has one double bed and one bedroom. Unless you're really, worryingly close with some very good friends, three would be silly, and four would be an absurd joke.

I had that first evening and the next day to explore my surroundings. One of the first things I was struck by was just how very, very British Malta feels. This was my first time in which I got to use my UK adaptor outside of the UK. But there are a lot more vestiges of British rule all over the place : phone boxes, post boxes, pedestrian crossing buttons, shops (Accessorize, M&S, Spar – among others), even a Cardiff Snack Bar (!)  that I saw from the taxi on the way back. Tourists too seem to be predominantly British. Even the scattered rain showers feel familiar.

From the Spar I bought Ribena, and felt like I'd come home.

Yet in every other respect it's blindingly obvious that this is worlds away from Britain. The streets are lined with palm trees and cactus. The November sun is still powerful enough that anything more than a T-shirt is usually unnecessary, sometimes even silly. Maltese is heard everywhere. And of course the architecture is altogether different. I have to say that many streets look run-down, almost dilapidated, but they are very much actively used and lived-in; a little bit of a culture-shock there. The posher places are very much cheek-by-jowl with those operating on a lower budget, and from the exterior they're not always easy to tell apart.

By the standards of Valletta this is a very wide and well-kept street.

My main bit of non-science excursion was to indulge my favourite tourist pastime of wandering aimlessly. Around Valletta this is an excellent strategy. As a capital city this is absolutely miniscule but very dense, with history in every step, and you can't fail to find something worth viewing everywhere you go. Doing a pre-planned route would be both boring and unnecessary. 

The narrow streets make finding somewhere to take a good overview photo difficult. This was about as good as I could manage. They need a few tall towers like Bologna !

The maximum elevation may only be 250m or so but the streets are very hilly. You get a lot of exercise walking around Malta.

The weather was... sometimes like this, sometimes bright sunshine. But I wouldn't want to come back in summer when it's 40 C.

The only "planned" activity I did was St Elmo's Fort, which was right next to my apartment so I could hardly avoid it. In fact I went twice. The first time I spent a good couple of hours walking around the whole fort, reading the signs and going through the series of really very good exhibits which cover the entire history of the island : from prehistory and classical antiquity to the Great Siege (1565) and WWII. I can summarise it all very simply. Malta has seen some serious shit. At one point it was reckoned among the most bombed places on Earth. But it's still here, the hulking fortresses of the knight's era still indomitable edifices of stone with walls that must be 20m thick. It is, in short, well worth visiting.

What exactly this is, if it's even part of the fort itself or technically outside it, I'm not sure.

The second time was the day after. As it happened the 10th November was the day the fort was opened for free with a military parade by the In Guardia re-enactment society, who do a parade of the knights of St John (being also Remembrance Sunday, this was preceded by a short memorial service of five soldiers which is basically identical to British remembrance practises). For a tiny local group they did an excellent job, and the acoustics of the fort made the muskets sound more like cannons. Incidentally, I also saw the 4pm ceremonial firing of a cannon from the Saluting Battery, so I have a good point of comparison.

The battery is about 15 minutes from the fort. You can pay a tiny fee to be on the platform when they fire the cannon, but I watched from the balcony like a cheapskate.

The Conferencing

This was my first ADASS so I didn't really know what to expect. Nobody made the obvious BADASS pun; perhaps that joke has long since run its course. I knew only three or four other people present but this does force one to mingle... which began almost instantly. The first day was a half-day session of tutorials. The first I simply watched along with, but the second was on user experience (UX). More on this in a moment, but the tutorial divided us all into random groups of six with the task being to design an app. The goal of this was not to make something functional but just to experience the design process as guided by a professional. 

A professional designer in astronomy ? Indeed. The ASTRON group in the Netherlands make so much software that they've hired a full-time UX designer who ran this course. The instructions filled me with dread : create a persona for people who will use your tool, write a story about how they'd use it... lordy, that sounds like corporate nonsense. Luckily for me, our group alone decided to have some fun with this. We decided to make an app to alter users of potential meteorite strikes. Our user persona was called Harald and he had a beloved cat (Whiskers) and a herd of cows. He was paranoid about meteorite strikes and his favourite activity was "not being hit on the head by meteorites". We even produced a visual of what the app ("Don't Look Up*") would look like, with a little warning message about the likely chance of a strike and options to get more details.

* Tagline, "Look At The App". 

Now, all of this is something one could do oneself without any guidance whatever. What I found the process did, however, was massively speed everything up. By delegating roles (though not very strictly) to each of the team members, everyone thinks through the process according to different perspectives. Consequently the creative juices really start flowing very quickly. How much warning does Harald need ? How does he want to receive alerts ? Does he want it to run in the background ? Do we need an Enterprise Edition that could provide warnings for multiple sites ? And so on.

The rest of the conference followed a more traditional structure. Normally conferences are subject-orientated, but this one is selected based on software. This is interesting because it brings together a much wider pool of expertise, with many people from software backgrounds who aren't professional astronomers at all. It makes the tea breaks an interesting experience, but the talks also are a lucky dip. Some were incredibly technical, more like computer science than astronomy*, others were about the history of project development, while a good chunk were on topics regular science conferences would normally consider too "soft".

* To the poor sod giving the talk about field gate programmable arrays, man, I have no idea what you were talking about, but bloody hell it sounded intelligent.

I'm going to limit myself here to the latter. There was a great deal of discussion about UX, which is about more than the software interface and actually even higher-level than that : how do users really use the software ? As various presenters said, traditionally astronomers aren't good at that. We write code that gets the right answer, but we don't do the (considerably easier) task of bothering to provide them a useful, intuitive interface. And we really should, because a bad interface means mistakes and the very inaccuracies we wanted to avoid ! Everyone likes the technical aspects and tries to avoid the social. But we shouldn't : these soft aspects can have hard results.

I have to also add that there remains an attitude in some quarters that our codes should be difficult to use, that they should only be accessible to an elite. This was firmly rejected here, with the overwhelming mood being to encourage everyone to actually think about interface design and take it seriously. No, it's not magnetohydronamics, but it's still important. I particularly liked the argument that we should presume users have the ability to understand the tool and it's only bad design which prevents them : the analogy made was that wheelchair users are only "disabled" when you don't provide them with lifts. 

As for my talk, I'm pleased to say that everyone really liked it. "I wish I'd thought of that", "I never would have thought of doing it that way" and even "Brilliant !" and "I wish I had that when I did cell biology" were mentioned. I was pleased as punch. There was even a question from the organisers afterwards as to whether we could organise ADASS in Prague. Well, I hope so. Next year it's in Germany which is much easier to get to than Malta so I'll probably try and go along; it was a welcoming affair and an interesting experience. In any case, it's clear that I need to keep promoting my code and that yes, other people want this to exist.

It was quite a large conference, with ~270 in-person attendees and another 60 or so online.

I'll close the science section with a sting in the tail. There were several nice history talks, including one on a 20-year project to digitise the entire collection of 500,000 photographic plates in Harvard. But there was also a warning. The incredibly popular DS9 software, which gets ~40,000 downloads per year, is in serious danger of running out of funding. This to me is almost literally unbelievable; it's such an indispensable tool that I just don't understand how any manager could be so ludicrously blind as to not see how its ~1 FTE requirement hasn't given back that investment a thousandfold and more over the years. Cancelling DS9 ? Have you gone completely mad ?

Ah well, a warning to us all. Anyway, the only conference socials were the welcome reception in which I managed to survive a ferocious onslaught of free wine, and a walking tour of Valletta. This helped put things in a bit more context. The guide was good, but a bit more "I've done this ten thousand times before" than the Alhambra guide. I asked her what the Maltese thought of the British when they decided for independence : was it a case of "get the hell out ?" or "we don't hate you, but please just leave". She said the latter. Which is as good as a colonial power can hope for, really.

I really liked the Tritons fountain. The way the water cascades in a shower from underneath the bowl, rather than just flowing over the edge, was somehow quite fascinating.

She also had quite an unusual take on the Great Siege. In Fort St Elmo this is portrayed as it usually is, as a heroic victory against the odds, a huge turning-point in the war between the Ottoman Turks and European Christendom. The guide, however, thought it wasn't anything in particular to celebrate, but more just pure luck : the Turks left because they were tired and wanted to go home and were worried by rumours of Christian reinforcements, rather than actually being beaten by the knights. Yet the exhibits at the fort portrayed this as a result of clever trickery in which the rumours were deliberately engineered by the knights.

Personally, for whatever it's worth, I stick with the classical view. Look, if you can hold out for so long against your enemy that they refuse to fight you anymore, if they'd rather turn tail instead of offering battle, then you've won.  It doesn't matter if this is because you actually beat them to a bloody pulp or convinced them through trickery that you could beat them to a pulp if they were foolish enough not to run away.  How you achieve victory has no bearing whatever on whether you have achieved victory. In that respect, the only thing that matter is that the enemy stop fighting. And I doubt there's a general in the world who'd disagree. 

And besides, for the massively-outnumbered knights to take out a third of the invasion force for the cost of one single fort is nothing to be sniffed at by anyone's standards.

All this being done, I went home. More conversations followed at the airport with other conference escapees who were, I'm delighted to say, enthusiastic about my presentation. Which is encouraging. Even DS9 took years to get any attention, but now practically everyone uses it : as an easy-to-use tool for quick inspection, it's second to none, and does a lot more besides. Of course the warning is that even that level of superlative success doesn't necessarily bring any benefits with it.

The return trip was just as long and uneventful as all the rest. Malta airport security have an everything scanner so that took all of five minutes. It's annoyingly busy inside (not much bigger than Cardiff despite being a popular tourist destination) but not awful. Zurich (shown below), where I had a four hour layover, is really very good indeed : absolutely massive, but with plenty of places to sit and charging points galore. Overpriced to be sure (I spent 18 EUR on Burger King because it was the cheapest option) but at least you can easily find a quiet place to sit. And so, feeling like I'd been gone for a full month rather than a mere ten days, back I went to Prague.

Galivanting in Granada

Two travel posts in a row ! Busy, busy...

Busy indeed. Immediately on returning from Cardiff my entire time was taken up for the next fortnight or so with admin duties. My Master's student has successfully transmuted into a PhD student (hooray !) which requires not only a bunch of direct logistics (where shall be his office ? whence his key ?) but also grant applications. And for myself, it became extremely urgent to actually book my next trip, a back-to-back conference jaunt. Which I managed, thankfully, just as the hotels were beginning to be really snapped up quickly.

The first destination was somewhere I've been once before and never got around to blogging : Granada. So to give y'all two for the price of one, I'll be interspersing this one with some recollections and photos from that trip too.

Granada And Environs

Happening right in between several major flooding incidents, this was not a good time to visit southern Spain. But we got lucky – very lucky. Flying from Prague to Malaga and thence by bus to Granada, neither the destinations nor the routes were in any way affected by the floods at all. Even luckier for us, writing this up a couple of days after getting back, Malaga is now in a different situation. Maybe blogging the experience of an actual disaster (as opposed to a faux hurricane) would be a better way to generate web traffic but I don't think I need that kind of stress.

Anyway, the ALMA "All Hands" is a travelling circus annual meeting for ALMA support astronomers which I've mentioned before. It's useful way of keeping abreast of the latest developments, but it's mainly about admin rather than science. There's little enough to interest the great unwashed general public so I'll concentrate on the travelling.

The four of us coming from Prague decided not to book the bus from Malaga in advance, not knowing how fast we'd be able to exit the airport or if the flight would be delayed. Which it was, though only by half an hour or so. Actually catching the bus was a little... chaotic would be too strong a word, but it was certainly confusing. The bus was showing as fully booked online, a little worrying because there weren't many other buses running that evening, but the bus driver sold us tickets anyway. We had to pay cash. In Malaga city centre the driver called out (in Spanish of course) for people going to Granada, a bunch got off, but we stayed put. Fortunately the very nice young man ahead of us explained that the bus had been over-sold so they'd have to transfer to another one, but assured us we could stay put. So we did. Then pretty much all the would-be-transfers got back on again a long with a lot more people.

It certainly felt chaotic, but it wasn't really. It only seemed so because I have absolutely no clue what the system is (that and some very loud Spanish people and the really rather small seats with very little legroom compared to most other coaches in Europe). I'm guessing that they keep some seats reserved from the app so that people can still walk up and buy tickets on the spot, but I really don't know.

Anyway, a two-hour, rather cramped bus journey got us to Granada's main station, and a short local bus took us to the hotel. As usual with these events, we're all put in somewhere nice so we don't feel tempted to wander off. Which is quite substantial consolation after a ~10 hour trip.

The traditionally-late Spanish eating hours served us especially well the first night, arriving as we did at around 10pm.

I have to say that this was actually a better arrival experience than my first visit. Seven years ago I came by myself for an observing run (we'll get to the telescope later). Flying into Granada airport (probably via Madrid, I think), getting to the city was much easier. But the IRAM guest house where observers stay before heading up to the telescope is uniquely difficult to find. Here's what I wrote in the post I drafted but never finished :

I'd been warned about this, but still... come on. Arriving "after hours" (meaning after 3pm, bizarrely) means you have to get the key from a guard in the adjacent car park. The guard knows what's going on, but speaks no English and fervently believes that SPEAKING LOUDLY AND SLOWLY WILL SUFFICE. It took about 10 minutes of LOUD, SLOW EXPLANATIONS before he let me go away with the key and find my room.

This was completely unsuccessful, for the residencia is contained within a gated complex of other buildings which isn't well-lit and not at all easy to navigate at night. There are no signs or maps telling you where each building is - you just have to go around checking for the one you want. The IRAM key was contained within an envelope, on which was written the room number and contained internet access instructions but didn't have the building number written anywhere. 

So, I wandered around – dragging my heavy suitcase the whole time, wearing my warm winter coat in 18 C conditions - looking at each and every building (there's around 30 of them), carefully checking for the IRAM sign. I couldn't see it anywhere. I couldn't face talking to the guard by myself again so in desperation I asked some wandering people if they could help me. They could. 15 more minutes of talking to the guard, who I was rapidly beginning to dislike (because how long does it take to say, "it's over there, oh, actually, I'll go with you it'll take 35 seconds" ?), with translation, finally found me at the door of the building. It was number 21. There was a sign, but it was tiny and hidden in deep shadow. I could've been wandering around for another hour and not spotted it.

The tiny sign underneath the 21 does have the IRAM logo, but in the dark this is near-invisible. The 21 would have been relatively easy to spot, if someone had only told me the frickin' number.

None of that this time ! I have to say the whole travel experience did get me rather stressed-out, what with the floods, the last-minute booking, the complexity of the travel and whatnot (I've had too many bad experiences with aircraft delays and suchlike), but in the end, absolutely everything went according to plan.

I didn't see much of Granada itself this time, but I liked it.

That leaves the social events of the conference. On my previous visit I went to the Alhambra, as everyone does, but I think I had a more limited, cheaper ticket*. I don't think I saw half of what I did this time. Previously I have to say I went away thinking, ho hum, yes, very nice, but not quite the wonder of the world I was expecting. This time I was considerably more impressed. 

* They also didn't require ID at the entrance. Google reveals that this is indeed a recent change designed to prevent resale of tickets at inflated prices, a thoroughly sensible decision.

I arrived early so I wandered on a bit further. From this rather pleasant little park, you can just see the already snow-covered mountains in the distance. More of them later.

The guide explained that the walls would have been just as bare when first constructed, the intention with the ornate details around the doors being to draw the focus of the viewer.

It also helped that we had a good tour guide. Rather cleverly, they give you wireless devices with a single, large headphone that sort of hangs over your ear instead of in it. This means the guide speaks to you in a normal voice from a distance and you can still hear everything around you perfectly well. I normally hate using a single headphone but it works extremely well here.

The level of detail is so intricate it makes "baroque" look like finger painting. Often my camera was simply inadequate to the task.

Something about that orderly line of cypress trees strongly reminded me of Villeneuve's Dune.

For instance, those cypress trees. We had a running joke that we had to believe anything the guide said, so when someone asked how old they were, he said something like "seventy years" with mock confidence, which someone else – who wasn't in on the joke – took for an actual answer. With impeccable timing, another tour guide happened a moment later to announce to another group that the trees are, in fact, six hundred years old. Well, who am I to doubt them ? 

The second social event, which actually happened right after the conference, was a visit to the IRAM 30m telescope. I don't remember the trip up having quite such a suicidal bus driver, so noting this for future reference : the road is long and extremely windy. You get fantastic views, but quite often I repressed the urge to yell out "SLOW THE FUCK DOWN MAN !" if only to avoid distracting the already obviously-insane driver.

When I arrived last time it was a month later in the year, and it started snowing for the first time that season, quite literally, about twenty minutes after I got inside. This time there had already been a snowfall but it had partly melted, so probably you can't infer anything about climate change from these two data points. Temperature was about zero; last time it quickly dropped to about -10 C.

The telescope is one of my favourite observatories. The cafeteria does excellent food and it's quite an experience to have seafood and wine while on top of a snow-covered mountain and being watched by the local foxes and mountain ponies. One feels distinctly like a Bond villain.

From the observatory cafeteria in 2017. They come right up to the glass, apparently used to astronomers. The telescope is right next to a ski slope so I suppose they've seen weirder.

Ponies from 2017. There was a lot more snow around when it fell, but the cutoff down the mountain was still very sharp.

This time we could simply drive back down again. Last time the snow was by then thick on the ground so the only way was by a combination of cable car (the telescope is right next to ski slope, and do I mean right next – you can watch skiers going past from the control room) and snowcat. It was a really fun way to travel on both counts. One particularly enduring memory is watching the snow blowers from the cable car, backlit by the sun – this is industrial-scale skiing that looks like something out of Blade Runner. These final shots are all from 2017, when I had the time to take more photographs and the weather was more photogenic.

My phone has a good wide-angle lens but my camera had a much better zoom function.

Snowcats are the only way to travel !

You have to remember that this carries on for several miles up the mountain. The scale of the operation to allow people to slide down a hill is massive.

And that was that. The next day at 6am, an unbelievably prompt taxi took me to the bus station and a bus (booked immediately after arriving in the hotel) brought me back to the airport, bang-on time. So off I went to Malta, but I think that'll have to be yet another post, you lucky people.

The Mumbles of Mumbledon

I've done quite a few visiting-Cardiff-as-a-tourist posts at this point so I hesitated to do another one. But since this time I had a couple of excursions to some different places and there are some nice photos... eh, what the hell.

This time I went back via Stansted, which involved 6 (or possibly more like 7) hours on a bus. The bus is very cheap but I think next time it might be worth the extra expense of the train. The first leg spent an age grinding through the gridlocked London traffic, taking a full 30 minutes to get round a single interchange. The driver's continuous insistence on sharp accelerations and decelerations didn't help.

Naturally this meant I arrived at the London coach station the exact moment my next bus was leaving. I'd booked a flexible ticket, but I had a full hour to kill. For sheer want of anything better to do I decided to check in with the office in case I needed to rebook the ticket. This was fortunate because I did, and nominally there should have been a fee for this, but the very nice lady wrote me a note saying it wasn't my fault and pretty please would the driver let me on the next bus. Warning me that the bus drivers could be very grumpy about such things, I was pleasantly surprised that the guy was not actually an ogre who wanted to club me and eat my bones, but a very nice chap who simply waved me aboard no questions asked.

In Cardiff it was, happily, raining. October is supposed to be dark and rainy, dammit. Bright sunshine would just be wrong. Even more fortunately, it would rain for only two days that I was there : when I arrived and when I left.

The next day I began doing the stuff I could do in Prague but just don't want to. I got some new glasses, a haircut, applied for a replacement debit card, went into Waterstones... that sort of thing. Also I was introduced to McVitie's Digestives Gold, which are incredibly dangerous biscuits. I ate several metric tonnes of actual food as well and regretted absolutely nothing.

On the weekend we went on a little day trip to Swansea to walk down the beach. The train ride featured a report of someone walking along the tracks but either we ran over the silly twat or he was never really there. I guess I'll never know. Worse was the extremely loud, dishevelled drunk guy shouting "tickets please !" as he walked to his seat because some people are just like that. The rest of his group seemed... less obnoxious but this one dude was awful. To the Asian gentlemen opposite us he said, "sorry I don't speak Japanese !". He spent the rest of the trip loudly ranting about nothing in particular and talking to the teenage girls opposite. It was creepy and weird.

Once you get through Swansea town things get much better. I haven't been there since a high school trip right before starting university, and the beach is as shamefully under-utilised as I remember. Miles and miles of sand just left to do absolutely nothing.

We walked right down the length of the beach, which would end up as a total of a 12 mile round trip (add on at least one more for me because I'd walked the dog earlier in the morning as well). At the Mermaid café right before you reach the Mumbles I ate yet another quite astonishingly large meal of what was very possibly the best panini I've ever had. That steak ! Good lord... and the truffle chips, proper British chip shop chips but heavily seasoned with truffle. When they asked if they wanted desert it was all I could do to blurt out "NO !" to prevent myself from exploding. It would have been like Mr Creosote.

One of those cases where you look at it and think "that doesn't look like it's nearly enough", realise the bread is actually enfolded spacetime and what appeared to be a few small pieces of steak is actually a sizeable chunk of a cow.

A few hundred metres more brought us to the end of the bay and the Mumbles themselves. What are Mumbles ? Nothing like wombles, that's for sure. No, apparently they were named by desperate sailors who thought they looked like boobies (no, not the seabirds). Walking along the seafront this made not a lick of sense because the cliffs are all perfectly normal-looking flat rocks, and not even the randiest, most sexually deprived sailor in history is ever going to mistake a cliff for something he could sodomise or otherwise generally fornicate with. Then you get to the Mumbles and think... aahhh, now it makes sense. Well, more so than the Grand Tetons, at any rate.

I suppose you have to admit they are very big and firm.

Presumably this is warning people against damaging the underwater archaeology (whatever that might be), but I prefer to think it's because the archaeology is itself very dangerous.

Thankfully we made it back to Swansea before nightfall and didn't encounter any more drunken louts.

The next adventure was a trip to Castell Coch, the Marquess of Bute's second home (or nth home at any rate). Much like his main residence in Cardiff (Cardiff Castle), this little folly is an ornate fantasy playground. And also much like Cardiff Castle, this is somewhere I haven't visited since school. It certainly seemed a lot bigger back then.

One of the towers is currently under repair. Sadly some of the ornate paintwork inside has suffered extensive water damage, though a restoration project is underway.

It's good to be the Marquess.

One nice feature is the handheld point-and-click audioguides they give you, which don't require those annoying headphones. They have a speaker that's loud enough to hear if you hold it close, without distracting everyone else.

Shout-out to the tiny Forest Fawr café, which is actually mainly a fireplace seller of all things, but is absolutely lovely inside and does top-notch greasy spoon toasties etc. Unexpectedly good for somewhere well out of the way !

Other exploits included a trip down the bay and repeatedly walking the dog in my more usual haunts.

And last but not least, my second-ever experience of a live rugby match. The Cardiff Arms Park is like the Millennium Stadium's misbegotten child (or possibly, more accurately, its wizened grandparent), lurking in the shadow of its much larger relative. But rugby is rugby, and unlike football, the number of points scored is somewhere in the low thousands per match, so at least there's actual stuff happening to watch.

And then I went from one home to another back to Prague. Not for long though, because I'm typing this up at the tail-end of a conference in Granada. More on that one next time.

The Morning After The Fourteen Years Before

I need to say a few words about the other highlight of last week, the UK's general election.

In years gone by I've stayed up into the small hours watching the election coverage. It tends to be quite fun listening to all the different kinds of election speeches. Some are vacuous, some are unhinged - Peter Mandelson's "my enemies will taste my inner steel !" polemic comes to mind for the latter. And of course you have all the analysis, commentary, the silly graphics... it's an unusual excuse for a late night, one which doesn't happen very often.

The last few, though, my heart wasn't in it. Politics in the UK has become too depressing, the results too much of a foregone conclusion. Well at least this time the result was a foregone conclusion but one which finally went in a good direction.

I got myself nicely ensconced in my hotel room. Plenty of tea, plenty of snacks. No alcohol, which was an oversight on my part but probably a wise one, what with being in the middle of a conference and all.

My plan was to stay up pretty late, just enough to get a sense of where things were going. If it had gone the other way, quite honestly I don't know what I would have done. Quite probably, and I'm not being rhetorical here, cry. The mood of the country has been so dead against the Tories for so long that for them to retain power would be an abomination.

What actually happened was that by around 3am (local time), after some actually quite decent interviews, analysis, and endless fun watching Jeremy Vine slowly wear himself out jumping around the swingometer (and various incarnations thereof), it was pretty clear that there would be no great upset. Two cups of tea could see me no further so I went to sleep... for about an hour. Then I woke up, saw the news, saw that results were coming in thick and fast : LABOUR GAIN... LABOUR GAIN... LABOUR GAIN... LABOUR HOLD... and so on, and I couldn't get back to sleep. So up I stayed until the end. I saw Starmer's victory speech, I saw Rishi concede, I saw Jacob Ress-Mogg and... heeheheheee !.... Liz Truss lose her goddamn seat.

I also saw Jeremy Vine still swinging hard (if a little more slowly) at well after 3am.

And of course there was the inevitable oddity, the crazy results bucking the trend with TORY GAIN. Which made no sense, especially for poor Jonathan Ashworth, who I've liked very much throughout his career in opposition. He deserved better. Unfortunately, politics is random enough that a few inexplicable curveballs like this are part of the process.

The main result, though, was exactly in line with expectations. The Tories haven't suffered an extinction level event (that was never very likely) but by God they've taken a body blow. The Lib Dems have deservedly resurged with avengeance. Reform have shown themselves up as the useless protest vote that Farage parties always are. The Greens and Plaid have made at least a little progress, while the SNP - in perhaps the biggest surprise of the night - have truly collapsed. You'll recall I said exactly this possibility right back in 2015, when everyone else suspected that the SNP surge marked a permanent sea change in Scottish politics, that once they were in so deep, it would be very difficult to get them back out. 

To me the lesson was different, that politics can be potentially very unstable indeed, and that large majorities can flip to large minorities if a party isn't careful. Fortune's wheel is ever turning... the system is one always on the edge of chaos, predictable only if it sticks to its own rules. The SNP took their new-found dominance for granted, to their ultimate cost.

Whoops.

But of course the real result is that huge Labour majority. I have to confess, of course, to being biased. This is the result of which dreams are made (second only to the ultimate goal of a Labour - Lib Dem coalition), giving power back to the sensible, grown-up, boring people. I couldn't be happier. To me it's a eucatastrophe, an unexpected (well, not so much) anti-disaster of astonishing good fortune, a real opportunity, at long last, for the country to heal itself. To pick itself up after 14 years of Tory shenanigans (especially the last five of the utmost stupidity), dust itself off, and look everyone else squarely in the eye and declare, "Why yes, actually there was a reason we used to be renowned for our political system, bitches."

In short to me the result was absolutely joyous. I walked into the conference with a spring in my step and my head held high, although by the afternoon the adrenaline finally began to wane and I started to crash. But it was a truly cathartic moment of the utmost delight, even something approaching bliss.

I've said enough out my quasi-adoration of Starmer's Labour here and here (and probably elsewhere) that I don't need to, ahem, labour the point.

Sorry, I'll see myself out.

But I just want to add one small but important point. In terms of actual politics, I'm firmly on the left. I believe in a big strong welfare state acting as a safety net, liberal in its social policies (guaranteeing freedoms in a utilitarian sum, acting with as light a touch as possible to impose the smallest restrictions for the biggest gains) and socialist in its economics (government providing all the essential services, but leaving non-essentials by and large to run themselves, intervening only when absolutely necessary). 

In terms of the way I think politics should be done, however, I'm a centrist. I believe more in the process than the result. I believe that while my own opinions are valid, and some fraction will be correct, the same is true of everyone else. Well, nearly everyone, probably not Liz Truss. I'm not joking here : as I've said rhetorically, you simply cannot reason with pathological liars like Johnson or the delusional like Truss. Nor does this work with the politically feeble like Sunak, who find themselves craven to their own party and chronically unable to lead. A reasoned argument with someone who refuses to make up their own mind gets you nowhere.

Most people don't lie at these extremes of personality types, though unfortunately they seem to be disproportionately represented in politics. But when you clear out this lunatic asylum, this squawking henhouse of nonsense, I believe discussions are the ultimate answer. That a decision formed by consensus is by far the most secure. When you combine independent conclusions formed in good faith, then and only then do you get the best decisions possible, not from any one ideology or perspective, but from many. So while of course I want to see the policies I favour enacted, more important to me is to see this process of serious discussion taking place. To see people getting together, genuinely engaging with each other rather than shouting each other down, compromising when necessary, forceful on occasion, but always listening.

This is why I'm a Starmer superfan. I know, I know, people say he isn't inspiring. Fuck 'em. I've said it before and I'll say it again : this kind of boring, sensible politics is the best thing I've seen happen (politically) in my entire adult life. The idea that you can turn on the television and there isn't a political crisis, that politicians are actually working to solve the problems rather than create more of them to (largely subconsciously, I think) enrage and divide voters... Good God, can it be true ? 

Starmer, to be sure, doesn't have the easy charm even of Sunak (in his own greasy and cringe-worthy way, but nevertheless, he gives slick answers much more comfortably in television situations than Starmer), let alone Blair. But if he delivers on results, this is a skill he may not lead to learn. He's generally good enough to get the job done, interview-wise. And he understands perfectly a key lesson of Blair, that voters judge in aggregate*. Individual incidents, however overblown by the media, don't really matter, it's the sum whole (and, crucially the feelings it engenders) that really matters come voting time.

* And many others as well, especially that leadership involves saying no to your own side. If you don't do this, if you don't impose some direction on the group, you'll end up going nowhere and being visibly weak.

So in the rest of this post I want to cover three things. First, I'll look at the electoral strategy that got us to where we are now. Then I want to say a little more about why I'm optimistic that politics, at least so far as actual policies go, is likely to get significantly better given the immediate actions Labour have taken in government. Finally, I'll end on a bit more of a cautious note as to how it may be difficult to retain this kind of attitude in the future, and how we must always be on guard against a return to factional chest-thumping politics where believing one's ideology is considered more important than getting anything done.

1) When The Hurly-Burly's Done : Why The Tories Lost And Labour Won

It's pretty obvious why the Tories lost : they were shite. Not only were their pledges shite (and racist), but they failed to deliver on any of them. Johnson, in short, broke them, turning them into a confused quagmire, a dastardly mix of anti-woke culture wars mingled with populist and at times even socialist policies that were largely unworkable. Johnson, in his pig-headed way, cared not a jot, driving them into both a hole and wall at the same time, if that's metaphorically possible.

From this any sort of recovery would prove near-impossible in the short term. Johnson, a traditional tribal politician, had the peculiar attitude of not actually standing for his own tribe. This kind of rampant megalomania is not common in British politics. What Johnson in effect did was to set all the Tory factions against one another, each thinking that they were the true voice of the Conservatives, each equally determined to fight their corner and each unwilling to back down. The result is that it transformed the notoriously disciplined party into something little better than a bag of screaming cats.

One particularly stupid cat, however, briefly assumed the mantle of authority. But Liz was too stupid and her beliefs too crazy to assume anything more than the mantle, not the authority and control itself. By doubling down on Boris' approach of total tribalism in support of unworkable policies, but having absolutely no appeal to other segments of the party (still less among the general population), she was doomed. But she did enough damage in her less-than-lettuce tenure to make recovery all but impossible for Sunak. 

Such a feat would have required a political genius of the highest order. Starmer, with his quiet but ruthless expulsion of dissenters, could not have done it : such things take time Sunak was not gifted with, nor did he seem at all interested in building a power base. People drone on about how Starmer doesn't stand for anything (or at least they used to, see below), but what in the world Sunak's famed "plan" was ever supposed to be was something I could never make head nor tail of.

The Tories made themselves unelectable. The Labour party made itself look boring... and safe. Gone were the anti-Semitic overtones of Corbyn, along with all his other pro-Russia, anti-NATO, ambivalent-EU stupidities. There was just enough radicalism in Labour to make everyone curious (federalism, abolishing the Lords, Great British Energy) but not enough to be a concern (e.g. not cancelling Trident a la Corbyn). True, they didn't adopt anything really radical. There was to be no hint of UBI, a four-day work-week, precious little about proportional representation, and no hint of re-joining the EU. But in this softly-softly approach they gave their opponents not a single piece of ammunition to use against them. If they weren't daring enough to face the arguments head-on, they also weren't stupid enough to fight battles they couldn't possibly win*. As I said, Starmer doesn't have the easy charm needed to carry this off.

* Yes, polls show people are now against Brexit, but it would the utmost folly to assume another referendum would be anything other than a repeat of the last disaster. You can't undo such things at a whim. You need a detailed campaign strategy, one that must be carefully formulated to avoid the mistakes of the first attempt.

It's worth bringing in some counterfactuals here though. Had the Tories been in a better position, would Labour have adopted a different strategy with a more radical, risky agenda ? It's possible - we can't know for sure. It's also possible they never would have elected Starmer to leader at all. One can play endless counterfactual games, but the one that strikes me as most relevant is in relation to Reform. There's no doubt Reform hurt the Tories pretty badly, though as to exactly how much I await detailed statistical breakdowns. Would Labour still have won without Reform ? It's absolutely a valid question; to say that Labour weren't proposing good enough policies to inspire people (given the low turnout) is by no means a claim without foundation, though I'll avoid committing to an answer for the time being.

But... let's consider what might have happened had Labour still been in the doldrums of their pitiful 2019 state. This, I suggest, would have been an absolute disaster in which a major Reform breakthrough might have been a real possibility. By playing it safe, failing to unify the right against them, Labour not only ensured their own landslide but also neutered any chance of Reform gaining a meaningful parliamentary voice. This was, unequivocally, the right election strategy for the right time. It remains to be seen if and how they'll adapt to the no-doubt different circumstances of the next election.

A pertinent point being exaggerated quite properly by satirists but taken too seriously by the less credible political commentators is how bad Labour's share of the vote was. In terms of delivering a win, the absolute share of the vote doesn't matter, and Labour knew this. What matters is that their share increased hugely relative to the Tories. We've now got a huge Labour majority because they are the most popular of the parties, simple as. That's the system we've got to work with and that's the game of electoral calculus they very successfully played. Absolute numbers don't factor into it.

Whether this is inherently fair or not is something I'll return to at the end. For now, I'll just say that it clearly is possible for small parties to make big gains if they work within the existing system rather than insisting that it should be something else and campaigning as though that were already the case. The Lib Dems did very well indeed precisely because of that (as did the SNP in the past). As for Reform, their poor performance indicates that either a) they're too stupid to understand how the system works, in which case they probably don't deserve to be in parliament anyway, or b) they really are all about the protest politics, not interested in any actual power but simply having the chance to rant and rave and wallow in their own sense of petty entitlement and victimhood. 

Sadly we still have to put up with this twat. Oh well, you can't have everything.

Which leads me to my final point in this section. Throughout, the Lib Dems were very careful to target Tory seats where they were polling well, not Labour. What we have is a de facto combination of tactical voting and even, to a degree, a progressive alliance. It's not sold as such, there are no open statements of collaboration with Labour (save an open invitation to intellectual property theft). What such movements have failed to realise in the past, I think, is that this kind of direct, rub-your-noses-in-it approach ends up being the kind of "being told what to think" attitude that people don't like. People are happy enough to listen to arguments aimed at persuading them. But this attitude of entitlement that of course you want to vote for me to get these guys out, of course you already agree with our agenda... that winds people up the wrong way.

Telling people, "here's the evidence for X" is generally okay with most people. Telling them, "and here's why I adopt position Y in response to this" is usually fine too. But being told simply that you must believe Y in response to X, must feel something that you don't already actually feel, that you must simply be a bad person otherwise... this doesn't work. Progressive alliances turn people off, I think, when they're so explicit because they make this inherent assumption that of course it's what people want even when it was never on their agenda. Instead, this much more implicit and totally informal approach has delivered real, tangible gains in part because it avoids all of this almost culture-war aspect to the whole argument.

2) Reasons To Be Cheerful

I mean, apart from the stonking great Labour majority, which is more than reason enough.

Labour have said for some considerable time that they were in talks with the movers and shakers behind the scenes, putting them in a position to take advantage of power the moment they attained it. And this appears to be emphatically true. They proceeded from a presumption of actually being in government, a very different prospect from being a party of protest. And so while too many wrote their manifesto pledges off as being unambitious or "not radical enough", this looks very different in the dawning light of actual power. We've seen immediate action on almost all of their major pledges, and even some which were barely mentioned. Barely a week into the new administration we've seen :

• Scrapping the detestable Rwanda scheme
• A new aid package for Ukraine with accelerated delivery
• Lifting the absurd ban on onshore wind power
• A commitment to housing targets
• Talks with the EU for closer alignment (at least beginning the process)
• The appointment of a prison's minister who doesn't believe prison is always the solution, a sentiment echoed by Starmer himself
• Meetings with doctors to avert strikes
• Work begins on recruiting new teachers
• Meetings with leaders of the other UK nations and even local mayors for greater devolution of powers

Perhaps most emblematic of all is a commitment from Starmer to work with those of any stripe (albeit this is easier because now their are far fewer politicians on the right). The dramatic tonal shift away from conflict and brow-beating to one of collaboration is not something that should be underestimated. May, for instance, pathologically insisted that "Brexit meant Brexit" and completely ignored the beliefs of Remainers. Starmer returns to a time-honoured approach of at least pledging to govern for the whole country and not just the party faithful. "I will fight until you believe again", he said, echoing a sentiment he expressed very clearly throughout the campaign. Thanks largely to Johnson, trust in politics has collapsed. The idea that politicians might actually say what they mean has become something of a novelty.

And this is why, I think, people weren't all that impressed by the manifesto, even though it contained some extremely ambitious pledges. People expected yet more climbdowns and u-turns and judged it accordingly : on that basis, it does indeed look weak. The problem is of course that when you lose trust you can believe anything, pervert any statement to mean what you want it to mean. Things look very different when those commitments actually materialise. And to repeat from a previous post, yes, of course politicians have to lie sometimes, there's just no other way of working together. But not all lies are the same by any means : lies about who you like and who you don't like are the necessary grease of the political machinery; in contrast, saying the machine is a typewriter when it's actually a clock is of a different order. Lies about people and lies about policies are not the same.

But I'm getting carried away. None of those things have actually been delivered yet, because it's been a full four days since Labour assumed office. Nevertheless, to be shown to be already beginning the work needed is important. And of course, it would be foolish to assume that every policy will be delivered exactly as stated and on time and on budget. No government is that saintly. For certain, there will be corruption, scandals, and stupidity, That's the nature of the game. The test for the government is how it deals with this, how it seeks not to eliminate such occurrences (a fool's dream) but to actually and significantly reduce all this compared to the shitshow of the last fourteen years. And of course in how it responds when these things occur, how it defends or suspends the accused, how swiftly it responds or doesn't respond.

3) Reasons To Be Cautious

Which brings me to my final theme. The small voter share is, undeniably, a source of concern for the future. It's not anything to get into a blind panic about, not something to declare the results invalid over. But it should give any reasonable politician pause for thought : we're seen as the better choice by far, might think Labour, but it's a pretty low bar. The rapid turnaround of Labour's fortunes might yet be matched by a similar feat by the Tories. Unlikely, to be sure, but quite possible.

In years gone by the Tories too had this presumption that they were "the natural party of government". Consequently they formulated policies which were by no means very nice, let alone desirable, but were at least workable. They were things that, quite unlike bridges from Scotland to Ireland, could actually be implemented. They knew they'd have to deliver to at least some some extent on what they promised, so they didn't promise everyone the Moon when the rockets weren't available.

What this shifted into was entitlement. And in this sense this is quite a different outlook. Instead of merely assuming that they would be in government, they assumed they deserved to be in government : come what may, no matter whatever bullshit they spewed forth, they deserved it not because of whatever nonsense they said but simply because of who they were, that they were fundamentally better than the little people. Sensible, cautious presumption became the height of arrogance. Policy became unworkable nonsense.

The message for Labour is manifold. They have to actually deliver on their promises : not everything, not perfectly, and not exactly on time and/or budget either, but the goal of perfection must ever be their aim. Contrary to a media which exaggerates every slight miss as a major and totally unrecoverable failure, the public's standards are not so ludicrously high. But they must still aim towards... let's call it core delivery. Then they have to avoid the sense of entitlement which causes policy to drift from pragmatism to nonsense. It's honestly quite hard to envisage this happening to Starmer, but power can corrupt the best of us; if he's truly wise, he'll leave before it gets to him. And with a thumping majority, maintaining parliamentary discipline will be tough.

The other note of caution is of course Reform. Or rather, their combined vote share with the Tories, which exceeds Labour's overall (though not Labour plus the Lib Dems). We shouldn't be too gloomy about this : in the seats which Labour actually targeted for winning, their swing away from the Tories was far more dramatic than the national average, proof positive of the importance of a disciplined and controlled election campaign strategy. Nevertheless, that the country has still not yet decisively rejected the absurdity of the Tory mindset, and some have even embraced an even more hardline variant of lunacy in Reform (however much that may have been a protest vote), should absolutely be cause for concern. Especially combined with that low turnout. Labour won the election, but the battle for hearts and minds is going to need to pick up a gear.

Conclusions

The cause for celebration is very real. A push towards cheaper, more secure, green energy, a movement towards fixing the NHS rather than just blaming the staff, towards closer alignment with the EU if not reintegration, towards more devolution and local powers rather than total fragmentation, and best of all a push towards real dialogue and discussions... all this looks pretty good to me. Gone too is the Tory party's grim parody of diversity (let's pick racists of different ethnicities to prove we're not racist !), replaced with a Labour party committed to actually delivering egalitarianism and opportunities - which has already gone down badly with transphobics like Rowling. 

Replacing all these idiotic culture wars with productive discussions ? Yes please. All this may not deliver everything I'd ideally like, but if tempered with realism, then these expectations aren't unambitious either. The reasons to be cheerful outweigh by far any reason for cynicism.

The question arises, of course, as to whether the result is fair giving the disproportion of seats in relation to votes. Here I will elaborate on things I've been saying for years. We have representative democracy, and FPTP delivers on both aspects of this. It's an absolutely valid way of selecting local candidates to be your ambassadors to parliament to speak on your behalf. It's also democratic in that its tendency to return large majorities mean you can be confident that the party elected will have few fetters acting against its pledges : it will try to enact its policies as stated, and not have to water them down in a coalition.

This is not to say that proportional representation wouldn't be a valid solution either, however. It really depends on what you want your system of government to be. If it's ensuring everyone has a voice, then PR is the better choice. If it's more important to represent local communities, FPTP is better (though, a ranked voting system would be better still, and arguably a sensible compromise between the two). The difficulty is that neither of these perspectives has any strong intrinsic claim to be the better option either morally or pragmatically. There simply isn't any one right way to implement democracy, no single solution to how a country should be governed or decisions formulated (the difficulties of balancing the need for both local and national governments is something elaborated on at length in Isabel Hardman's excellent book).

Starmer's lack of a clear ideology has caused difficulties, but Laura Kuenssberg (of all people) mentioned the intriguing phrase of "moral socialism". Which, as she pointed out, could have been purpose-written for a Guardian headline. But might this phrase have actual value ? I've pontificated about liberal democratic socialism, trying to maximise both social freedom, political choices, and equality of resources all at once, an ungodly phrase for an awkward balancing act. "Moral socialism" at least rolls off the tongue a lot more smoothly. 

Starmer himself doesn't seem to think like this. He just wants to fix things. 

Fair enough, but for a lot of people, having some comparative ideological framework is of tremendous help. Starmer tends to assume, I think, that everyone is like him, that when a solution is clear to him that everyone else gets it too - a minor weakness which is an occasional annoyance, but he'd do well to learn this at least when communicating his intentions*. But I shall leave aside the thorny question of how much the system itself matters, to what extent can good people deliver good results in a bad system and vice-versa.

* For instance, in one of the debates, the fact that his two-stage (stop the gangs, process those already here) scheme would easily cut illegal migration far more than Sunak's Rwanda farce was easily lost in the verbal fog. Starmer doesn't seem to realise that implications aren't always equally obvious to everyone.

I believe in credit where credit is due. For all the scantily-clad villainy of their statements during the campaign, Rishi Sunak and Jacob Rees Mogg both gave very gracious concession speeches. If they'd only adopted such attitudes a little more during their terms of office, perhaps I might have been more sympathetic and trusting towards them. 

See, make no mistake, I despise the Tories. Loathe them. But I concede that, if brought back as a halfway-sensible, respectable party which would at least regrow its moral backbone, it would at least have some uses. Somebody is needed to hold the government to account. Somebody needs to provide a counterbalance, to act as a reminder if nothing else then at least why the alternatives are worse. Getting that important balance, maintaining that vital tension and stress in the system, the drive to do better or else we'll end up with that lot, is not at all easy. More difficult still is, to my everlasting exasperation, getting the majority to see that some choices are, quite plainly, utterly stupid. 

This though is an altogether bigger challenge, and for now I think I shall be content to accept the fact the government is not only "not a shitshow", but actually intent on delivering its promises. At the very least, there's the hope for a better tomorrow which we've not had in a good long while. And that is no small victory.