OneHourAhead

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Warrant Issued for Michael Brown

From the beeb website:

Warrant issued for Lib Dem donor

A judge has issued an arrest warrant for a wealthy businessman whose company donated more than £2 million to the Liberal Democrats.

Michael Brown, 42, is due to stand trial in September accused of a number of fraud and money laundering offences.

But Judge Geoffrey Rivlin at Southwark Crown Court issued an arrest warrant after he breached his bail conditions.

A City of London Police spokesman said: “Efforts are being made to contact him.”

A further hearing on the case has been scheduled for 11 August.

Update: Stephen has more from Sky at LDV.

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The definitive top 10

Although you’ve all got your own ideas of what constitutes a good blog I, of course, know better.  So in proper TOTP countdown style, start playing ‘whole lotta love‘ from my mux (bow-wow-wow-wow,wa,wa,wa,wa…):

10.     She’s a baroness, she’s from Suffolk, what more could you want.  In at 10, it’s Mrs Valladares

9.      One half of the Lib Dem Duo , MatGB seems to know everything, and he looks like he can rock out.  Keeping the scene ALIVE!!

8.      Resplendent, redoubtable, radical, real and apparently reluctant, a climber at 8 - Charlotte Gore.

7.      A political blog that is unique in never have politics on it.  At 7 I have voted for the absorbingly quaint Just 474 votes to win.

6.      His posts seem to be more intermittent these days but still each one is crafted with elan. Hug him if you want, but he is probably carrying a knife these days, it’s Jonny Wright at number 6.

5.      This wouldn’t be a blog countdown without one of the godfathers of the scene - Paul Walter, burbling since 1892.

4.      Adding some intellectual content to the Lib Dem blogosphere and channeling Ricardo on a daily basis, at No. 4 it is Jock Coats over at his place.

3.      A non lib-demmer in at 3 - Brevity may not be his strong suit, but meticulously pulling apart the untruths of Westminster certainly is - Unity over at the Ministry of Truth.

2.      The other half of the LD duo in my list: Jennie from the gob.  I have pillaged her blog on number of occasions for some tasty blog morsels and as I have said before you don’t get posts like this on many political blogs.

and still at number 1, beating even Bryan Adams’ time at the top, for the 40th week running, it has to be…

…Ms Mortimer. Although I am a royalist at heart, if ever there were a republic in the UK, I would vote for Alix as its first dictator.

So there!

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OHA is now 5HB

Howdy. 

OneHourAhead is now posting from the other side of the Atlantic instead of the other side of the North Sea so forgive me for being slightly late on the draw on any breaking news.

I will however at least have a ringside seat for one of the most exciting political races in recent history.  I am in a democratic city in a republican state in the south so things could get interesting.

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Switzerland, I bid you adieu

After two years of Swiss life, I am leaving the land of cheese, chocolate and nazi-gold for pastures fresh so I thought I would give you all the benefit of wisdom in relation to this small alpine retreat and the things it is supposedly famous for…

Safe Streets

Although crime has increased in Switzerland in recent years, violent crime is still virtually unheard of, and generally takes place in the immigrant communities (one reason for the rise in xenophobia recently).  In this respect it is a very nice place to live.  The fear that pervades British society is absent here.  I have no problem with my girlfriend walking home alone late at night and when you find yourself suddenly in an area that looks dodgy you think ‘wait a minute, this is Switzerland’ and the worry dissipates.  The only time I have ever witnessed any crime is when someone tried to rob me in Geneva in what was possibly the worst attempt at pickpocketing in the history of the criminal fraternity, and I simply laughed at him.  I also once left the keys in my girlfriend’s scooter for two hours - it was still there when I came back.

There is a more annoying side to this law-abidingness though, probably best shown in this saying:

“Within every Swiss man there is a policeman sleeping. Within a Vaud man, he is awake.”

There can sometimes be a suffocating feeling in Switzerland, a feeling that you don’t really have true freedom.  I have heard stories of people having the police called on them because they put the rubbish in the wrong bin and people getting out of their cars to personally berate you for using a mobile phone in your car, when it was stationary.  A professor friend got a ticket for reading directions from a piece of paper while driving.  Technically, these things are illegal, but in all cases common sense has come a distant second to the letter of the law.

One thing that surprises me is the amount of graffiti around. And not the good banksy graffiti, really bad stuff.  It seems to be everywhere, far worse than back in the UK.  Maybe this is the only way for Swiss kids to express their dark side. Personally I think it is because Swiss civic architecture is so damnably awful.

Money, Money, Money

Switzerland is rich. However, it wasn’t always like this. Although the country made a mint from increasing industrialisation in the latter part of the 19th century the country took a tumble in the interwar period, and only made it back to the top of the wealth league with the help of some dubious manufacturing decisions during the second world war.

Salaries here are good, but living expenses are high, particularly in the big cities.  This could be due to the high level of protectionism within the country, particularly in the agricultural sector.  The country does sometimes seem to live in its own little shell, with shops selling products that are unique to Switzerland, and none of the choice you find in other countries.

This most immutable of economies has also been hit by the recent economic woes, with UBS cutting 5,500 jobs within the next year, and growth has slowed along with the rest of the western world.  I doubt it will go under, its seem far to sensible for that, but with the rife protection, for industries and workers, there is a sense that if a real economic blow came, it wouldn’t withstand it well.

Switzerland is also obviously a famous tax haven - Shumacher lives down the road, and Ingvar Kampard (Mr IKEA) lives up the hill.  Individuals can negotiate their own tax rates here, if they are rich enough.  For us mere mortals, tax is slightly lower than in the UK, but nothing to get wet-knickered about.

Mountains

There is not much to say about this apart from sometimes it is truly breathtaking.  I have written this post in two parts: during the first part I was sat on my balcony with a view over Lake Geneva to Evian and the alps beyond, with the Jura mountains behind me. Now I am sitting at my work desk from which I can (just about) see Mont Blanc.

*smug mode*

I will add a bit about places to visit to my ‘places to visit’ page in the near future

Trains

And if you want to go and visit the mountains then ‘the SBB train crew welcome you on board the …’.  I will miss the trains.  I think this is an area where the myth really is true - the trains are hardly ever late, never cancelled, go everywhere and are cheap*.  I think my favourite thing though is the simplicity of the pricing system - returns cost twice as much as singles, there is no peak times, and whether you get your ticket a week in advance or as you dash to catch the train, it costs the same.  I think this simplicity really makes the journey a lot less stressful. You always know how much it is going to cost.  Simplicity is the key to everything with money.

I think one of my abiding memories of living here will be getting up nicely at home, grabbing my snowboard and the catching the train into the mountains and being ready to fall down the slopes by mid-morning.

* if you have a half-price card, costs about 170CHF for the year (or free to federal employees like myself) and does exactly what is says on the tin - you get half price travel on all trains, as well as discounts on buses or boats across the lake, for a year

Direct Democracy

The politics of Switzerland are unique, being the only country in the world really to use direct democracy.  There is no doubt it engenders a sense of civic responsibility within citizens.  However, there are downsides.  Direct Democracy allows NIMBYism to thrive.  A example that affected me was that the university for which I worked was not allowed to enlarge its animal house because the local people didn’t want it.  This directly affected the work the university was able to do and would have damaged its ability to compete internationally.  A recent vote also shadowed BoJo’s ban on drinking on the tube - you now cannot buy alcohol at a train station after 10pm.  This is supposed to cut crime but the idea is laughable as Swiss trains and stations are amongst the most pleasant in the world.  However, I suppose, at least the people were allowed a vote on it, rather than being told by a mopped-haired twat.

Due to the rising crime amongst the immigrant population the right-wingers of Switzerland have seen their popularity rise.  But beyond the dodgy poster that was put up last year I haven’t really seen any cases of xenophobia, it is more that the Swiss are fiercely proud of their country and, in some respects, hold on to the Heidi myth, and see anything that might damage their idyll as dangerous.  What they don’t seem to take into account is that 1 in 5 of the workforce is foreign, and that the country really would grind to a halt if they all buggered off home.

Neutrality

Probably the most famous thing about Switzerland is its ability to stay out of any fight going.  Of course, they have their knives for stabbing people and opening bottles of chardonnay under enemy fire, but apart from that I always expected the Swiss military to comprise a handful of farmers with pitchforks and perhaps a camouflaged cow.

How wrong I was.  Switzerland is any military buff’s wet dream.  The armed forces here are a mixture of Dad’s Army recruitment and 007 cunning.  One of my favourite facts being that a number of bridges, tunnels and roads here in the country are rigged with explosives, ready to be detonated if any of their neighbours gets a bit antsy. Legend has it that this was only became known to the wider Swiss public in 2001 after the Gotthard tunnel fire - the Swiss army conveniently forgot to tell the firefighters tackling the blaze that the tunnel was packed with a few tonnes of TNT.  A few years later the residents of a small street in Lucerne got a letter telling them that underneath their houses was, again, a few tonnes of explosive.  It wasn’t deemed necessary for them to know until then.

And what if the cold war had gone hot and Russians had made their push through Austria to Switzerland?  Well apart the bridges, tunnels and roads disintegrating around them they would have to put up with the guerilla warfare that the Swiss army is trained in, where the soldiers have been told to abandon the plain and the cities and take to the mountains where specially designed fortresses were put in place to hide the troops and fight back.  there was a myth that even the Swiss air force flew from a runway enclosed in a mountain, thunderbird-style, but apparently it is just a myth - they only keep their planes in the mountain, the runway is outside!

And for the citizens, once the army has fled to the hills?  Well, building regulations say that every new house/apartment building has to have a nuclear bunker in the basement.  I have to go through five steel doors to get to the washing machine.  There should be a place for every Swiss in a nuclear bunker, and space for residents to.

One of the strangest sights of Switzerland is when, on taking a train back from the slopes on a Sunday evening, you have to sit next to a Sig 550 assault rifle.  The Swiss army is a conscript army, meaning that every male between the ages of 18-30ish has to go away for a few weekends every year and learn how to kill the ruskies. So this leads to the odd sight of spotty teenagers sitting in McDonalds eating a Big Mac with their rifle perched next to them.  This leads to the odd fact that such a peaceful country has on of the highest guns-per-capita ratios in the world.  However, they still have a low violent crime incidence - leading to the inevitable conclusion that guns don’t kill people, idiot Americans do.

So, what could Britain learn from Switzerland?

The ASI asked a few weeks ago if there was anything that Britain could learn from Switzerland.  I think the idea of civic responsibility is something that any country would gain from. Not necessarily in the direct democracy way of Switzerland, but allowing people in some way to feel that their community still belongs to them, rather than the designated department in Whitehall.   The Swiss also have a good, if expensive, healthcare system, which allows more choice for the individual.  I don’t think the Swiss model is exactly what Britain should be following but the idea is good

So that’s the end of my time here.  It has been mostly good, but the struggle against the bureaucracy of the place has been difficult.  As with most places, I would highly recommend a visit, but not perhaps as a place to live, unless you are super-rich.  But now I can add my name to the list of luminaries that have called Lausanne home: Voltaire, Mozart, Byron, Hugo, Dickens, Conan-Doyle (well, Dr. Watson), Simenon and Gibbons from the artistic world; Napoleon, Gandhi, Mussolini and Lenin from the world of politics (and Hemingway was here to report on Mussolini); Chaplin, Hepburn and Hayworth all had children here and coco chanel is buried in the graveyard I pass every day on my way to work.  Al Gore visited while I was here as well - the Nobel laureate in Peace, the champion of the green movement, the teller of an inconvenient truth didn’t use the famed Swiss train network - he flew in by helicopter escorted by two Swiss F-16s.

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Boris, Davis, Kearney, Scott, Harris, Brown, Cameron, Clegg

Real life has been catching up with me recently and haven’t really been keeping up with the developments in political life so this is a quick run-down of my opinions on various matters:

Boris/Local Elections/Crewe

I know it was all a long time ago now and I hate to remind you all but I wasn’t overly optimistic after the results.  I thought the local election results were okay but for both Crewe and London the squeeze took hold and we seemed almost resigned to the fact afterwards.

As for Boris, well, he has nicely shown his true colours in the first couple of months in power.  More rules and policies to hit the poor.  He shows as stupidity the idea that conservatism and liberalism go together.  He has also shown that the modern Tory is just as authoritarian as anyone in the Labour party.  I hope this will all come back to bite the Tories in the arse come 2010 but I won’t hold my breath.

Double-D and Double-H

First off, Nick made the right decision.  I can’t quite fathom why people think he didn’t. The only way for him to have possibly done better was to be psychic and get someone to resign first.  By staying out of the fight we got to have our say against 42 days and without looking like the crank that Davis did.  Fine, we don’t command the pulpit on civil liberties but this little debacle has thrown into light DD’s other less liberal positions with which we can go after him when he returns to the backbenches.  Plus it adds a little to the inner turmoil of the Tory party that is just aching to boil over as the scent of victory draws ever nearer.  The worst thing we could have done was stand, it would have leant weight to one of our opponents most promising attacks against us - that we are simply opportunistic, political scavengers waiting for some bloated carcass of politician to hove into view.

Ros4Prez

I have nothing against Lembit and am happy to have a Hello! celebrity in our midst but think the position would be better taken by someone with perhaps a smaller profile who can get on with the hard slog associated with being president and doing all the general party things, allowing the MPs to get on with furthering our cause in the wider sphere.  Plus she and Mark now live in the splendid surroundings of Suffolk, where all the best people come from.

Henley

Certainly not great, but not absolutely awful either.  Time to look at our overall campaigning technique though.  We have made a lot of our invincible by-election team but in these days of a Tory resurgence we will have to look for other avenues in to voters minds.

One thing though, I have to disagree with John at Liberal Revolution. I thought that the website wasn’t good, neither modern nor stylish, and although a lot of information was contained, it was simply too busy, best exemplified by the fact they couldn’t find anywhere to put the youtube video, so made it tiny and put it over a banner.  John Howell’s website wasn’t great but the main page was a lot simpler allowing the information on it to be taken in quickly (although at 1400 the day after they haven’t updated their website with the fact that they, er, won).

Brown’s woes

Wow, where to start.  The big man has taken a battering in the last couple of months, but he soldiers on as only a dour Scot can.  But I don’t understand why he continues to come out with more and more moronic ideas?  Surely it’s obvious that you shouldn’t lock people up for 42 days?   If your administration keeps losing people’s data, why do you think they would then trust you with being the sole repository for their identities?  If your party is the supposed champion of the people, why try to take more and more money from the poorest?

Even though Labour has dived in the polls I don’t think its beyond saving.  Less than a year ago Brown was riding high.  Who’s to say what will happen in the next two years to change to political scene before the next general election?  What it would take though I do not know, and I don’t think GB does either.

Cameron’s woes

Samantha may already be wondering what colour carpets to have in the No. 10 flat but I bet while she sits there looking at swatches, Dave is beside her wondering how long he can keep his group of parliamentary odd-bods all pointing in the same direction, or if he does make it into the black door, how long he will stay there before the knife comes down swiftly between his shoulderblades. The loons on the back benches and in the constituency parties are staying with him for now as he is a winner, but with no real substance behind his not very good style, he will trip up.

The cliche is that oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them and I don’t think that will be any truer than in the general election of 2010.    

Nick’s woes

The polls ain’t good, but have they ever been?  Caught in the middle between the increasingly crazed Labour party and the resurgent Cons we really have to begin fighting our way out of the sandwich.  Importantly, we have to regain our own story.  At the moment we are taken over by the ‘protest vote’ story and the ‘opportunistic’ story, the latter not helped by Nick’s decision on the Lisbon referendum. 

I think the direction of the party is good, more in keeping with the original liberalism of the party.  This emphasis on putting individuals back in charge of their own lives is good, as it is the way the general consensus is going, with people more and more despondent with the burgeoning state.  I think we have to be willing to make tough decisions, such as proposing tough taxes, and also make radical decisions, such as proposing LVT or drug legalisation.

Most importantly though, we have to push away from the mainstream politics of the big two.  Currently we are seen as the poor man’s version of both, whereas moving away from them to a more radical standpoint would get us noticed above normal politics.  We need to admit that we don’t have the answer to all life’s ills, that the answers lie with individuals and small communities rather than anyone 50,100, 200 miles away in London.  This was nicely illustrated by Nick in a recent speech on education.

So, the country is moving away from Labour, as their ideas of social democracy move ever closer to pure socialism.  However, the country shows no real passion for the compassionate conservatism of the current right.  As with all good Englishmen, they really just want to be left alone.  Appealing to this nature of the country is the key to winning, IMHO.

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The Secret to Henley

Personally, I was quite disappointed when I turned on my computer this morning to see the results of yesterday’s polls, I was hoping for a closer race.  I guess a lot of soul-searching will be done by the campaign team over the next few days.

However, On the metro into work I came across something that added at least a small consolation.  When back in the UK over the weekend I picked up my old copy of ‘The political animal’ by Jeremy Paxman.  By a small stroke of coincidence that bit I got to this morning was when he went to meet a man named ‘Boris Johnson’ (never heard of him) when he was out canvassing to become the representative for Henley in the 2001 general election.  As well as bits about voters telling him all they wanted was someone who would bring back hanging and get out of Europe, JP has this to say:

“Henley is the sort of place where they’d vote a mule into parliament if it promised to kick in the right direction”

Cheered me up a bit - I’m glad we are not kicking in that direction.

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Double-D has 25 opponents

There are apparently going to be 26 names on the voting slip in Haltemprice and Howden on 10 July:

• Grace Christine Astley - Independent
• David Laurence Bishop - Church of the Militant Elvis Party
• Ronnie Carroll - Make Politicians History
• Mad Cow-Girl - The Official Monster Raving Loony Party
• David Craig - Independent
• Herbert Winford Crossman - Independent
• Tess Culnane - National Front Britain for the British
• Thomas Faithful Darwood - Independent
• David Michael Davis - Conservative
• Tony Farnon - Independent
• Eamonn “Fitzy” Fitzpatrick - Independent
• Christopher Mark Foren - Independent
• Gemma Dawn Garrett - Miss Great Britain Party
• George Hargreaves - Christian Party
• Hamish Howitt - Freedom 4 Choice
• David Icke - No party listed
• John Nicholson - Independent
• Shan Oakes - Green Party
• David Pinder - The New Party
• Joanne Robinson - English Democrats: Putting England First
• Jill Saward - Independent
• Norman Scarth - Independent
• Walter Edward Sweeney - Independent
• Christopher John Talbot - Socialist Equality Party
• John Randle Upex - Independent
• Greg Wood - Independent

So, quite an array of nutjobs. I think we were right to stay out of that one.

But who is the craziest on this list: Icke, Mad-Cow girl or Davis? It’s a tough call.

UPDATE:  For all those people coming to this blog purely to search for Gemma Garrett, here she is:

Courtesy of the Daily Idiot

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Doris Lessing

An interesting interview with British author Doris Lessing, the 2007 Nobel Laureate in Literature has been put up on the nobelprize website, if, of course, you are interested in that sort of thing.

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Lasciate Ogni Speranza Voi Ch’Entrate

This post is a shameless copy of Jennie’s over at the yorksher gob, but you know Jennie, Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery

Firstly, What Pseudo Historical Figure Best Suits You?

What Pseudo Historical Figure Best Suits You? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Dante Alighieri According to you most of humanity will spend at least some of their afterlife in hell. You have a high likelihood of being exiled, but anyone as bloody fucking romantic as you deserves what they get. You have an exceptional moral code, overshadowed by the fact that you yourself cannot uphold it. Your existence bears a definite irony, although of fairly Christian morality, many pagans, satanists, communists, and intellectuals admire you and your works for all the wrong reasons. Also, the brightest star in your sky is never going to be your lover… It takes a lot of grief to be the cartographer of hell. Dante Alighieri 75% Jesus Christ 58% Friedrich Nietzsche 58% Elvis Presley 58% Adolf Hitler 58% Stephen Hawking 42% Sigmund Freud 42% Steven Morrissey 42% Miyamoto Musashi 33% C.G. Jung 33% O.J. Simpson 33% Hugh Hefner 25% Charles Manson 17% Mother Teresa 17%

Hmmm, sounds about right, I am in a type of exile, although one self-imposed and without the possibility of death or imprisonment if I were to ever darken the doors of England again.  And I do get followed around a lot by pagans and commies, although I thought that was just because of my snazzy dress sense!

The second part is a book meme:

“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So I think that is a fairly run of the mill list for a 28 year old gent, with the possible exception of Bridget Jones’ Diary for which I am truly, truly sorry - perhaps that is why the historical figure quiz thinks I should go to hell.

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"To the beloved memory of Harriet Mill"

I visited Avignon and the surrounding area over the weekend. On Sunday morning I went and found John Stuart Mill’s tomb in the cemetery.  He is buried there with his wife, whom had died 15 years previous.

Although the sides of the tomb bear his name, the marble top contains the eulogy written by Mill to his wife, Harriet. It reads:

To the beloved memory

of

HARRIET MILL

the dearly loved of deeply regretted

wife of JOHN STUART MILL.

Her great and loving heart,

her noble soul,

her clear, powerful, original and

comprehensive intellect,

made her the guide and support,

the instructor in wisdom,

and the example in goodness

as she was the sole earthly delight

of those who had the happiness to belong to her.

As earnest for all public good

as she was generous and devoted

to all who surrounded her,

her influence has been felt

in many of the greatest

improvements of the age

and will be in those to come.

Were there even a few hearts and intellects

like hers

the earth would already become

the hoped for heaven.

She died,

to the irreparable loss of those who survive her,

at Avignon Nov. 3 1858

Quite moving.