History?

This is a post that has been kicking around in my head for a while but has been dragged kicking and screaming to the surface by this post from the lovely and thoughtful frumiousb. My reaction to the post was that it was curiously detached. It could have been written about the Peloponnesian War. I couldn't write with that kind of detachment about the Somme or Ypres. It's too close. My grandfather was there. The chapel at school was filled with tablets commemorating the Old Boys who died there.

So, my broader question is "when does history start (or end, if you prefer)?". Is it a matter of time or more to do with some sense of personal connection? There's certainly a sense in which, for me, the Vietnam War is "further away" than WW1 So what says the blogosphere?

itchyfidget asked

1. What most frustrates you about interacting with people in general?

Their humanity? Seriously, it all depends. Mostly I don't find people particularly frustrating but certain behaviours do drive me nuts. I think the hardest to take is people who know they are talking nonsense, know you know they are talking nonsense but still expect you to behave as if you believe them or think they are talking sense. IBM was a hotbed of this.

2. What do you know now that you didn't know fifteen or twenty years ago?

How much easier it is to play rugby when one can see the ball.

3. What's your preferred gentle brain activity? Crosswords? Sudoku? Puns? Other?

I'm tempted to say trying to relearn how to integrate a complex function around a closed contour but that would violate the "gentle" condition. I tried Sudoku but it took me less than six puzzles to work out a fully programmable way of solving them which rather spoiled the fun. Cryptic crosswords remain tops in the brainiac department.

4. How do we in the UK move forward from the present political situation in which everyone wants a piece of the centre-right?

The key element has to be proportional representation. That said, I would prefer it to be in the context of more fundamental reform. I think a move to a truly Republican constitution is essential (and that means much more than scrapping the monarchy and giving the PM powers that Henry VIII would have envied). I'd also like to see genuine subsidiarity. If power is indeed vested in the people let local communities decide how much of that they want to surrender to Westminster (or Edinburgh for that matter). Top down devolution is essentially a nonsense.

5. You get to radically influence the teaching of either literacy or numeracy in primary schools. Which do you choose?

Which leg would you like cut off? I'd have to say numeracy though because I think it's handled much worse today. After all, most (British) primary school teachers are reasonably literate. If I had to answer the question for Canada it would be more difficult. The "communications" David used to bring home from elementary school could reasonably have been described as a gross parody of illiteracy. How people with such poor language skills get to be teachers, let alone heads of schools, is beyond me.

Largely pointless trivia quiz

Because I'm bored:

[Poll #713780]

The rapid decline of monarchy

Have you ever thought about how rapidly monarchy has gone out of fashion? Only a hundred years ago it was still considered a viable constitutional option for newly independent nations. Norway in 1905 is a nice example. Now, the only monarchies are those that have been around for a while and most of them are fairly shaky. It's pretty hard to find any country since 1918 that has voluntarily become a monarchy. Jordan and Iraq had kings thrust upon them by the British. Spain reinstalled its monarchy but in rather exceptional circumstances. Otherwise, out of all of the countries that have come into being as a result of the break up of assorted empires I can only think of one (Swaziland) that has chosen to become a monarchy. Given that monarchy was well nigh universal for a thousand years or more that's pretty remarkable.