The SNP spent £315k and won 6 seats and the Lib Dems spent £470k and won 11 seats, and here is where the funny part comes along.  The Tories say that they actually got nearly as many votes as the SNP and Lib Dems, but that just didn’t translate to seats because:

Everyone recognises that we ran a good campaign but the votes didn’t all fall in the right places

Yes it is unfair and I can feel their pain.  If only there was some sort of system where the results were proportionate to the votes…

Mind you, I don’t see them complaining that their <40% of the votes in England got them >55% of the seats.

I look forward to their attempts to find a system that removes the unfair disadvantage they have in some areas without affecting the unfair advantage they have in others.  Oh hang on – they already worked that out didn’t they?  What else is their plan to ‘equalise’ constituencies and re-draw the boundaries without scrutiny but a piece of blatant gerrymandering?

Some of the writing is beautiful, some of it very functional.  There are few hard facts in it: the one that sticks is the mnemonic Piet Koopt Hoge Schoenen (Piet buys high shoes) to remember the order of the main canals – Prinzengracht, Kaisergracht, Herengracht, Singel.  Even so, by the end I felt I knew a lot more of the city, especially the Jordaan district which I have probably wandered through umpteen times without any notion of the historical context.

Here is what I said about it on Amazon:

This series is pitched and described as a sort of alternative travel book, but it is a very oblique sort of travel book, being more of an anthology of literature around the theme of a city, with a mixture of writing from both well-known and obscure sources. These can be excerpts from novels, histories, letters and diaries – including one of the most famous of all diaries: Anne Frank’s.

With Amsterdam being one of my favourite places I was prepared to enjoy this book, and I did, although for me it started a bit slowly. Of course everybody will find some of the pieces better than other, it just happened that all the pieces I liked least were in the first section. I was worried that the book was going to be a disappointment but it soon got under my skin.

There are some pieces from very well-known writers like Albert Camus, Simon Schama, Ian McEwan and Voltaire, but a lot of the book is by Dutch writers, many translated into English for the first time. Perhaps surprisingly it was the pieces by the relatively unknown writers that were more engaging.

The book is split into sections with loose themes: the sea and canals, art, the occuoation of WWII, and the famous tolerance of the Dutch and specifically Amsterdam. The section that is closest to a traditional travel book contains descriptions of various ‘must see’ places, but even this is an idiosyncratic selection, including plenty of places that I had, to my embarrassment, never heard of despite many visits – like the Portugese Synagogue.

This is not the place to come looking for hard factual information on what to do, where to stay or where to eat, but rather it wraps you up in the atmosphere of Amsterdam. Every time I came across the names of places I knew I wanted to be back there seeing it in a new light and every new place described made me want to just see it.

I think this is a very neat idea executed very well and I’m sorely tempted to try the equivalent books on Paris, London and New York if they do them – but not before I have gone back to Amsterdam to check out a few places first.

Some of the writing about the second world war was very moving and thought-provoking, and also uncomfortable reading – but even more uncomfortable for any Dutch readers.

There can be few cities that have generated sufficient writing of sufficient quality to make a similar books – London, Berlin, Dublin, Paris are the others in the series – I wonder which other places could follow?  New York?  Rome?

Must be killing RR to just produce a film and not to write it, direct it, edit it, and compose the soundtrack too!

1. Couldn’t resist the Robert Rankin reference there!

As an atheist and Labour member I may well not personally like what they do with it, but as a supporter of the Creative Commons principle I don’t think I should stop them.

Yesterday I was a little less impressed as we passed through, as we do every day on the way home from work.

This is, as the council keep reminding us a multi-million pound scheme, so who decided it would be a good idea to put a bus stop in a single-lane road, only a few metres after a roundabout?  A bus only has to stop for a few minutes and the traffic backs up to block the roundabout.  There is a wide expanse of pavement where the bus stop is – more than enough room to make it a proper lay-by bus stop.  The stop in the other direction has room for cars to park, but not the westbound side.

Very poor planning in my opinion.

Skuds' cooker in the immediate aftermath of the beans on toast incident

Here is a photo of what happened when I felt a little peckish and made some toast under the grill.

My new theme song is:

I’m the self inflicted, mind detonator.
Yeah. Im the one infected, twisted animator.
I’m a firestarter, twisted firestarter

One day I told them that I preferred how it tasted at their old place in Three Bridges and they said they would have a word with the owner.  He didn’t change it, but they said they would get the chef to do it differently for me, so now when we order we ask for chicken satay and say “its for Andrew” and get it done just the way I like.

This has been going on for a while now, and Jayne has mentioned it to some of her friends.  The other day one of them was in the takeaway and decided to ask for “Andrew’s chicken satay”.  He said he really liked it.  I wonder if it will catch on?  I can see a few possibilities:

1. The boss will decide to change the recipe
2. The boss will decide to add “Satay Andrew style” as an option on the menu
3. The boss will get annoyed and tell the chef to stop indulging me

I’m hoping for No 2.  I would like to be imortalised on the menu of a Chinese restaurant.