Why do we talk about prime ministers winning power?

I half-heard an item on the Today programme this morning about Jeremy Corbyn needing to "appeal to older voters if he is to win power in 2020," and all of a sudden it was that last phrase that struck me. It is pretty much the universal formulation to describe the process of appointing a prime minister, to the point where I at least have never before questioned it. Why would I? Elections are competitive processes and the office of prime minister carries a great deal of power, so the leader of the successful party has clearly won power.

Except that, if you transpose the phrase to another context it suddenly sounds very strange indeed. Imagine if the newly-appointed head teacher of your child's primary school wrote to parents to announce that she had won power over the school. Even in the private sector chief executives do not win power over multinational corporations: they are appointed by the board (usually these days to rescue the company from whatever scandal its recent actions have embroiled it in).

The point is that both words in the formulation are problematic, and both transfer an inordinate amount of agency in the wrong direction. When a board 'appoints a new chief executive' or governors 'appoint a new head' the successful candidate has clearly won, but the linguistic formulation gives agency in the process to those who have appointed him or her. Not so, it seems, in general elections, where the electorate become not merely passive but absent from the phrase used.

And then there is the word 'power' itself. Yes, anyone heading a large organisation (such as a national government) has power, but is it not hugely more important that he or she has responsibility too? Yet there is nothing in the phrase 'winning power' even to hint at such responsibility. And with the current government in particular that is a massive problem. I have written before about the extraordinary way in which ministers in this government and the last have ceased to take responsibility for the areas under their charge. Time was that if a scandal broke in say, the NHS the relevant minister would take responsibility and resign, even if the scandal related to events that happened before they took office. Now it is as likely to be the minister who breaks (or even engineers) the crisis, to empower them to bring in more and more sweeping changes.

The current government like power, it is clear (which governments don't, once they get it?) and do not have a great deal of time for responsibility. How else could they preside over benefit changes that drive large numbers of their citizens to suicide? The thing is, while we persist in talking about David Cameron "remaining in power" until 2020 then we are, in a small but crucial way, gifting them more of that power and relieving them of more of the responsibility.

So what should we be saying? Pretty simple, in my view. In the early hours of the morning of the 8th of May 2020 I want to hear David Dimbleby say that "The British electorate has given Jeremy Corbyn responsibility for leading the country."

Well it could happen...

Summer babies, or why does no one commenting on education understand education?

Just a little one, but I mention it because it seems to me indicative of a general trend. Pretty much everyone nowadays feels free to pontificate on any aspect of education they want (generally related to how shit British schools are) without the need actually to understand what they are talking about.

This morning Nick Gibbs announced a change in schools admission rules to allow parents of 'summer babies' (those born in July and August) not to send their children to reception class as soon as they are 4 but to delay school starting if they felt that to be more appropriate for their child. He said, "Parents know their children best and we want to make sure summer-born children can start reception at the age of five, if their parents think it is in their best interests. We are going to make changes to admission rules - but we want councils and academies to take immediate action."

Pretty uncontroversial, one might think. It has long been known that summer babies suffer a deficit throughout their school career, to the extent that August born babies are 20% less likely than average to end up in 'good universities.' A more anecdotal (but nevertheless fascinating) indication that I have myself tested and found to be true is this: at the beginning of a school year ask a teacher to name all of their year 11s from the previous year. The chances are that the names they fail to remember are those of the July and August-born students.

Quite why this happens is open to debate but it seems most likely that the experience of their first year in school, when they are only just four whilst others are nearly five, sets the tone for summer babies' entire school career. At that age the differences in maturity and confidence can be very pronounced and probably the youngest children become locked into a pattern of diffidence and insecurity from the start.

 What was also unsurprising this morning was that Nick Gibbs made it pretty clear that it was Local Authorities' inflexibility that was the problem here- that the only thing standing in the way of concerned parents doing the best for their children was the dead hand of local bureaucracy. The BBC certainly went along with this implication, as did the papers. Even the Mirror (not known for its instinctive support for the Tories) wrote, "Schools and councils, which are responsible for admissions, often say summer-born pupils must go straight into year one and miss out on the reception year altogether. That means parents can feel pressured to send their child to school before they are ready."

Case closed, surely? This is a much-needed reform, with the government stepping in to remove a needlessly bureaucratic piece of regulation.

Well, yes and no, and this is where the issue of commentators not understanding education comes in. Because there is a reason that schools and local authorities are so intransigent about the year of entry of children into the school system, and that is because they are forced into it by the government itself! Anyone actually involved in the school system would know this, yet as far as I am aware the point has not emerged in this morning's commentary.

The thing is, a school's exam results (and therefore its position in league tables, its Ofsted ratings, even its freedom to avoid compulsory academisation) is based on age cohorts rather than year cohorts. So for instance GCSE league tables (such as the crucial 5+ A*-C including English and Maths figure ) include only the results of students who reach the age of 16 during the academic year in question. Summer babies who have been allowed to enter the school system a year late would be in Year 10 when they reach 16 and so would have no GCSE results to report. Because of their late start they may well do really well, and get a whole hatful of A*-Cs by the end of Year 11, but those results will simply not count in any analysis of the school's success or otherwise. Instead the students concerned will be counted amongst the utter failures- those who have achieved nothing at all.

Let me give a simple example to illustrate the point. Say there are 200 students in each year group and 20 of them are summer babies who have been 'kept back.' Then say 90 (45%) of the year group got 5+ A*-C, including 15 of the 20, who are now not the youngest but the oldest in their year. Excellent! Good result, surely. Errr, no. Because the 'kept back' students' results don't count, though the equivalent 20 from the year below DO count towards the total cohort. So the result the school has to report is not 45% but 37.5% (75 of 200 students). Which, unfortunately, is below the government-imposed 'floor target.'

So the school involved will quite likely be put into Special Measures and flagged up as a failing school.

So the problem is not the admissions rules set by Local Authorities but the system of counting exam results set by Government, as any educationalist could tell you. And yet, not a single mention of that in all the reporting of this I have seen.

Sigh. At least I don't work in schools any more.

You can frighten some of the people some of the time...

Q: What do Scottish independence, the migrant crisis and Jeremy Corbyn have in common?
A: Despite the Establishment trying to frighten them into one viewpoint the British public eventually stuck two fingers up and went the other way.

I think this statement requires a bit of unpacking.

First, what do I mean by the Establishment? Well, I am referring to a strange and unholy alliance that seems to have grown up on some issues between the Libdemtorylabour party high command, the newspapers and mainstream TV. Basically, all those who seem convinced that UKIP (which received 12.6% of the vote in the 2015 election) represents the views of the British population and Nigel Farage is their spokesman. There is (on the face of it) little in common between the SUN, the BBC and the Labour party, but on all three of the issues mentioned above they seem to have been pretty much of one mind, and passing on more or less the same messages to the population at large. Which were (and are):

Scottish independence - Oooh. NO! Definitely not. Scottish independence will result in economic collapse, the disintegration of our glorious country and the summary execution of English incomers at the border by armed SNP terror groups.

Migrant crisis - Shit! Help. We're going to be overrun. There are swarms of them out there and they are ALL climbing the fences in Calais to get to Britain.

Jeremy Corbyn - Oh My actual God! He will single-handedly bring about a reversal of the space-time continuum and take us back to the seventies! There will be rubbish in the streets, black and white TV and crimplene flares. And Jimmy Saville ffs!

I am summarising, but those were pretty much the messages. And how did the Great British Public react? Initially they seem to have gone along with it. The pro-independence campaign had a slow start in Scotland, for a time Jeremy Corbyn seemed a bit of a joke, and few people seemed keen to challenge publicly the ludicrous idea that most of sub-Saharan Africa was parked out in Calais, waiting to get across to Britain where they would, on arrival, be given a house and generous benefits for life.

But in time things changed. Support for Scottish independence grew through a grass-roots movement of unprecedented scope, coming to within a whisker of victory. Corby emerged as the front runner, increasingly desperate scare tactics by the BlairMandelbrot doing nothing but boost his momentum. And as for the migrant crisis - well that has been the most heartening of all. Because what people did was not pontificate or protest. They started giving. It has been a grass roots campaign again, people collecting and distributing stuff for the migrants in Calais and offering places in their homes to Syrian refugees.

And what does that show? That, thank God, scare tactics only work up to a certain point, and in today's interconnected world probably less well than they ever did before, because people can talk to each other now. They no longer rely on the Establishment to provide their world view.

They have learned that they can say, "No. Fuck off. We are better than that."

What would it mean for the Labour party if Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader?

I would begin by saying that Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader appears a foregone conclusion, except that the combined effects of unreliable polls and extreme press coverage make any such definitive statement questionable. It really is quite hard to dig beneath the hyperbole-ridden narrative to discern what real people actually think, but what I can say is that a remarkable range of people of my acquaintance seem (sometimes to their own surprise) to be pro-Corbyn.

However his election will not (would not) be the end of the story. There is a line of argument that suggests that he will lead the Labour party, and henceforth the country, back to the sunlit uplands of austerity-free social justice and progressive socialism, and another that he will preside over internal division and electoral collapse unmatched since the days of Michael Foot. Others of course believe that it won't make a blind bit of difference either way.

So what is the truth? And, more generally, what difference does it make to a large organisation like the Labour party (or an even larger one like the United Kingdom) who is or is not appointed its leader?

I have always found it mildly irritating when presenters on TV history shows say of a castle that it was built by King Alan (or whoever. There never was a King Alan, I don't think, but I like the name). Whatever the truth about the construction of the castle in question, one thing can be said with some certainty: King Alan did not build any part of it. Indeed King Alan would probably have struggled to tell one end of a pickaxe from the other and would have been very unlikely to have had any meaningful understanding of the load-bearing properties of stone arches. Why should he? He would have had people to do all that.

The same thing applies in a more general sense to the leaders of almost any large organisation. It is often said of chief executives that they "built the business up from nothing" and of head teachers that they "turned the school around," but what does that actually mean? The chief executive of a widget-manufacturing company will never have manufactured a single widget and neither will the head teacher have done much in the way of teaching of the students in their school. Indeed in very large and hierarchical organisations the head will have had very little direct involvement at all in any aspect of the running of their organisation. There will be levels and tiers of management between them and any of the actual workings so that their role becomes purely strategic.

So is that the fundamental importance of a leader then - to provide strategic direction? That would seem almost too obvious to be worth stating. Yet even there the importance of the leader is a shifting and amorphous thing. In really big organisations the only ways for the leader to provide strategic direction are through the appointment of (a few) key individuals and the occasional statement of principle. Yet the really effective leaders are those who appoint independent-minded people with strategic understanding of their own and then delegate to them not just tasks but responsibility and decision-making power too. And if they do that, is it not the people they appoint that begin providing the strategic direction? What is more, though the central decisions and keynote policy statements that a leader makes would appear to define strategic direction, in reality that is often less clear. Keynote policy statements are often pretty vague and amorphous things until they are translated into working policies, and that is work that is never done by the leader who made the initial statement.

All of this is very true of party leadership and of the office of prime minister as well. The PM may have made a grand statement in a party conference or an election manifesto, but that means nothing whatever until it is translated into deliverable policy by an army of civil servants, by which time it may well resemble only very loosely the vision that the politician initially outlined. They can hire and fire of course, but only (in most cases) within the relatively restricted pool of elected MPs, each of whom will have his or her firmly established strategic vision, to the point where cabinet reshuffles seem less like opportunities to provide strategic direction and more like attempts at herding cats.

And yet, it is the leaders who have made the political weather over time, is it not? There would have been no New Labour revival without Blair, and (obviously) no Thatcherism without Thatcher. And to take the example most closely related to the topic of this post, it was Michael Foot whose appointment hammered the last nail into the coffin of Old Labour, was it not?

Well, yes and no. Thatcher came to define a generation with its unholy amalgam of unbridled free-market capitalism, social division and the diminution of all forms of collective action. Blair was synonymous with Cool Britannia, PFI and the availability of highly skilled, cash-in-hand Polish builders. Yet did they change the weather or simply reflect meteorological changes that would have happened whether they arrived or not?

And what of Michael Foot? A more decent, principled politician it would be hard to identify yet the utter collapse of the Old Labour project did take place on his watch and the worry that the appointment of the modern-day politician who most closely resembles him (Jeremy Corbyn) will have the same effect seems a reasonable one.

I would argue though that the contexts are utterly different, and context is all. The assumption from a cursory analysis of UK history would be that Blair and Thatcher were effective leaders and Foot ineffective, but that is to ignore their context. Blair and Thatcher each in their own ways articulated a desire (which struck a chord with the electorate) for change - for an escape from a set of attitudes and process that people had tired of. In Thatcher's case it was an escape from the ageing and crumbling post-war consensus on the need for large and bureaucratic collective structures (nationalised industries, banks, unions) to to keep the country on the straight and narrow. In Blair's it was the nasty parochial anti-communiarianism of Thatcherism people were fed up of.

But what of Foot? Well it seems to me that he didn't offer the populace escape from anything really. In a time when many people were pretty much fed up of collective action, in "the longest suicide note in history" he proposed more of it. There might have been a great deal of unease about where Thatcher was taking the country, but even the working class (so-called Essex Man) was guiltily seduced by the idea that maybe they wouldn't have to sit through interminable union meetings any longer but could sell their council houses, get a credit card and spend, spend, spend.

Jeremy Corbyn's context is very different. It is free-market capitalism that the general populace is sick to the back teeth of now. They have had enough of city wide-boys putting their pension pots on the 3.45 at Chepstow and laughing all the way to the bank when the bet failed, leaving them having to work until they are 75. There is a depressing uniformity, and has been for years, to what politicians are allowed by their spads to say in public and at least Jeremy Corbyn is saying something different, and even appearing to say what he thinks rather than what a focus group in Wolverhampton has determined is the most electorally acceptable thing for him to say.

Being a refreshing voice on the media circuit is very different to being party leader of course, let alone PM, but what is interesting is the effect Corbyn has had during the campaign, even on what one might think to have been the archetypal tough audience- his leadership opponents. Until he emerged as the potential winner the Labour leadership[ contenders appeared to be vying with each other for the "Blandest Political Statement Imaginable" prize - desperate to show how electable they would be by never saying anything whatever that might alarm or offend (or indeed interest) anyone at all. Yet, stung into action by Corbyn's direct honesty and inexplicable popularity they have suddenly started coming up with ideas that one couldn't imagine having been pre-approved by Conservative Central Office. Yvette Cooper caught the changing public mood rejecting Tory little-Englandism by arguing for  the admission of 10,000 Syrian refugees and Andy Burnham said he would include Corbyn in his cabinet and agreed with many of his ideas.

And I can't imagine Corbyn being a Brown-like control freak intent on stifling any and all opinions that are not congruent with his own world-view. The role he has laid out for himself in the campaign is something between what Belbin would call a 'co-ordinator' and a 'plant' and that really isn't a bad position for a party leader, or indeed a PM, to take. If he can regenerate the self-belief and political engagement of the Labour party and remind them why they (presumably) got into politics in the first place then maybe all he has to do is make a few high-minded statements of principle and let others get on with the business of translating those into policy.

For too long Labour has been frightened of its own shadow and ashamed of the political compromises they have had to make to cling to power. But that is no sort of atmosphere to bring out the best in people. So if Corbyn at least gets people thinking a bit and gives his colleagues the confidence occasionally to say what they actually think, then maybe that is all that the Labour party needs.

We'll have to wait and see.

Why the anti-Jeremy Corbyn vitriol?

Jeremy Corbyn's unlikely emergence as the clear front-runner to succeed poor Ed seems to have got the Labour party all in a tizzy. At one level this is amusing: surely only the Labour party would become so terrified when one of its leadership contenders turned out to be popular. At another level though it is initially baffling that so many Labour stalwarts seem so keen to predict electoral meltdown, internal schisms, fire, pestilence and eternal damnation should a mild-mannered North London intellectual be elected to become their leader.

Some degree of antagonism during an election process is inevitable of course - how does one rescue a failing campaign except by attacking one's more successful rival? However what we have seen of recent days has been an order beyond that. There seems a real hatred of Jeremy Corbyn and all he stands for - odd, since the hatred seems one-way. He by contrast has refused to engage in mud-slinging and appears to be conducting a campaign remarkably free from vitriol. Even his supporter Ken Livingstone, usually the first to enter any slanging match, accused Tony Blair of no more than having failed to read Corbyn's manifesto.

So what is it all about, this hatred? Why did Blair accuse Corbyn of seeking to 'annihilate' labour and why did Alistair Campbell urge Labour voters to support 'anyone but Corbyn'?

The Corbynistas' view would be a simple one of course. Blair and Campbell are the spawn of the devil and all the other candidates have been brainwashed by their evil campaign to turn Labour into an offshoot of the Tory party. New Labour was a cynical betrayal of everything true believers like them held dear and so New Labour cannot forgive heroic mavericks like Jeremy Corbyn who speak truth to power and question its legacy.

There is some truth in this of course, but also some wilful fantasy. Many of Corbyn's supporters probably are champagne socialists plotting the downfall of the capitalist hegemony from the comfort of their Georgian townhouses, safe in the knowledge that whatever radical policies he pursues it won't touch their final-salary pensions or (horror of horrors) lead to house price deflation. Also, much as it soured towards the end, Blair's New Labour project certainly did do some good things. In the shadow of Iraq it is easy to forget the minimum wage, capital investment in schools, reductions in child poverty, Third World debt write-offs, peace in Northern Ireland... I could go on.

It is also pretty absurd to suggest that Blair and others hate Jeremy Corbyn because he stands for social justice and a protective State. For all their differences of opinion on methods, surely Labour supporters broadly agree on ideals. So why the hatred then?

Partly of course it is the simple fact that there is no conflict more vicious than an internecine conflict. The human species seems to reserve its bitterest hatred for those most like themselves: the Jews and the Arabs; the Northern Ireland Protestants and the Northern Ireland Catholics; Indian Kashmiris and Pakistani Kashmiris; New Labour and Old Labour. Where fundamental values and cultures are entirely different we seem to rub along pretty well: it is only when we are identical but for one small, but (to us) hugely important, difference that we start killing each other in significant numbers.

There is more to it than that though. Labour has had its fair share of internecine hatreds, even before Iraq, but Blair's outbursts recently, and those of other party stalwarts, feel different. For a start they have not come in the context of an unedifying cat-fight of the sort politicians seem particularly prone to. Jeremy Corbyn is not fighting back (he doesn't need to. He is sitting pretty on 53% in the polls). The hatred seems to be self-generating, and coupled with what appears a genuine fear of an existential crisis for the Labour party.

So why would that be then?

Well, oddly enough I have a theory. I think the explanation lies in a variant of the 'zealous convert' syndrome, by which converts to a religion are frequently more antagonistic to their old beliefs than those who have never converted. Blair, Campbell and the rest seem to me to have just the same uneasy, fearful hatred of Jeremy Corbyn as would a zealous convert of worshippers at their own old church.

You see, much as I never liked or trusted him that much I simply cannot believe that Tony Blair joined the Labour Party with the explicit desire to subvert its fundamental principles in a swivel-eyed pursuit of Thatcherite neo-Conservatism. I remember the honest idealism of his first term. As a country we were reeling from Thatcher's onslaught and Blair brought back some sense of social responsibility, of interest in and care for the under-privileged and of an ethical dimension to policy.

The thing is that, like all serious politicians, Blair was a realist. See things from his point of view and there was a logic to his drift to the Right (sort of). Free enterprise and the unfettered power of capital seemed (at the time) a hugely powerful force which could, if harnessed properly, lead to real social good. And for a time it worked. Brown let the bankers off the leash and Labour used the money that came rolling in for some fantastically valuable investment in schools, hospitals and the incomes of the less well-off. Win-win, surely.

Yet there are consequences to selling one's soul, even for the best of motives. Blair, Brown and the rest knew that financial deregulation and the opening of public services to private enterprise was making some people hugely and unfairly wealthy and eroding something central in the UK's view of itself. Yet they went along with it with the slightly manic zeal of recent converts to a charismatic cult. Peter Mandelson's use of the word 'intensely' to show just how relaxed he was at people becoming extremely wealthy shows the internal tensions they were all living with though. Surely even he could have spotted the absurdity of the oxymoron.

And now it is those zealous converts to New Labour that face the existential crisis. Like Faustus, having sold their souls they then discover not just the price, but the illusory nature of the prize too. It is not just that New Labour's reputation now seems (unfairly, in some ways) tarnished beyond recovery, it is also that the unsavoury weapon (neo-conservative economic policies) they gritted their teeth to grasp in pursuit of their aims turns out not to have been a very useful weapon at all. Bank deregulation didn't give us riches beyond the dreams of avarice, it bankrupted us for a generation.

And what Jeremy Corbyn does that is completely unforgivable is to remind them that the uncomfortable road they bravely chose to follow in pursuit of their noble aims really wasn't the only road at all. And didn't take them quite where they wanted to go either. But one thing a zealous convert will never do, however conflicted (s)he might feel and however uneasy deep down about their new religion, is to convert back again.

So don't expect a gracious acceptance of Jeremy Corbyn's victory form Tony Blair any time soon.

London

I don't think I realised the extent to which adrenaline was fuelling my cycle ride in the last few headwind-plagued days. Now though, back in London, it is out of my system and I am utterly and completely exhausted, described by my partner Julie as a broken owl. It's an unusual image but feels oddly appropriate as I hunker down, my feathers fluffed out, my achiles tendons aching, staring wide-eyed at the wind bending the branches of the London plane trees outside.

John o Groats to Land's End was certainly a journey, though it is not immediately obvious where to. It was packed full of immensely valuable experiences - of nature, of the scale and variety of the country, of the people and places encountered along the way - but what did it all amount to as a complete endeavour? Did it have any meaning, and is it even important whether it did or not?

It is interesting of course that we started in Scotland - the country where I lived as an adolescent and young adult - and finished in England, where I now live. Interesting too though that the countryside where we ended up was so strongly reminiscent of the countryside where we began - not just Bodmin Moor with its trackless expanse of sheep-shorn grass tufted with gorse but the wild immensity of the Atlantic seen from Land's End itself. But in a sense the whole endeavour was time apart and divorced from the normal rhythm of my life. I simply cannot now imagine myself getting up tomorrow morning, pulling on cycling shorts still damp from the previous night's washing in the sink, and clipping on a pair of wet and muddy cycling shoes before heading out through unknown tracts of Britain to some distant bed and breakfast and the prospect of a hot shower and a meal involving chips.

Of course journeys have often been seen by religious and philosophical traditions as central to spiritual development. There are symbolic journeys, like the Pilgrim's Progress or the Ramayana or even the Odyssey, but physical journeys are also often seen as valuable or even compulsory undertakings for any devotee. In the Christian tradition there is pilgrimage to sites made holy by a variety of saints, in Islam the Haj, and in the Hindu tradition a huge variety of such undertakings, to and around a whole range of sacred rivers, lakes and mountains.

And it is undeniable that there is some sense in all of us of travel as a metaphor for something to do with our development as people. We talk about 'voyages of discovery', of making 'a great leap forward' in our thinking, or by contrast of being 'stuck in a rut' or 'bogged down' by problems. When we are working through those problems we feel that we are 'really getting somewhere' and 'forging ahead.' So there must be something intrinsic there that we are tuning in to. Journeys really must be good for the soul, in one way or another.

And for me, I am really not sure that it matters where my particular journey led me, because it led me forward. I thought about things, looked at things, experienced things. And then came home.

One word I didn't consider in my somewhat teacherly post prior to setting out was in a sense the most obvious one: voyage. Voyage has its root in the Latin word for a road, 'via', and maybe it encapsulates the essence of what a true voyage is all about. It's not really about the destination at all, or about the challenge of reaching it, or even about the purpose for doing so. It's about the road. About the setting of one foot in front of the other.

Or in my case, the endless repetition of the pedal turns.

Land's End

So we made it, and when we got there who should we see but Michael Portillo filming a piece to camera for a series called Coast to Coast. Land's End is altogether more of a commercial operation than John o Groats, with a fairly ghastly looking theme park and a photography business set up at the signpost. It is a stunningly beautiful place though, and the Atlantic stretches out, wildly beautiful, to eternity.

We were greeted by Martin's family and friends and my own daughter, whooping and whistling and bearing bottles of Prosecco. I felt rather sorry for an Australian end-to-end cyclist who arrived at the same time and was met by no one. Later, as we were being driven back to our accommodation we overtook him cycling back to Penzance.

The last day was actually one of the hardest, with torrential rain in the morning and the strongest headwinds we had encountered all trip. I had reached a sort of mental exhaustion too, and a couple of times on some of the last big hills I almost fantasised about getting off the bike and walking. Seeing the hill stretching on up and feeling my legs burning and my heart pounding I would quite vividly imagine myself admitting defeat and walking the last bit of the hill, pushing my bike.

The weird thing was that my legs simply didn't seem to get the message. They just carried on turning the pedals and before I knew it I would be at the top (and hit by the suddenly even more ferocious headwind). Maybe it was what my late wife called my Mastermind complex: "I've started so I'll finish."

I started this ride, so I finished it.

Dunmere

Nearly there now, though going over Bodmin Moor was rather disconcerting. Sitka spruce plantations, dry stone walls, bracken, gorse, sheep. I thought I was back in the highlands again. In fact though the flowers held the clue: the gorse (in full flower in the highlands) had completely gone over, and the foxgloves were down to their last few florets at the end of long flower spikes. Also the sheep were all shorn, and the lambs almost as big as their mothers.

Today was the day to which words such as 'challenge' and 'battle' were most appropriate - nearly ninety miles and a constant series of sharp ascents and descents ( we climbed a total of 5,500 feet today apparently) and all in the face of a consistent headwind. I had known this all along of course (apart from the headwind), and a part of me had been dreading today, and wondering if I was physically up to it. Yet the odd thing was that in the end it was a bit of an anti-climax. Yes it was hard, and yes, some hills had me pretty much at the limit of what I was capable of. But the fact was, each hill was just another hill, with nothing particularly special about it. And at the end I didn't get a great sense of elation at having passed a personal milestone.

The thing is, (and this may sound odd coming from someone who has recently done the London to Brighton 100k single-day walk and the JoGtoLE end-to-end cycle ride) that I have realised that challenging myself physically is really not something that motivates or even interests me hugely. Yes, I am competitive and yes, I am pleased that I have demonstrated to myself that I can do it, but I have no interest for instance in doing this cycle ride again and beating my time. Or running a marathon. Or anything of the sort, really.

Some people clearly are hugely motivated by discovering and then extending the limits of what their bodies are capable of. I admire such people, but I am not one of them, I have realised.

So why did I do this? It's a big question and I haven't quite got there in answering it yet, but some of it certainly is to do with getting a sense of the whole country - how it changes and how it connects. Some of it too was probably about the symbolism of setting myself a task that was long and arduous and then ensuring that I achieved it. But some of it was almost akin to mindfulness, I realise now. It takes a while, but eventually you do stop thinking about the pain in your backside or the ache in your ankles, or about how far there is to go and how long this climb will last, and you just let your mind go free. And you see and hear and smell things and the incessant rhythm of the pedal-turns frees your mind. For a while. Until the burning in your legs is so bad you can no longer ignore it.

Tiverton

A day of persistent heavy rain and 12 degrees Celsius welcomed us into the West Country. I am sure it was an utterly beautiful ride but its charms were lost on me. We stopped for lunch in a Sainsburys in Bridgewater and sat shaking with cold in the unheated cafe, eating soup and drinking hot chocolate and staring blankly at the rain pounding down outside. The cleaning lady asked us to tell her when we were leaving so she could mop up the muddy water under our chairs . Still, nothing a hot bath at journey's end can't fix.

The route we have been following is a 'safe' route that avoids main roads and makes extensive use of cycleways. It is my first experience of these really - in London I ride in the road, regarding my bike as another vehicle - and they give a completely different feel to the experience of cycling.

I wouldn't choose cycleways if I was in a hurry, but they are often really lovely. Many are on canal towpaths and abandoned railways, and not only are these guaranteed to be more or less level and traffic-free, they are also wonderful corridors of biodiversity through farmland and towns, which is ironic really given their original purpose as the arteries of industrial Britain. Cycling them is also more sociable than belting along head-down beside the traffic on the A38.You see fishermen, canal boaters, dog walkers, elderly couples, families - all human life is there. And everyone says hello (or regional variants).

The problem is that though the best are superb, some are truly atrocious. In towns they can lead you to busy junctions then simply stop, or require you to cross and recross busy roads, or be simply a narrow section of potholed, gritty tarmac delineated by a line that drivers simply ignore. And canal railway paths are hugely variable both as to their surface and the frequency and nature of the anti-motorbike barriers. Some are smoother tarmac than an A road, but others are impossibly rough, muddy, rutted, or even impassable even by mountain bike. The barriers can be such as can be simply rode through (carefully) or they may require you to get off and lift the bike over.

And the thing is, you simply can't tell. There is some (fairly minimalist) signage on cycleways nowadays and they are marked and rouetable on Google, but nowhere is there any sort of indication as to quality, or indeed rideability. So you can head down National Cycle Rout 63 (or whatever) and suddenly find yourself in ankle-deep mud or on a grass towpath with a single four-inch wide meandering smooth line that takes immense concentration and good bike-handling skills to follow.

It's a shame, because I reckon as a country we have made huge advances in encouraging cycling and we're 90% there. The problem is, the other 10% can turn a nice day out into a bit of a epic struggle.

Clevedon

Not much to say about the ride today, or too tired to say it, which amounts to the same thing. More endless rolling miles of country roads, more headwind, more beautiful ancient villages and more contented dairy cattle chewing the cud in lush meadows bordered by neatly trimmed hedgerows. Aside from the industrial areas round Bristol it was largely Shires England at its poshest. Lovely to ride through but I wouldn't want to live there, despite being white, native English speaking, middle aged and relatively well off (which I reckon are pretty much all prerequisites).

So instead of writing about the ride I will write a little about why we are doing it - or why Martin, my ride companion, is anyway. Martin is 61 and has had type 1 (insulin dependent) diabetes since the age of 20. It is clear that the diagnosis came as a bit of a shock to an active, sociable, beer-drinking student back then in the seventies, and it is apparently only recently that he has talked to anyone much about it. His wife and kids knew, of course, which was handy in case he went into a hypoglycaemic coma, but it really wasn't something he ever mentioned. He had learned to handle it in his own way and has always done so very effectively, thanks to good common sense, a sound understanding of food (he cooks for the family) and a handy bag of jelly babies.

I didn't really know any of this of course, but there is nothing quite like spending hours and endless hours grinding along endless country roads to encourage conversation. I also didn't realise to what extent he is set on proving to himself that diabetes (well managed) is not a disability and does not stand in the way of a full and active life. So he swims every morning of the year in Hampstead ponds, cycling up there for 7 am rain, wind or snow.

And so he set out to achieve a lifelong ambition and cycle the length of the country, and I am very pleased to accompany him in doing so. We have to be careful to time food breaks sensibly and I have come to notice when his blood sugar is dropping (simple really - he slows up and goes quiet) but he is unquestionably going to do it.

Martin is raising money for Diabetes UK and has a JustGiving page at https://www.justgiving.com/Martin-Ransley/

Worcester

Canal boats here in the Midlands have a whole different set of connotations from those in the Lea valley in North London. There the inhabitants are often young eco-warriors unwilling or unable to enter London's ridiculous rental (let alone mortgage) market for property. Up here the owners seem much more likely to be men and women of a certain age who see their boat as an idyllic hideaway and quaintly old-fashioned. Instead of stacks of skip-salvaged firewood and nests of well-used mountain bikes, on the roofs of these you will see hand-painted traditional tin jugs and drifts of petunias planted in wooden mock wheelbarrows. Instead of Peruvian alpaca earwarmers the canal-boaters here sport wide-brimmed canvas sunhats, and in place of the ubiquitous solar panels here you tend to see elaborate TV aerials.

The odd thing is that the boats look very similar (though a tad neater and more pristinely painted round here) and have the same sorts of names - 'Free Spirit' and 'Rosie Lee' and 'Jenny Wren' and the like. There is also much more in common than first appears in the atmosphere around them. Here too there is something apart about the canal boaters. They are a small, physically isolated community living out their days on these corridors of tranquillity while twenty-first century life rushes past on either side. So maybe the dreadlocked eco-warriors of Hackney and Walthamstow have more in common with this particular band of Midlands retirees than would initially appear the case.

The canals really are corridors of tranquillity too. Nowadays often quite heavily wooded on both sides, except where they wend their way half-invisibly through post-industrial towns and cities, they are alive with wild flowers, dragonflies and even kingfishers. On one occasion we raced a kingfisher for the best part of a mile. It wasn't much of a race to be honest, except that every hundred yards or so the bird would perch on an overhanging branch and wait for us to catch up. The electric blue of its back against the dark water was magical, and sometimes as it faced us from its perch I would see the contrasting deep red of its breast. Truly gorgeous.

For the rest we passed through a lot of what looked like Archers country, with enamelled signs on farm gates proudly proclaiming the quality of their pedigree Holstein herds. One place boasted a 'Well kept village' award that I am sure was largely the work of a local Linda Snell (and woe betide anyone whose hanging baskets remained unwatered). Mind you, they also had a scarecrow competition that I am not sure Linda would have been happy with: one of the exhibits was a man seated on a toilet with his Y-fronts round his ankles. I mean, maybe that sort of thing is acceptable in Penny Hassett, but really!

One last little incident to recount. As we were getting ready to leave Stoke-on-Trent this morning I was wondering aloud to my ride companion where I could get some black insulating tape to hold in place the end of my handlebar tape. Suddenly I was interrupted by a white van driver who had been parked nearby. Clearly having overheard us he walked over holding out a new and unopened roll of said tape he had got from the back of his van. He said, 'here you are. I've got plenty,' then got into his van and drove off before I could give him the roll back.

Not sure that would happen in London.

Stoke-on-Trent

Today we were cycling right through George Osborne's northern powerhouse and the predominant sense was of industrial decline. Our (no main roads) route took us primarily along canal towpaths and abandoned railways, with one section round the side of a vast slagheap. These were often serene and beautiful (if occasionally muddy and unkempt) places but I couldn't help remembering that they would once have been alive with freight transport of various kinds.

Alongside our route much of the landscape was post industrial. We saw a few old potteries, with buddleia growing out of the bottle chimneys and a couple of unidentified factories that looked shut up and abandoned. Incongruously though this is also the region of the multi million Cheshire mansion and some rural stretches made their way past what could only be described as stately homes for the twenty first century, with thoroughbreds grazing in beautifully kept rolling pastures.

Being largely on footpath / cycleways we met lots of people, a large proportion of whom greeted us with a cheery "how do" and pulled in to the side of the path to let us through. There were dog walkers, men with fold up chairs fishing in the canal, kids making the most of the start of their summer holidays and mums with pushchairs and a gaggle of kids.

At one point we stopped for some bike fettling near an old lady who was chatting at length with an old gent as her dog waited patiently down the path. Eventually she set off again, and about 50 metres on met another old gent and stopped again. I could almost see her dog sighing and wondered how long her morning constitutional took.

The other sort of person I kept seeing was  men in their late forties or fifties walking alone without dog or fishing gear. They wore saggy workmen's trousers and faded baseball caps and though many were tall and had once clearly been well built they all stooped slightly, their shoulders slumped.

It is easy to read too much into a pair of faded trousers that have become loose and shabby but these men became symbols of industrial decline too, for me. They looked like the kind of man who should be working in some sort of heavy industry, operating a lathe or a sheet steel press, rather than walking down a canal towpath to some crappy zero hours contract job.

I have on occasion felt sorry for myself because my career as a head came to an end with no send off. But as I cycled past these men on my carbon fibre framed road bike I certainly found myself counting my blessings.

Preston

We were slowed up a little today because a friend wanted to join us for a stage, but that just gave more time to appreciate the gorgeous scenery, especially on the first half of the day through the Cumbrian fells and skirting the Lake District. Londoners would call this the North, but actually we are half way down the country now, and compared to what we have been cycling through this feels much more southern. The hills are softer, greener, more rounded. There are meadows dotted with Fresian cows and even the hill farms are neatly divided into fields with drystone walls. In the verges cranesbill and meadowsweet are in full bloom and the elder bushes, which in the North were white with flowers are, down here, studded with tiny green berries.

Even the smells are different - the thinly spiced aroma of the Scots pines replaced with the fruity reek of dairy farms (a smell instantly familiar and comforting from my childhood in Berkshire). The Irish Sea, when we reached it, was a placid grey green and smelled of estuary mud, with not a trace of the harsh salty tang of the North Sea. On three or more occasions people have overheard conversations about where to go and which direction to take and have simply butted in to volunteer the information, with none of the cautious reserve I still associate with highlanders.

The impression of approaching the South was rounded off this evening when we went for dinner.The friend who had joined us is Greek, as was the proprietor of the restaurant in which we ate. Cue much expansive conversation about the old country, the only words of which I could follow were 'ndaxi' and 'epharisto', sudden appearance of multiple dishes we had not ordered and generally much conviviality.

Now I am emphatically not saying that unexpectedly convivial hospitality like that would be less likely in Scotland, it's just that the whole scene was so unmistakably North London that I would not have been surprised to open the door of the restaurant and find myself in Green Lanes. Instead of Preston, Lancashire, birthplace of Wallace and Gromit creator, Nick Parks.

 Mind you, Mr Google tells me that the UK's first KFC was opened in Preston (in 1965) so there you go. Practically London.

Shap

Just a short one today because I only rode the last twenty miles of today's stage after driving back up from London. The contrast in modes of travel was interesting though, from the hecticness of the M6 to the tranquillity of bowling along through the Cumbria hills with that rarest of things, a tailwind, making the road roll smoothly backwards below my wheels.

There is a rhythm to cycling, in a very explicit and physical sense. Your legs have a natural favoured tempo and I fell back into mine with a strange sense almost of coming home to it. After a while they move in that tempo so automatically that a downhill section where you stop pedalling actually feels disruptive. And if it wasn't for the arse pain and an irritating bit of incipient tendinitis in my ankle I begin to feel as if my legs could carry on that rhythm indefinitely.

It's a pleasant feeling really, and after a time frees you up just to look around and to listen, and to let your thoughts drift. Listening is an interesting aspect actually, because another surprise has been how bloody noisy it is a lot of the time, so periods of relative quiet are particularly blessed.

When you cycle beside a main road (our route means we hardly ever cycle actually on one) the noise from the traffic is almost overwhelming. And it's not so much engine noise as a sort of incessant swishing rumbling roar from the tyre noise and wind of passing of the endless speeding vehicles.

Even away from main roads though, if you have a headwind then the roar of it in your ears drowns out any other sound and you can only converse in shouts, or more likely not at all. And even when there is no wind noise, cycles are rarely actually a silent mode of transport. There are the ticking noises from the gears, the soft swish of the tires on the tarmac, and the thin scratchy whisper of a chain in keep of oil.

But you can tune those out, and so when you're away from traffic and there's no headwind, and the gears are properly adjusted, and the garmin isn't chirping at you, and you're not freewheeling them you do get something like silence.

And finally you can hear the birdsong and the soft rustling of the creatures in the hedgerows.

Queensferry

Another tough day, with pissing rain, some big climbs and a near constant twenty to thirty mph headwind all the way. All finished off with an even stronger headwind crossing the Forth Road Bridge. However we made good time, which was just as well for my complicated travel arrangements. I am now interrupting my journey to attend my daughter's graduation while my ride companion carries on, his son temporarily accompanying him on my bike.

So this is a halfway point for me in a sense and a chance to reflect on whatever I might have learned.

First, it turns out that the world is quite large, but not incomprehensibly so. Cycling as we have been is not that much quicker than the speed an enthusiastic traveller of previous centuries might  have achieved, given a fit and willing horse. And the pace of our journey would not have been beyond the imagination of even our prehistoric ancestors.

And the thing is that travelling at that pace seems to make you far more aware of how far you have gone, and how much landscape, day length and weather have changed as a result. When you fly you barely notice these things because they happen in the blink of an eye. Even going by train or car isn't the same because during the journey you are insulated from the world.

Making your own way through the landscape though really shows you, not just how much of it there is but how much of it we can explore - how far we can go. No wonder exploration seems to have become something of an addiction for so many ancient peoples. There is something uniquely empowering about it- the sense almost of having potential access to the whole world, if only one took the time to venture out.

The other thing I have learned applies I feel to all sorts of journeys, physical and metaphorical. It was someone like Confucius who said that a  journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but that is only partly true. Because single steps is all it is really, beginning, middle and end.

The idea of cycling nearly a thousand miles can be a daunting one as you study the maps in advance. But after a few days of actually doing it you realise that the next day, and the next, will just be days, maybe a little tougher, maybe less, than today, but all in all just days.

Similarly when you see a big climb ahead you begin to understand that it is just another climb, and simpler than that, that each pedal turn is just another pedal turn -  no harder or more intimidating than any of the countless thousands you have already done.

What this realisation gives rise to is two feelings. The first is a sort of phlegmatic acceptance that the next pedal turn is not of itself going to either cripple you or finish the ride, so you may as well just do it and stop worrying. The goal of the day is too remote to concern yourself with so you might as well just live in the moment. And, surprise surprise, do that and you actually start enjoying the experience. Sort of.

The second feeling is subtler but more empowering still. Once you can really stop focusing on the goal and the destination, and start instead to enjoy the experience of turning over the pedals (and looking at the view, listening to the bird song, chatting with your ride companion) then paradoxically you begin to find that before you know it the goal has been achieved anyway. You find yourself in your evening rest spot glowing with physical exertion and starving hungry.

Which is a pretty damn fine set of sensations too.

Blair Atholl

A tough day today, with a strong headwind all day and little shelter on the uplands, including on the twenty mile slog up to the Drumochter pass. A beautiful day too though, particularly the first half through the forests of the Cairngorms National Park.

Forest is a word with negative connotations in much of the Highlands, implying those vast tracts of dark green sitka spruce plantations that spread like a malign rash over hundreds of square miles, only to be replaced when they are clear-felled by a landscape as desolate as the Somme.

These were different sorts of forests though, at once completely still and alive with a mystery that no bare heathland can approach. In some places they were forests of stately birch and oak, with hazel and willow crouching at the edges where the woodland petered out into heather moor. Elsewhere though it was Scots pines that predominated. Superficially similar to sitka spruces they give a much more open cover, their reddish trunks bare of branches right up to the crown and mottled with silver-grey lichen.

And this openness allows more light, and so more life down to ground level. So the forest floor was textured with soft mounds of spaghnum moss and undulating carpets of heather, just coming into flower. Elsewhere there were great spreads of blaeberries in fresh green leaf, drifts of multicoloured foxgloves and even clumps of lupins, the predominant shade a deep blue.

Though you could sense that the forest was alive with birds and small animals it also provided plenty of cover so I actually saw very little, aside from a jay that sprang up out of a small bush just as I approached, and on one occasion an adder sunbathing on the road.

Whatever else a journey like this does, if it gives you the opportunity to meander on quiet byways through forests like those then it is worth the hours battling headwinds alongside the A9, in my book.

Tomatin

In a sense it was more of the same today: more space, more time, more sheep. Also more hills, more wind and more incessant arse-ache.

More dreary music too, whenever we stopped for a cup of tea and a restorative bacon sandwich. It was only when I hear Dido's White Flag for the third time that I really noticed it: recent chart hits of a certain type have become the muzak for our times.

All of which suggests that I might not have enjoyed today, but I certainly did. There is something quite unlikely about setting out to cycle nearly a thousand miles and oddly pleasurable to find oneself actually doing it. Nice to picture one's progress on an actual map of Britain and to realise that one has already done the top triangle that is one of those things that gives the island a recognisable shape. There is something uplifting too about seeing a great long hull ahead and instead of feeling one's heart sink thinking instead, 'well I did the last one. And the one before that. And the one before that...' and setting to to labour up this one as well.

This morning over breakfast we got talking to a woman who works for an organisation called something like Scottish Heritage, working mostly with the Outer Isles, Orkney and Shetland. She explained the massive issue she is having at the moment with the Orcadians and Shetlanders objecting (quite justifiably, in my view) to the fact that all of the organisation's letterheads and so on are bilingual, in English and Gaelic, Gaelic never having been spoken in Orkney and Shetland.

For her this was an example of parochialism and the inability to see the big picture but for me it reminded me of how pressing concerns can become for one group of people while others are barely aware of them or dismiss them as trivial. How many londoners, or glaswegians even, would know or care that Orkney and Shetland are not and have never been Gaelic speaking? And yet clearly to the islanders it is an important issue of identity and distinctiveness.

What was also interesting though was the woman's suggested solution to what she regarded as parochialism and I saw as lack of sensitivity. "More people should do what you're doing," she said. "Get on their bikes and cycle the length of Britain."

I didn't point out that a Shetlander might be offended by the suggestion that we were cycling the length of Britain. Because fundamentally I think she was absolutely right.

Golspie

So day one done and time to reflect before sampling whatever culinary delights Golspie town has to offer.  It occurred to me quite early on today that doing a ride like this places one in a club of sorts - defines one, at least for the duration of the ride. It's not a club I feel any particular affinity to, to be honest, but I have to recognise that membership has a certain cachet, particularly to some non members.

In an otherwise deserted gift shop and cafe in a rainy Lybster harbour we were served tea and mushroom soup by a teenage girl who had obviously not had many customers that day, and did not expect many more. She wanted to know all about our ride and at one point said, with real wistfulness in her voice, "I'd like to do something like that one day. It's just, you know..." and turned back to stacking paper napkins.

It is in many ways a futile and nowadays pretty ordinary sort of challenge to undertake, so what is the attraction? Maybe by the end of it I will know better. What today at least has provided me with in abundance is three things notably lacking from the typical London life: time, space and sheep.

Time has a different weight and texture up here. The village shops and Claymore Arms Hotels (other bleakly functional boozers are available) look exactly as they did back in the seventies, the lichen-mottled drystone walls could have been there since the last ice age, and horsedrawn harrows rust outside farm outbuildings that appear both entirely derelict and still in use.

This sort of journey forces different attitudes to time too. Nothing happens very quickly - we are not racing or even pushing particularly hard so ten hilly  miles can  take an hour. On the other hand we are only doing seventy miles a day and have nearly twenty hours of daylight to do it in, so what's the rush?

And the thing is that the combined effect of these two counters to the London view of time is pretty healthy. It's not so much about taking things slower as accepting that time really has very little relevance at all.

Space too, on the scale one experiences it here, is good for the soul. The vistas are enormous, with little in the way of visual detail to distract the eye. And so one notices more: the herd of red deer on a far hillside or the unexpected drifts of red and white foxgloves against the heather. And travelling like this one traverses space slowly enough to appreciate its scale and the slow rate at which the landscape changes, from peat bog to lowland meadows, to marran grass covered dunes. And that too is food for the soul.

And the last thing - in many ways the best of all- is the sheep. Pretty much everywhere, sheep. Sheep have a simplistic view of life really. To misquote someone or other (without data connectivity I can't even find out who), sometimes they stands and chews, and sometimes they just stands. Occasionally they will all set to to baaing about something (or quite conceivably, nothing) until an entire hillside is a cacophony, but mostly they just lumber phlegmatically around chewing at dry - looking stuff that clearly even the wild deer have turned their noses up at.

For some incomprehensible shepherdy reason on some of the lowland farms great herds of what looked like last year's lambs had been herded into large enclosures and, in at least one case, left there untended. The herding itself is a great excitement of course, with madeyed sheep leaping and sprinting everywhere, but once contained, shoulder to shoulder in a sea of grubby wool they just stand there, apparently content. Or at least accepting of whatever incomprehensible fate life had lined up for them.

I'm not saying I envy them. The life of a sheep is dull, brutish and short (to misquote Stella Gibbons this time) and nowadays they don't even get shorn for the summer, but have to mooch around with last year's fleece falling off in unattractive straggles. But what I do envy, sort of, is the attitude (something between resignation and disdain) with which they regard pretty much every aspect of their existence.

John o Groats

One thing I didn't give much thought to is what direction my journey would take as I set off on this adventure and oddly the initial direction at least has been backwards : back into the Highland Scotland of my teenage years.

Partly it was the looming imminence of the mountains glimpsed from the train and the flat immensity of the sky, and partly the eternally outdated looking station platforms and the clusters of pebble dashed bungalows round every village and small town.

The sun was setting at ten pm as we approached Thurso and that too brought back memories of endless midge-clouded summer evenings and the last touch was the seen-it-all minicab driver who regaled us with tall tales of bonkers travellers he had ferried from Wick to John o Groats or back: cyclists on penny farthings and seatless bmxs, or his favourite group, who took two weeks to get there from Edinburgh, stopping at every distillery on the route. Aside from the strange near-Orcadian accent he could have been any of the dryly humorous Muilleachs I remember from my youth.

So I started by going backwards then, and maybe before I go forward again I should rest here a while. Not literally - we have seventy miles to cover today - but metaphysically. On the ride down to Golspie I anticipate encountering very little that will define this as the twenty-first century. So maybe for today it can be the seventies again and I can be a lanky teenager with all my life still ahead of me.

Heading Off

So tomorrow I am heading off to John o' Groats, in order to cycle thence to Land's End (or as my daughter put it, I'm going from John of Oats to Man's End). Why? Good question. It's not for the physical challenge really, but to experience what it means to travel the entire length of the (mainland of) the island on which I have lived for all but four years of my life. Travelling long distances has become so easy and so quick that we often fail to connect with its fundamental importance: people repeatedly tell us that it's a small world, and sometimes it takes travelling at moderate pace and under our own steam to make us realise that really it isn't. The world is just as large as it always was and we are just as small.

I shall attempt to post occasionally to this blog (at least if anything interesting occurs to me) but before starting I thought it worth reflecting on the language we use to describe what I am setting out to do. 'Travel' is of course from the old French 'travail', still in existence in modern French meaning work, and in English carrying even stronger connotations of hardship and extreme effort, reflecting what an onerous business any sort of travel used to be (and still is for commuters to and from London). 'Journey', oddly is from the French word 'journee', indicating a day's length, yet has come to carry connotations of much longer trips (or hops- which was the original meaning of that word).

So neither travel, journey nor trip seems the appropriate word for what I am undertaking. What about 'adventure'? Definitely getting closer. That is from the Latin advenire, meaning to come towards, or arrive, and it carries connotations of looking to the future (in French, l'avenir means the future)- connotations carried even more strongly in the related word Advent. A true adventure (whether in fiction or reality) has the adventurer arrive somewhere utterly different from their place of departure, whether physically or metaphysically, or both.

The word 'pilgrimage' is an interesting one, not that I am suggesting that that is what I am embarking on ('embarking' of course implying getting onto a boat). Its root is in the Latin word for a foreigner or stranger, 'peregrinus', and there is a strong sense for me in the notion of pilgrimage of someone lost in a strange land, seeking meaning through an arduous quest. So not a pilgrimage then, I hope.

What it will also not be is a challenge. 'Challenge' is from the Latin 'calumnia' (also giving root to the word 'calumny') and had originally all sorts of connotations of false accusation, confrontation and the need to prove one's worth. It is an aggressive and disputatious word and I want nothing to do with it on this adventure.

So how about odyssey? The Odyssey has come to be an archetype of the symbolic journey-narrative but its meaning is neither simplistic nor especially comforting. Odysseus' wanderings seem interminable and he is manifestly powerless in the hands of the Gods to whom he is no more than a pawn. Famously also, when he arrives home he finds it utterly changed. Yet maybe because of all that the poem has caught human imaginations for centuries, its central idea perhaps best summed up Tennyson in the lines "I am a part of all that I have met;/Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'/Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades/For ever and forever when I move."

This is a related notion to the ideas in the word 'adventure' and maybe that is partly why we all want to travel /go on a journey/trip/pilgrimage/ move from one place to another from time to time. Maybe we all get a sense sometimes of something just out there, a little beyond the horizon, that might be interesting to explore. As Browning wrote, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/Or what's a heaven for?"

And oddly, just to finish, the word 'explore' is from Latin and originally meant to shout out. A suitable exuberant term I think for what exploration can and should be.

Fear and self-doubt in politics

Yesterday I read an article that suggested that Michael Gove might end up being the best hope this country has seen for some time to carry through liberal reforms of the criminal justice and penal systems. Once I had picked my laptop back up off the floor I read the article again and gave it some serious thought. Because, although I detect a worryingly uncritical attitude to Gove's destructive and anti-intellectual 'reforms' of the education system, I think perhaps on this specific issue the writer may have a point.

The thing is that any putative incoming Labour justice minister would have been prey to the same fear of 'not being tough on crime' that over the past few decades has led Labour Home Secretary after Labour Home Secretary to ramp up both the pointless rhetoric and the unproductive policies of harsher prison sentences. It is called "doing a Blunkett" in the trade. Michael Gove has no such fear. For a start he is the darling of the Right and thus immune from criticism in this sort of area, and secondly he is entirely devoid of any emotion as humanising and empathetic as self-doubt.

Thinking about this led me to reflect more widely on what it takes to be a 'great' political leader: to be a Hero in the terms of the hero-quest narrative of election campaigns that I discussed in a previous post. And it seems that one of the key elements is indeed a complete absence of normal human self-doubt. Thatcher had it, as did Blair in his messianic post-Iraq years, and maybe Cameron has it too, though for a different reason- he has had his self-doubt removed, not by zealous belief in his cause but by utterly impenetrable arrogance.

But why does removal of self-doubt help a leader? Is not self-doubt one of those things that make us human? That allow us to relate to those around us and to question the effect of what we do on others? Indeed it is, but as Shakespeare understood, the qualities that make us human are almost diagrammatically opposite to those that make some of us 'great leaders' in these terms.

(Yes, I had to get it back onto Shakespeare, didn't I.)

King Lear is the best example that comes to mind. Admittedly it is not established particularly forcefully at the start of the play that King Lear is a great leader, but presumably one is expected to take that as read. The country certainly seems settled and prosperous- a "fair kingdom" with "plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads" and Lear is very certain of his own "majesty", appealing to "the sacred radiance of the sun" more or less as an equal and describing himself with grandiose images such as in the phrase "come not between the dragon and his wrath." Even Tony Blair never went quite that far.

What changes, particularly in the course of the thunderous third act, is that he discovers self doubt. At first it is just self-pity, as he describes himself as "A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man," but eventually becomes a genuine impulse to question himself and his previous actions. He admits that "I have ta'en/Too little care of [the plight of the poor]!" and later famously describes himself as a "foolish fond old man" and "not in [his] right mind."

This is far more Ed Miliband than Tony Blair (let alone Thatcher or Cameron) and it is very clear that, although he is bizarrely recrowned King just before his death he is not, by the end of the play, any sort of King at all (or in the terms of my previous post on elections, any sort of Hero). What he is though, possibly for the first time in his life, is a decent, caring human being.

Does this then lead us to the depressing conclusion that what it takes to be a Hero, and thus a successful political leader is a level of hubris and arrogance that banishes self-doubt? Surely not!

For a start, I have never fully understood why absence of self-doubt is equated with heroism (or even bravery) in the first place. Certainly in the more simplistic fairy tales that you find in Hollywood blockbusters it often seems to be (I am not sure that John McClane would ever describe himself as a foolish fond old man) but surely true heroes are those who confront their fears and their self-doubts and work through them in the interests of others. Aren't they?

Interestingly, that is an idea that Hollywood has a peculiar take on, which maybe points us to some of the reasons why thoughtful, questioning politicians are so infrequently successful in the Anglo-American world. In super-hero films self-doubt seems often to be symbolised as something entirely external to the Hero (Superman's kryptonite for instance) which almost fatally weakens him (the gendered pronoun is deliberate) and has to be utterly excised before he can triumph. Far from being an intrinsic and potentially valuable, humanising aspect of his character self-doubt is the enemy of true heroism, or so it would appear to Hollywood executives.

My sense though is that this antiquated notion of political leader as Hero has a pretty limited shelf-life now anyway. In the internet age everything is open to question as never before, and my hope is that any political leader who obdurately refuses (or is unable) to question themselves, their policies or their effect on peoples' lives will not retain public support for ever. To quote the Who, surely to God we won't get fooled again.

And there have been great political leaders who had not had their self-doubt surgically removed, haven't there?

Admittedly the only one who comes to mind right now is Nelson Mandela, but surely there are others.

So what does the election result say about the British people?

My previous post was about the political parties' election campaigns, but election campaigns only explain so much and there are many people out there who believe that the way the general population (or a proportion of them) voted says something profound about the nature of society. And whilst those (like me) on the left may be heartened by the upswell of social consciousness north of the border we are in danger of descending into misanthropy when considering what the election appears to have revealed about our fellow citizens in the rest of the country. Faced with the evidence of the Tories' anti-immigrant, anti-poor, pro-rich policies they voted for more of the same and the Guardian readers amongst us have reacted with something like disgust.

The difficult point though is that, if your sensibilities are democratic then the use of that 'they' is problematic. If we believe that the English are fundamentally self-interested and illiberal then what are we supposed to do? Emigrate? Establish a dictatorship? What? These people don't deserve the vote, do they?

By coincidence, there was an item on the Today programme this morning about the Bradford stadium fire, in which  a doctor who had treated some of the victims commented on the extraordinarily uplifting atmosphere amongst those waiting for emergency surgery. And as he described their unselfish good humour and patience I reflected that more than likely a lot of those football fans would have been UKIP (or at least Tory) voters, holding forth in the pub about fucking immigrants and fucking benefit scroungers.

Certainly, history shows that there is in the English character (if such a thing exists) a strong impulse towards mutual supportiveness, consideration for the underdog and rejection of illiberal dictatorship. Yet there is an equally strong strand more recently for Little Englander insularity and a what-I-have-I-hold lack of generosity towards the 'undeserving' poor. How can that be?

It has often been said that what the right wing parties tap into is a sort of selfishness born of fear. Certainly fear was a powerful weapon for both the Tories and UKIP this time round. UKIP's support is fundamentally dependent on whipping up fear of immigrants and the EU whilst the Tories were all about fear of a Labour-SNP coalition and a descent into the abyss of financial crisis.

However what the Bradford City example (and countless others) show me is that when faced with real and overwhelming fear the British people generally seem to respond nobly and well. In the really tough times they never supported a Hitler or a Stalin (not even a Putin) or turned on their own minorities and the vulnerable within their populations. So why are they apparently doing the latter now?

Well actually I think it is because the fear that the Tories and UKIP evoke is NOT real and NOT immediate, and whilst real fear and real danger can bring about nobility and selflessness the prospect of fear and danger somewhere down the line rarely does. Take immigration for instance. It has come to appear almost a given that the English fear immigration and vote UKIP to protest about it. Yet in the place where immigration has actually been the highest, and had the greatest effect (London) the UKIP vote was the lowest. It is in places near but outside the capital that fear of immigration is at its highest. People from the Home Counties and East Anglia for whom a visit to London is something of an occasion look at the bewildering diversity of ethnicities in the capital and it terrifies them. People who live in the midst of that diversity are relatively much more at ease with it.

Or take the fear of economic crisis and poverty. It is a fact easily ignored, but amidst all the talk of austerity and hard times and financial crises there is a large swathe of the British electorate who have done just fine over the last few years. Yes, their salaries might not have increased, but their mortgage payments have gone down, prices in the shops feel more affordable than they have ever done and their house has shot up in value. Most people in this country aren't on zero-hours contracts. They haven't had their benefits slashed. They probably haven't even lost their jobs, or necessarily know anyone who has. So while everyone has gone on about the economic crisis they have quietly wondered, what economic crisis?

Meanwhile all around fear is being whipped up about the dire and far-reaching consequences of economic ruin and a seed of fear has lodged there, but it is a sort of theoretical and abstract fear- not one that forces its way into their faces and brings out whatever fundamental decency they have deep down. Instead it turns them inwards. Makes them feel grateful that none of this seems at the moment to have affected them too badly and makes them want things to stay that way. So they have voted out of something like cowardice. They don't actively want policies that will lead to a dismantling of the Welfare State and the creation of an entirely unprotected underclass, they just want to ignore all that because, for the moment, they are doing fine and all that talk emanates from a scary parallel reality which they really don't want to think too much about.

My hope is that once the reality of Tory policies start playing themselves out people may start recognising that it is not some parallel reality at all, but their country and their people who are affected, and that may start triggering the fundamental nobility and decency that has served the British so well in times of actual crisis. Once they have seen the implications of the removal of Human Rights legislation, the sell-off of social housing, the £12.5 billion cuts to the last rump of benefit payments, the removal of schools from local democratic accountability, the triumph of insularity over internationalism on the EU question, and more.

Then maybe they will realise that they have sleep-walked into something they really cannot stomach and someone will be able to channel their shame and disgust into a genuinely progressive politics.

The narrative of election victories

The results of the 2015 UK General Election have been described as extraordinary now more times than I can count, and everyone is scratching around for explanations as to why the pollsters got it so wrong and why two neighbouring countries with a shared heritage should have elected two such entirely different sets of political representatives- broadly, England (except for London) going Tory/UKIP and Scotland going to the left of Labour.

(One VERY important caveat here, by the way. Though Cameron's victory is being hailed as if it were virtually unanimous, his party received well under 40% of the vote and still has a majority slimmer than John Major's in the 90s. Still...)

The SNP whitewash has been categorised south of the border (and particularly by the tabloids) as a nationalist, anti-Union and even anti-Labour surge but actually it seems to have been in a sense more extraordinary than that. A country which has always been if anything more socially conservative than its neighbour has apparently swung politically to the left of the most left-wing of the UK-wide parties. The SNP is anti-Trident, anti-austerity, pro-progressive taxation and increased welfare spending and pro-immigration. The Siriza of the UK, or more akin to pre-Blair Labour than anything else. The Tories whom the English elected, meanwhile, argue for reduced taxation and the taking of a flamethrower to the Welfare State.

So how did that happen? One argument of course would be that the Scots have, en masse, moved politically to the Left whilst England (and Wales, it appears) have moved to the Right. To some extent this is no doubt true, but in a sense saying that does no more than restate the original question, with no real explanation. So why has it happened?

Well, one explanation, that is appropriate to the (vague) themes of this blog is the issue of narrative. I have argued before (here for instance) that there is a strong narrative imperative in the way we view the world. As a species we use narrative to construct and inform our view (political and otherwise) of the world, and a simple, clear narrative is more powerful than any logical argument, however clearly stated. And it seems to me that this election has shown that fact more clearly than ever, because the parties that won were the ones with the clear narratives.

First, the Tories. Like any political party facing an election it presented the electorate with a hero quest narrative and they did it very well: there was a goal (the Long Term Economic Plan), a serious danger to escape from (the nameless horrors of the global economic crisis), a villain (the Labour party, which single-handedly, recklessly and with malice aforethought created that global economic crisis), various perils to be navigated (Europe, immigration, financial perdition) and of course an element of comedy (Ed Miliband). Essentially of course there was a hero (David Cameron). I will come to the hero bit in a minute, but it is worth pointing out that there was even a mini-narrative for the election campaign itself (Lynton Crosbie's assertion that polls would not budge until a sudden last-minute swing when people realised they couldn't afford the Miliband risk) and a useful prop (the jokey note to a 'friend' left by the Labour finance minister).

The SNP had an equally strong hero quest narrative. They also had a goal (the establishment of a Scottish Shangri-La), a serious danger to escape from (austerity and the Tory dismantling of the Welfare State) and a villain (a three-headed monster, the ThatcherBlairCameron). Their unexpected, but archetypally Scottish, heroine was Nicola Sturgeon, a feisty wee woman who rose to superstar status.

The UKIP narrative started simple and direct (I have just eaten, so really don't want to spell it out) but began to lose its clarity as Farage back-pedalled from some of the more extreme crap spouted by supporters. It is maybe for that reason that, thank God, UKIP began fading in the polls and didn't achieve their breakthrough.

So what of the losers? Well, I don't think I am the first to point out that neither Labour's not the LibDem's narrative was in any way clear or comprehensible. The LibDems villain was (sort of) the coalition partner they had been in bed with for five years. The danger to be escaped was both (sort of) the same as the Tories' and (sort of) the Tories themselves. Labour's danger to be escaped was in some ways their own past in government (never a strong start...). Business was both a villain and an ally and the prop they used to counter the Tories' treasury note was both literally and metaphorically a tombstone.

(On a side note, it is quite extraordinary how Labour failed to construct a coherent narrative out of the Tories' record, with its failure to eliminate the deficit, bring down immigration or protect the NHS from top-down meddling. It is also extraordinary that they only once seemed to mention that the bogeyman economic crash was brought into existence by policies on bank deregulation that the Tories of the time condemned as not going far enough!)

The disappointing performance of the Greens was another illustration of the narrative imperative. The key moment was Nathalie Bennett's 'brain-melt' in that LBC interview. This was presented as going to the trust issue- that potential voters lost trust in her competence- but I think it was simpler than that. Her inability to recall her party's policies on social housing showed that she had quite literally lost the plot (or forgotten the narrative she was attempting to outline). The Greens have always presented a clear narrative (danger to be avoided- environmental catastrophe and villain anyone who recklessly pursues economic growth) but this time they seemed sometimes to forget themselves what it was and they paid the price.

So what of the heroes of these respective narratives? There is not much point discussing the inadequacies of Clegg and Miliband in that regard. Flawed heroes are all very well in literature, but not for politics. Miliband came across as a decent, well-intentioned geek, Clegg as an unprincipled, power-hungry wannabe, but what they had in common was the fact that both lacked an indefinable something that both Cameron and Sturgeon (for all their diagrammatic dissimilarities from each other) had in spades- self confidence. Clegg knew that the fresh promise he had held out in 2010 was tarnished beyond repair by the student fees betrayal (and more) whilst Miliband was, and no doubt still is, in some sense still the nerdy boy who used to shut himself into the library of Haverstock School every lunchtime.

So what about Cameron and Sturgeon? Well, both had one enormous thing in common: neither had anything like as much to lose as either Miliband or Clegg. Cameron had already announced he would not be standing again after this election and Sturgeon wasn't standing at all. For Sturgeon, anything even vaguely close to what the polls were predicting was always going to be a vast improvement on any previous SNP performance and for Cameron, even if he lost he could pretend that he had sacrificed himself and his political career in the greater national interest and laboured on with the politically unpopular 'tough choices' that only he was brave enough to make (sorry- had to stop for a while. I feel a bit sick).

But there is something deeper still about the nature of both of these heroes. Utterly different in almost every ways, their cultural heritage has gifted both of them a sort of fearlessness that removed the self-doubt which condemned Clegg and Miliband to oblivion. Cameron's fearlessness is born of entitlement- the utterly impervious arrogance of the public school elite, which I have discussed here for instance. This innate self-confidence was boosted by the fact that I really don't think that he (or Gideon or the rest) actually care that much. They haven't got Thatcher's passion or Blair's messianic zeal. They're just doing it all for kicks.

Sturgeon has a different sort of fearlessness. Her's is the 'fuck it, why not?' of the perennial Scottish underdog. She is an Archie Gemmill for the 21st Century, nutmegging the Dutch goalie as Scotland celebrated yet another heroic sporting failure at the 1978 World Cup. She (and all Scotland) knew that however many SNP MPs they sent to Westminster it was unlikely to make a lot of difference so they really had nothing to lose, and God, did she make the most of it.

So how important is this sort of fearlessness to elections in general? Utterly crucial, unfortunately. Thatcher had the fearlessness of the zealot while Major was racked by self-doubt and tempered by reasonableness. Blair was positively Messianic whilst Brown was clearly tortured by inner demons. Some US presidents (Reagan, George W Bush. Need I go on?) have had a fearlessness that is born of stupidity but interestingly Obama- clearly beset with self-doubt of his own when  it comes to actual, policy delivery- seemed able to either simulate or genuinely experience a sort of selfless embodiment of some higher force when contemplating the large and abstract concepts of government.

So there you go. And the implication is obvious really. If Labour wants to return to electoral success (and that is not a redundant question- Miliband often came across as terrified of the idea), then what they need to construct is not so much a coherent set of policies as a compelling narrative. And, like it or not, the primary quality they need in their leader is neither intellect nor compassion nor even political vision, but self confidence.

Our changing relationship with information- or why more isn't always better

On the top deck of the W3 today I watched a group of teenage girls photographing themselves on their phones- leaning in together with their best group-selfie poses, presumably prior to posting the resultant images on some social media site. I don't think there was any particular special occasion- it was lunchtime and they weren't especially dressed up- but they were obviously all well used to being photographed in this way. I was reminded of what photography meant to me when I was that age- how infrequently one was photographed and how awkward and embarrassed one felt when it happened. Most of my generation have kept hold of this self-consciousness in front of a camera, but I suspect our children's generation will be very different when they are our age.

I have written about the notion of the selfie as an existential act here but the point of this post is a much broader one, about our relationship with information about ourselves (and those we know) as a whole. The amount of information about those around us that is readily available has grown exponentially of recent years. When I was young, once someone was out of sight one knew virtually nothing about them until they returned. Phone contact was theoretically possible but generally extraordinarily infrequent by modern standards- you had to either be at home or find a payphone and have the required change. The person you phoned had to be there (no answerphones for most) and you had to rely on no one else wanting to make a long phone call at the same time. Photos were expensive and unreliable and anyway took days to develop (assuming you remembered to send them off). Letters were something of a palaver and far from instant. It is only twenty years or so since one used to hear announcements on Radio 4 inviting Fred Bloggs, last seen in the Winchester area, to contact their family about their mother who was 'dangerously ill.'

We knew next to nothing about each other's whereabouts or activities in real time and never questioned that lack of knowledge, because that was how it had always been. Our children's generation have grown up in a very different world. They expect to be kept informed in quite extraordinary detail about everything that is happening to virtually anyone they know and we (their parents) expect it of them too.

One's first reaction is that such ready and complete information about one's loved ones must be immensely reassuring. In the old days, when I set off to hitch from the Isle of Mull to Reading none of my family would have the faintest clue where I was until (if I remembered) I phoned them from my destination. Now our children would travel by train rather than hitching, and if that train was delayed by 20 minutes we would probably know about it instantly.

So has this led to greater levels of reassurance? OF COURSE NOT! Whoever coined the phrase 'ignorance is bliss' knew that well enough. Because if such detailed real-time information is theoretically available about those we know then when it fails to appear we immediately start to worry. If that child was due in to Reading at 18.15 and they haven't texted us by 18.35 to say they have arrived, well... Whereas in the old days if they set off on Monday you wouldn't start getting anxious about not hearing from them until at least Wednesday (or maybe that was just me).

The same thing applies more broadly to our social networks, I believe. It was not uncommon in the past to lose contact completely with people, simply because one changed schools or jobs, or moved out of the area. That is why Friends Reunited (remember them?) was formed. I can't see that happening in the same way to our children's generation though. They have come to expect extraordinarily frequent status updates- reminders and reinforcements of their friendships. And such low-grade social contact reinforces social bonds to a much greater and more disparate degree than ever happened in my day. So they are, to some extent at least, in touch with literally anyone whom they have ever met and still want to stay in touch with. Which means of course that people can't just 'lose touch' in the old way. So if someone hasn't made any contact of any sort (liking a Facebook post, tagging you, sending you a pm) in a period as short as say six months, then that must mean they simply don't want to be your friend anymore.

There is a connecting theme here, I believe. Information has come to be seen as a commodity- a need as basic as food and drink. Someone has even amended Maslow's heirarchy of human needs to include WiFi. However just because something is a basic need doesn't mean that the more of it you get the better. Take food for instance, and our current Western society's troubled relationship with it. And whilst lack of information leads to disempowerment and alienation from society, more information (after a certain point) emphatically does not lead to the opposite. Because information, like chocolate, can become psychologically addictive so that we binge on it and make ourselves unwell.

Perhaps that is an exaggeration, as things stand, but project forward just a little into the future. I can envisage a time when implantable sub-miniature sensors can provide us with a constant stream of real-time data about every important function of our body- blood pressure, heart-rate, blood sugar levels, even the levels of stress hormones. They will be popular I imagine, and sold as invaluable aids to maintaining a truly healthy lifestyle (on a minute-to-minute basis!) But can you imagine how unhealthily addictive such information might be? There are plenty in our society who are becoming neurotically health-obsessed as it is and this would take it to an entirely new level. And imagine if one of the implantable sensors failed- the blood pressure one for instance. What would that do to one's actual blood pressure?

And if that isn't a nightmarish enough thought, what about going one step further? What if implantable sensors could assess and feed back information about the functioning of one's brain itself? The state of one's mood; how negative one was feeling; whether one was falling prey to irrational thoughts. Ludicrous? Certainly. Impossible? Probably not.

The thing is of course that information once it exists cannot be destroyed. Not really. Not as long as someone wants to retain it. What can happen to it though is that it can be ignored. It seems a basic human desire to know more about the world around us. We are an inquisitive species- it is probably that as much as anything else that has led to our rapid development- but we can choose occasionally not to be inquisitive. Not to ask. Maybe even not to to want to know. It is getting increasingly hard, but it is possible. There are those in our children's generation who quite deliberately go "off grid." Who close their social media accounts, throw away their smartphones and resort to those ancient and inefficient means of gathering information about the world: their five senses.

And maybe they've got it right.