Music For Your Tape Recorder

This year started slowly as Lone's Galaxy Garden was still in hard rotation - or whatever technical phrase applies in the iTunes era. In the latter half of last year it suppressed everything else and continued to do so into the first half of 2013. 'Dream Girl/Sky Surfer' overtook 'Roygbiv' as my most listened song and is now beyond five hundred plays. Last time I checked I was listening to it twice a day on average, though I've slowed down a lot since it passed that mark. The rest of the album isn't far behind. Lone released a standalone single in June which you can see only six places into the list, giving you an idea of how little anything else caught my ear. It's a slightly shorter annual list than usual and probably more padded than I'd prefer, but that doesn't mean that there's little to talk about.

The Further Away

IMG_4808, Sarah Zucca, 2013

Back in 2007 I wrote that Christmas had lost the meaning it once had. Given our earliest Christmases are as children, the meaning it has is invariably material. A decade ago as I was approaching the end of school, receiving lots of presents or even money in lieu was very little to get excited about. Where once there was unwrapping at 5am, I now struggle to get out of bed at 1pm. By the time I got a job and started generating income I could buy all the CDs and DVDs I wanted any time of the year. Asking for them, because you've been asked what you want, reveals a massive void at the core of the materially-orientated 25th. Currency is just being cycled and because requesting an object requires no consideration on the part of the purchaser, the present isn't really personal so much as a financial obligation to avoid being the one taking more than giving. So come the material crisis in my later teenage years, I began to realise the spirit of Christmas was seeing relatives.

Unfortunately, when I wrote up that realisation it was actually the last time my relatives came over from the US in December. For the past two years they've come over in late October for a pre-emptive combination of three birthdays in November, two in December, and Christmas rolled into one. Still, that leaves Christmas itself rather sparse with only my uncle joining us from down South. This compounds the sense of meaninglessness since the 25th is pretty much like any other day except very few people are working. Since I'm working right up to the 24th and back to the coalface three days later for the stint before the New Year holiday, it feels little different from an extra long-weekend. A far cry from the build-up in primary school when in the final few days before finishing up we'd bring in board games and videos to watch. My traditional viewing of the Muppet Christmas Carol is down to that. In fact, that too reveals a change in perspective.

Wake Up Maggie, I Think I've Got Something to Say to You

(C) Agence France-Presse

Originally I was going to write back in April about Margaret Thatcher on account of her recent cessation of life, but the saturation of media coverage covered most of what could be said. I put the post back to November and planned to use some of the non-domestic events of her premiership as jumping off points for some discussion. That schedule slipped as per the pattern of neglecting to write when work is easy, so here I am in the midst of the Christmas workload (you know, that company that even Thatcher wouldn't privatise) writing two posts back to back. Fortuitously (and this is going to sound terrible), Nelson Mandela died last week. Perhaps this is a good time to follow on from my comparison of Zimbabwe and South Africa, Mugabe and Mandela.

The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

The Emperors and Kings Curl in the Autumn as the Burning of Leaves

It's a bit odd, don't you think, that even while freedom and equality are the hallmarks of Western democracy (apparently simultaneously unique to all) that some people are living like royalty? I'm not talking about those financially benefiting from austerity and the ideologically-driven shrinking of the state, I mean royalty with a capital R. Of the nineteen monarchies depicted left in 1908 only eight survive.

The first to go was the Portuguese overthrown in 1910. The Qing Empire (of China) was overthrown in 1912, though Puyi was restored in Japanese Manchukuo from 1934 to 1945. The Russian monarchy was famously overthrown in 1917 which directly inspired events in Germany a year later in November 1918. Austria-Hungary ceased to exist earlier in 1918 and the Hungarian throne was vacant until overthrown in 1944. The Ottoman Sultanate was abolished in 1922. The Hellenic (Greek) monarchy was abolished in 1924, restored in 1935, vacated in 1947 and abolished again in 1967. Serbia had become Yugoslavia in 1918 and the monarchy was exiled in 1941 then formally abolished in 1944. Romania and Bulgaria were overthrown under Soviet hegemony in 1947 and 1946 respectively. The Italian monarchy was abolished in 1946. Japan and Thailand remain, while the Spanish crown was vacated in 1931 and only restored in 1978. The other survivors are stable and quite geographically restricted, almost forming an arc: Britain (minus Ireland, 1921), Belgium (not depicted above, probably because Leopold II wasn't welcome in the club at the time), The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.