My mother complained that I haven’t written about my graduation apart from that slightly sarcastic post I wrote prior to it. So here I am with an update on the experience.

First of all, it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. We had to be sat down by 10:30 and the ceremony didn’t start until 11:00. That was a pretty boring half hour. But then once the ceremony itself started it went surprisingly quickly.

Unfortunately the person who was reading everyone’s names out made a bit of a mess of it. A lot of people’s names seemed to be pronounced incorrectly. It wasn’t just the international students, which you might understand. But even some common Anglophone names were completely mauled.

For just one example, the guy who was sitting next to me is called Sussock. Not too difficult I would have thought, but he was introduced as ‘Sisscock’. Amazing. I was a bit worried I was going to be Step-hen but I got off in the end. But for so many people I imagine their memory of the ceremony will be this guy butchering their name. I’m sure it’s not a fun job to have to read so many names out, but it was a bit unfortunate.

The rest of the ceremony wasn’t much better, I’m sorry to say. I watched the webcast of the ceremony that came the day before mine to see what I should expect and that went much better. But in my ceremony the same jokes fell flat because the delivery was so poor. And a lot of the script was skipped as well. I reckon he just wanted to go home early!

The plus side of that was that we all got to go home early as well! And the queue for the photographer was not bad at all — I was only third in the queue when I joined it. So it was all over much more quickly than I expected.

So I got a nice certificate and a glorified giant red Smarties tube. I was not sure about that you know. In all of the photographs my parents took I am standing there with this ridiculous empty Smarties tube. Then of course for the proper professional photograph I was holding a different fakey prop degree certificate. I can’t really deal with these levels of fakeness. In future I will probably just look at the photos and think, “Smarties tube, fake”.

The photos we took ourselves were not much of a success. My parents can’t seem to cope with the digital camera. Every time my mother uses it she asks the same question — “Which button do I press?” Which button do you think? The one on the top, just like film cameras??

But no, she just reacts like she’s been asked to build a nuclear bomb. Once she’s figured it out she waits about 20 seconds and then — without warning — just presses the button. No “are you ready?” or “right” or any other warning to stop looking gormless. She just presses it. So in all of the photos she took I look either confused, disgusted or gormless.

Escapades with the old camera (which is genuinely as old as I am) were not much more successful, so I hear. My mum managed to drop it in McEwan Hall and the back fell off, exposing the film to all that vicious light. Apparently it was in a dark stairwell, so fingers crossed. Later on we couldn’t work out if it was winding on or not. Serves them right for using a camera that’s about to celebrate its silver anniversary.

Then we got someone to take a photo of me with both of my parents. It was the best shot of the day — apart from one thing. We were standing in front of a building site. We didn’t even realise until I downloaded the pictures onto my computer.

It is funny because when I went through the campus earlier in the week I was surprised at how little it looked like a building site — the new computing building is almost finished, and it’s now largely free of the normal eyesores that are associated with construction sites. Yet we managed to stand in front of the one tiny bit that still has building equipment on it. Incredible.

I also look pretty peeved in a lot of the photos. And I look gaunt and baggy-eyed. It didn’t help that I was seriously tired having had so little sleep and I suffering from caffeine withdrawal at that time of the day, several hours after my one and only coffee of the day.

Anyway, I know you are desperate to see a photo of me in all of that silly attire and holding that ridiculous Smarties tube, so here is the best shot of me (cropped because my parents still haven’t mastered the zoom function on the camera).

In complete seriousness though, all-in-all it was quite a strange day. I felt a bit down about it on my way back. I had a very strange mixture of feelings. Partly that I was probably seeing a few people for the last time and didn’t really get the chance to say a proper ‘goodbye and good luck’ in the rush of the day. Partly regret that I hadn’t made the most of my university days. Partly that I have to come to terms with the fact that I’m moving on to a strange and challenging period of my life. Mostly, simply that — despite the fact I didn’t enjoy my time there much — university is over. Bye-bye JSTOR log-in. Seeya later Athens account.

So in the slim chance that any of those people I didn’t get the chance to see again happen across this post, all the best for the future!

Yet again, the comments to a previous post have gone on an interesting tangent. Once again Jeff was behind it. He’s not afraid to get stuck into a debate and he always has some interesting points to share, even though I don’t always agree with him! I thought the discussion was quite good so I want to share some of it in a new post and also expand on my thinking behind abstention and why it is not a bad thing.

Before I start I should point out that I have never abstained in an election that was at local government level or above. In fact, in the local government elections last year I listed a whopping four preferences. Not bad for a cynic! (Having said that, it was admittedly for negative reasons — I wanted to vote for everyone except Labour).

Nonetheless, I struggle nowadays to understand why abstainers are so vilified, as though they are sub-human. I think sometimes people conflate abstention with apathy. In reality it is perfectly consistent to be interested in politics and yet not vote when the election comes round.

In his first comment Jeff said:

I find it incredible that someone can maintain such a thoughtful and intelligent political blog with all these numerous opinions and then, when an election comes around, he may not take part.

Compare and contrast with James O’Malley’s comment:

I think your experiences of becoming more apathetic with age - essentially more apathetic as you became better informed - are pretty similar for a lot of people. I’ve just finished a degree in International Relations, and as a consequence of learning what a horrible bleak mess the world is, I think we all became cynical about almost anything political.

I have gone through a similar process. Being interested in elections and voting behaviour, whenever there was an opportunity to study them at university I took it. I wrote my dissertation on what motivates people to vote. The whole learning experience has led me to become less likely to vote and more sympathetic towards abstainers.

(As an aside, if anyone’s interested, I have decided to upload my dissertation here since it got the best mark of anything I ever did at university so I feel quite good about it! So if you’re interested and you have a bit of spare time, have a read and you might get a bit more insight into my current thinking about voting.)

In short, Jeff asked why someone like me would not vote despite knowing so much about politics. What slipped his mind was the possibility that someone like me would not vote because they know so much about politics.

For a few months now I have been meaning to outline a few problems with elections and democracy as we know it (this post isn’t it by the way, it’s still coming). This is not because I am not a democrat, because I am. However, I am disappointed in the poor standard of analysis of democracy. Discussions about it frequently descend into a list of clichés and slogans. It leads me to think that most people are democrats because of blind faith rather than because they have actually thought about it.

That’s a dangerous situation to be in because it breeds complacency. The flaws of democracy are constantly swept under the carpet. But the only way to improve things is to put the flaws on a pedestal and debate them properly. Simply pulling out that hoary old Churchill quote doesn’t bring us any further forward.

That was the case in the comments to the post about student apathy. All I said was that I understood why some people would not vote. Before I knew it, commenters made out that I was advocating something resembling anarchy, I had no right to complain if I didn’t vote, I was doing an injustice to the people of Zimbabwe, and, yes, that bloody Churchill quote was wheeled out. A who’s who of clichéd arguments that get us no further forward.

Bellgrove Belle began proceedings by advocating compulsory voting — albeit with a ‘none of the above’ option (how gracious of you!!). I let that slip by at the time, but only because I didn’t want to go down that tangent. However, now that I have started a separate post I will outline why compulsory voting is the most outrageous idea.

Firstly — and this should hardly need pointing out — people are not the servants of politicians. Yet. Politicians are the servants of the people. Having a government frogmarching everyone to the polling station is not my idea of freedom. The point about the right to vote is that it is a right. That means that you can choose to use it or not. If you are forced to vote, it is no longer a right — it is an oppression.

A vital principle of our liberal way of life is that people know for themselves what is best in almost all instances unless their actions cause harm to others. If people do not vote, it is not because they are wrong (which is a view typically only found among political elites). It is because, for the abstainers, it is costly to go out and vote. And if it is costly for an individual, in turn it is costly to society.

Beyond the cost of sending everyone out to vote, what is wrong with just leaving people be? People should be perfectly entitled to abstain if they want. Forcing people to do things they do not want to do will only breed even more cynicism and apathy.

Having a ‘none of the above’ option is the ridiculous fig leaf to all of these criticisms. There is already a none of the above option. People know very well that they can spoil their paper when they get to the polling station. If people were screaming out for a none of the above option, we would know it by now.

I have only ever heard compulsory voting being advocated by two groups of people: politicians and aspiring politicians. It is funny that these people should select the one ’solution’ to apathy that is almost guaranteed to give them more votes. What a coincidence! Moreover, it is the lazy option for them to choose. It implies that it is the voters who have done wrong, which is a very undemocratic stance to take in actual fact. For politicians, the idea that it is they themselves who have caused apathy — and that it is their job to fix it — is too difficult for them to comprehend, so it seems.

Jeff was next up, suggesting that the logical conclusion of my defending abstention for an individual is advocating mass abstention. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, it is the very fact that others vote in their millions that makes abstention as an individual a reasonable option.

If no-one else voted then I would find the voting decision very easy — I would cast the deciding vote, probably for myself. We don’t live in that world, and my stance is a pragmatic recognition of that fact.

There is that old guilt trip: “what if everyone else thought like you?” The point is that not everyone does think like me. And it would be rather egotistical of me to think that my actions would be copied en masse by the population as a whole. If it were the case that I was so influential, I would find myself sharing the same bed with six and a half billion others every night. As Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt point out:

Imagine that you and your 8-year-old daughter are taking a walk through a botanical garden when she suddenly pulls a bright blossom off a tree.

“You shouldn’t do that,” you find yourself saying.

“Why not?” she asks.

“Well,” you reason, “because if everyone picked one, there wouldn’t be any flowers left at all.”

“Yeah, but everybody isn’t picking them,” she says with a look. “Only me.”

Then Jeff pulls out that old one — if you’re so dissatisfied with the candidates, why don’t you stand yourself? The answer, I would have thought, should be obvious. Standing for election would involve immense personal financial and other costs. I would have to give up my job to dedicate enough time to campaigning, meaning a loss of income. Then I would have to somehow fund the campaign itself.

On top of that, I would probably lose my deposit. The political system is heavily biased in favour of the large parties — partly because of the voting system, partly because of the media and whatever else. The fact is that if you want to be successful in an election you almost always need the backing of a big party machine.

Independent candidates are successful from time to time, and small parties do break through. But in reality these are all led by either someone with a lot of money or a celebrity figure like Tommy Sheridan or Martin Bell. The other successful independents are single-issue (often local-issue) candidates, and I am interested in more than one local issue.

The point I am making is that were I to stand for election tomorrow, no matter how good my policies were, I would have almost no chance of making any kind of impact whatsoever. Am I supposed to believe, as Jeff suggests, that this is the extent of my democratic powers? You can’t exactly blame someone for not doing this when the odds are so heavily stacked against them.

Get ready for another cliché now. “If you don’t vote, you don’t have the right to complain.” Aaah, *tick*.

This is one of the oldest ones in the book. Yet even though it’s a catchy slogan, what is always omitted is exactly the reason why you don’t have the right to complain. Is that because there isn’t one?

Democracy is about so much more than elections. For sure, an election is a vital cog in the democratic process, but it is just one cog among many. China has elections, but that doesn’t make it a democracy. Just this week we have witnessed a sham election in Zimbabwe.

I would think that the idea that elections are the only valid form of political participation in a democracy would come as a surprise to the many pressure groups, non-governmental organisations, media outlets, publishers, think tanks, academics, mass demonstrators, lone protesters, letter writers, bloggers even, and others — all of whom play a vital role in a democracy. Is it really more valid to enact change “from within”? Then we are to do away with all of these vital elements of civic society? Are these people all supposed to stand for election as well? Are they harassed about their voting behaviour before being permitted to speak up?

Democracy is so much more than putting an X in a box. It is about speaking out, debating and persuading. If you have next to no power in the ballot box, what is so illegitimate about using a different method of trying to improve the world? I think that suggesting that people don’t have a right to speak out because they recognise that their vote is near worthless is actually an intensely anti-democratic view to take.

Jeff’s position is apparently to say that the only valid way I have to express myself is to vote for someone, even if it is the “least worst” candidate. Am I really supposed to believe that the extent of my democratic rights is to vote Lib Dem instead of Labour?

Even when I do express a preference in the polling booth, that vote is a drop in the ocean. My reasons for voting are lost among those of thousands of other voters (or, in a national election, millions of others), each of whom voted for different reasons. The politician then cherry-picks the reasons that suit his agenda best. So what have I achieved by voting?

I can say that the time I have spent voting is a waste when I could have spent that time engaging in another democratic activity. For instance, I could have spent that time writing here. That way I can articulate my views in an infinitely more nuanced way than I would by voting. This makes my voice louder than it otherwise would have been. I believe that I can make more of a difference by doing this. What would be so illegitimate about that?

This is all without even getting into the instance where you genuinely are undecided. If a voter is guilt-tripped or compelled to haul himself into the polling station, what is he supposed to do? Toss a coin? Close his eyes and see where the pencil lands? Given that your vote is essentially a way of enforcing your views onto other people, I am amazed that anyone thinks that the decision to vote should be taken so lightly.

Finally came the guilt trip from Ideas of Civilisation. He brought up the current situation in Zimbabwe saying, “it’s a reminder of the freedoms, and responsibilities, we have here.”

The thing is, I believe that recent events in Zimbabwe support my view. Morgan Tsvangirai pulled out of the contest because the election was a “violent sham”. Was that illegitimate? Or should he have contested the election because otherwise he doesn’t have the right to criticise? Of course not. His voice is louder outside the contest and he has made the point about the current situation in Zimbabwe very forcefully. It is a perfect example of making one’s voice heard outside of official electoral channels.

Of course, the situation in Zimbabwe is very different to the situation we face in this country and other, freer, more democratic countries. I suspect the point IoC was making about Zimbabwe was that, in such countries whenever there is a free election is usually has a comparatively high turnout.

That is right, although it is a very different situation. When you are given hope in the shape of an inspiring candidate you are bound to grab it with both hands. That is the case even more so if the bandwagon theory (discussed in my dissertation) is true — people want to feel a part of making a big change so will take part in the vote.

You don’t have to live in an unfree country for such a thing to happen, so that doesn’t put this country’s politicians off the hook. Barack Obama is currently doing it in the USA by engaging certain parts of the electorate at levels that have never been achieved before. It’s just that right now there is no such candidate in this country.

Back to the unfree country though. Even in the hypothetical watershed election that brings everyone hope, turnout will not be 100%. It might be higher than the turnouts we see in this country, but it will be nowhere near 100%. In fact, if turnout was anywhere close to 100% accusations of vote rigging will be flying.

This fact demonstrates that abstention is a perfectly natural and legitimate position to take in an election. In fact, it serves a very useful function in a democracy. Any attempts to eradicate it should be viewed with as much suspicion as attempts to eradicate any other political view.

There has not been much blogging this week because I have been quite busy. Part of that is because my next post is another epic rant unfortunately (looking like 2,000 words plus at the moment). But most of the time has been spent on preparation for the silly thing with the gown and stuff which happens tomorrow morning.

I have managed to go through my entire time as a student without complaining about debt or money issues. But just as I get to the end of this whole academic journey I have been tipped over the edge. I honestly cannot believe how much money I have had to spend on this nonsense. I don’t like dressing up at all (I think it’s quite pretentious, even on special occasions) so I’m buying all of these smart clothes for the first time. I haven’t got the calculator out, but I reckon it must be well over the £200 mark by now. What a load of fuss over 90 minutes! I bet you I will never find another use for that white bow tie…

Anyway, thanks to the wonders of modern technology my graduation ceremony will be broadcast live on the internets (Windows Meeja required). Will I trip up? Will my trousers fall down? Will my hair catch fire? Tune in to find out!

This post began as a response to Jeff in the comments to a post below. But it was getting long and waaay off topic. So I have decided to post it as a separate post.

To save you from trawling all the way through the discussion, we were basically wondering whether the SNP can afford to throw away student votes. I think we agreed that they probably can, because student votes don’t exist to a great extent anyway.

And you raise a good point about the students too. I do wonder how many of them really vote despite their protests and the like. Am I right in thinking that you were even considering not voting? If that’s the case then not much more proof is needed that student participation rates are low.

Jeff is right that I am considering not voting in the next election. It all depends on how annoyed I am at all the parties. Last time round I voted for everyone but Labour (even giving Solidarity my fourth choice!) in the local elections. Possibly in the general election I will throw my weight behind an anti-Gordon Brown tactical voting campaign since I live in his constituency. How funny would it be if he lost his seat? I can’t miss out on that opportunity!

But in general I am pretty disappointed in all of the parties. And given that I have almost zero chance of affecting the outcome anyway, I see little point in casting my vote. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m apathetic about politics, as you are surely aware.

I can’t speak for other students of course, but I think they are much like all young people, and to an extent people in general. Some are really interested in politics and will vote in any election no matter how inconsequential. But many, many others are entirely disenchanted with politics.

There is a stereotype that students are generally heavily interested in politics. Of course there is that element of loud-mouthed self-styled radicals. But they are in a pretty small minority. Most students, I bet, could not give two hoots about party politics. Even some politics students I’ve come across can be surprisingly poorly informed.

This has something to do with blogging as well. It used to perplex me — perhaps it still does — that you do not get more students blogging about politics. After all, students are supposed to be opinionated and earnest. And they often have plenty of spare time to dedicate to this sort of thing. Plus, all of this blogging and new technology — you might expect it to be a young person’s game.

But you don’t get many student political bloggers. From the top of my head, I can count them on one hand. Maybe I can count them on two fingers — including me. I remember once a survey revealed that the average age of readers of political blogs is 40.

Even among my mostly politically aware circle of friends, I probably know almost as many non-voters as voters. I am somewhere in the middle. For the time being I vote, but I don’t blame anyone for not voting.

Funnily enough, despite the general trend that people get more interested in politics (or at least are more likely to vote) as they get older, I have moved in the opposite direction. When I was as young as possibly 12 or 13 I was more earnest and couldn’t see why anyone wouldn’t vote. Now at 22 I am jaded and cynical and am more and more likely to abstain every day.

What does it say about me that I’m jaded and cynical at the age of 22? Imagine what I’ll be like when I’m actually an old codger…

Anyone disagree with me on students and politics? I know a few students (or graduands!) will be reading this, so what do you think?

Jeff at SNP Tactical Voting took the baton from me and listed his top 10 blogs (although unlike me, he concentrated just on Scottish political blogs). In the process, he accused this place of having “a scarcity of posts of late”.

Guilty as charged. A number of elements have conspired against me when it comes to updating this blog.

First of all, I set up a separate F1 blog — immediately robbing this place of around half its content! Then there was the fact that I was in my final year at university. I didn’t want to mess it up as the dissertation deadline passed, then essay deadlines, then the exams came along.

Even since the exams have finished, though, it hasn’t quite worked out. I always find the transition from busy (!) student to lazy summertime bum difficult for some reason that I can’t put my finger on. Blogging always takes a back seat for a week or two as I grab some rest and get those summer jobs dealt with. I have been — gasp — reading books for leisure (which I never get the time to do during term time). I have been listening to that pile of unlistened-to CDs that has built up since last summer. The pile is now down to six which is very exciting. I have also tidied my room from top to bottom, sorting through stuff to work out if I should chuck them out or not.

Then there is the small matter of finding a job. Or, more accurately, working out what my career is going to be. Now that university is over for good (and I doubt I will be darkening the doors of academia again), I can now — belatedly — devote more of my brain power towards researching careers. I have not got very far forward. Every time I seem to get closer to finding a path that I find acceptable, something comes along to put me off. For this and various other reasons, I still find myself running around Edinburgh from time to time.

Also, for the past seven or eight months I have routinely been taking daily walks round the park and suchlike. This was partly to get me out of the house and into the sun. It is also with one eye on my slowly-but-surely expanding belly. A good side-effect is that I spend the walks listening to podcasts that I would never otherwise manage to listen to. However, it’s possibly fair to assume that this time may otherwise have been spent blogging which is why things have been a lot quieter here over the past year or so.

Then, just when I was ready to get back into the swing of things, all of my websites were knocked out by that exploding transformer. Then a different issue put my websites out of action on Tuesday as well! All-in-all, I lost about three days of possible blogging activity.

And then I got some good news. I’ve got a degree, and it’s a 2:1. It was such a relief — I was genuinely worried that I was headed for a 2:2 which would have been seriously demoralising. I would really have kicked myself for a few things if that happened, but somehow I have escaped.

I still don’t know the marks for all of my courses yet, which is quite frustrating. Of the scores that I know, I was on course for a 2:2. And I am sure I muffed up one of the exams that I haven’t had back yet. I’d love to think it was my dissertation that pulled the whole lot up. Anyway, I shouldn’t worry about that now. What matters is that I’ll be doing the silly dressing up thing with the stupid hats and scroll things later this month. (Incidentally, does anyone know where the hell you get a white bow tie in this area? That is the rubbish I am being asked to wear for this thing.)

All of this is just a really long-winded way of saying: yes, I know, it’s quiet round here. Jeff said that the scarcity posts is made up for with thorough detail. That is really a side-effect of the fact that it takes me so bloody long to get round to writing anything. By the time I’ve reached this little screen my head has collected so many thoughts on the issue that I end up writing a bloomin’ essay. Even this post is probably about 2,000 words long now.

The thing is, just because I’m not posting much on this blog doesn’t mean I’m not posting much at all. There are four other major outlets of mine. Twitter is the main one where I post anything that will fit into the 140 character limit. Then there is Delicious where I post interesting links, often along with a pithy comment. Then there are the two other blogs, Scottish Roundup and vee8.

These all have a presence on the sidebar here, but I thought it would be good to have an area where all of these various updates are gathered on one page. I started with a lifestream (launched a few weeks ago, though I kept it quiet). But I wanted something a bit different so I spent a bit of time in Yahoo! Pipes to create what I have modestly called the “megafeed“. For the time being I’ve placed it just above the lifestream on… the lifestream page.

Neither of them is exactly perfect. The lifestream just contains the headlines of each item. It incorporates Last.fm as well, but it’s pretty rough and ready really. Meanwhile, the megafeed just looks like a big list of stuff. There’s no way to tell whether it’s a Twitter update, a blog post or what. I tried to make it more obvious, but either there isn’t a way to do it in Yahoo! Pipes or I am too much of a n00b to work out how to do it. Just thought I’d mention it since I spent a bit of time on it. Think of it as a stalking opportunity.

Now that I have sorted that out, it is time to post not just in the four other places but here as well. Now I have drawn up a little list of posts I want to write. My calendar for this week looks fairly empty. I should probably be looking for a job but I will try to get some stuff up here too.

You might have noticed that I haven’t been updating this place so much recently — although that’s quite a common occurrence nowadays so you might not have noticed! This hectic stage of my life finally came to an end on Friday as I sat my last exam. Here are a few things that have happened recently that are notable enough to deserve exclamation marks. Then I will get back to writing about proper stuff.

UFO sighting!

Was this an early sign that I was losing the plot? While I was on one of my many commutes from Kirkcaldy to Edinburgh I saw something in the corner of my eye while the train was passing Edinburgh Airport. At first I thought it was a bird or something — it was quite small. Just as I focussed on the mystery object, some kind of bullet or something shot across really quickly and the object disappeared in a puff of smoke.

My first thought was that there was some kind of clay pigeon shooting competition or something going on. But it seems unlikely that this would take place on the runway at an airport. Moreover, it seemed as though the mystery object was taken out by some kind of science fiction-style laser shot.

That experience was probably an early sign that the exams were genuinely driving me mad. For the sake of my own self-esteem, I have decided that it was a weather event. A really weird weather event.

Hand dryers that actually work!

There was a nasty surprise when nature called while I was in Edinburgh Waverley train station recently. It now costs 30p to spend a penny. The current inflation worries finally had a tangible effect on me personally. Forget food and fuel prices — the cost of taking a leak jumped by 50%! And it is plain inconvenient having to use a 20p and a 10p rather than just dealing with one 20p piece as before.

Anyway, I went in to do my business and they’ve given the place a nice renovation. The highlight is undoubtedly the new hand dryers. Hand dryers are notoriously awful. They just never do the job. All that ever happens is your hands get a bit hot and your hands remain as wet as they were when tap water rather than wind was enveloping them.

These new hand dryers in Edinburgh Waverley toilets are something else though. There are posters next to them that actually say, “Hand dryers that actually work!” I just thought to myself, “yeah right — hand dryers never work.”

The new dryers are quite strange. Rather than sticking your hands under a hot air blower, you stick your hands in a little slot in the top of a box. It’s a very strange feeling. You move your hands up and down in the pocket as wind gets blown around inside. I did this for around 10 seconds as the poster advised, but I was convinced that my hands would come out still soaking wet. But to my surprise my hands were bone dry! It’s like magic.

Furthermore, the posters proclaim that these new dryers are more energy efficient than the old design. The future of hand washing is indeed very exciting! These are special hand dryers — they have their own website as well.

So the next time you’re in Edinburgh Waverley station, think about going into the toilets even if you don’t need to go. Worth every of the thirty pennies.

The end of university!

I had three exams this time round. My personal feeling is that the first one went okay — could have been better, could have been worse. The second one was not okay — I had to choose two questions but I could only really answer one of them. The second question was just bluff. We’ll see how that went, but I’m not too confident about that. My third exam — the one I had the least amount of time to study for — was one of the best exams I’ve ever had.

At least I finished on a high. That is not quite my last action as a student. I still have some books to return to the library, collect a copy of my dissertation and utilise the careers service to try and work out what on earth to do next. Anyone want to offer me a job?

I won’t pretend I enjoyed university, and I don’t think I’ll miss it. Many people say the student days are the best days of their lives. The idea that the rest of life is even worse than this is something I’m trying to avoid thinking about.

It is often said that the most despised people in the country are journalists and estate agents. And while these people sometimes are indeed prize toss pots, there are two other professions that I despise above all others. Actors and politicians. Thing is, acting and being a politician is essentially the same job. They’re not wrong when they say politics is showbusiness for ugly people. Both aspire to earn money by spending their life being insincere. You can’t admire that.

But unlike many, I cannot bring myself to hate Boris Johnson in particular. That’s not because LOL I like his funnee hair and he is a legernd. (I do find it amusing, though, that people will — without a trace of irony — cite this article and others by the (admittedly excellent) Charlie Brooker saying “LOL! CHARLIE BROOKER IS A LEGEND!” It’s all a bit Dan Ashcroft if you ask me. But never mind.)

No, the real reason I don’t hate Boris Johnson is because I can’t stand politicians full stop. To single out one person the way some single out Boris Johnson seems incredibly unfair to me. And the reaction among some people to his election as London Mayor has left me in despair about the state of political discourse right now.

So I was glad to see the balance redressed somewhat by the excellent Nosemonkey yesterday. I was beginning to think I was the only one who couldn’t understand why so many people were queuing up to pour effluent on the man.

It is slightly dangerous territory for me to be talking about London politics. Everything I wrote here applies. But I have been spurred into blogging about this for two reasons. One is that the position of London Mayor is pretty much the only major directly elected post in the country and its effects inevitably reverberate around the country. The second is that the debate itself merits comment because it reflects the shoddy standard of political discourse in the UK as a whole.

I will refrain from commenting too much on the policies of either candidate. I know too little about the policies and obviously my opinions could well be different were I actually a Londoner. But I would probably have reluctantly voted for Brian Paddick. I would probably not have allocated my second preference. Choosing between Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson is a bit like choosing between shit and shite. Forced at gunpoint however, I would plump for Johnson.

I have, after all, voted for him before. A couple of years ago Boris Johnson stood in the election to become Rector of Edinburgh University. He was an early favourite, but then that shady coalition of Labour / Green / People and Planet / whatever in EUSA went on the offensive to produce a highly negative campaign based on Boris Johnson’s support for tuition fees.

The students, being self-interested, rational utility maximisers, decided to vote against the possibility of being seen to favour tuition fees. I voted on principle against this subsidy for the middle class.

Today we have the completely anonymous Mark Ballard as our Rector. Don’t know who Mark Ballard is? Don’t blame you. He used to be a Green MSP but was such a nonentity that he was voted out last year. As such, a genuine nobody is Rector of Edinburgh University. The guy we could have had is now Mayor of London. (Even Magnus Linklater would have been better. I actually met him while he was campaigning and he seemed rather pleasant.)

It is true that Boris Johnson is a bit of a clown. But I don’t see why this is necessarily a barrier to being in public office. People always drone on about how boring politicians are. They complain about bland inoffensive leaders — Blairs, Camerons, Cleggs and the like — who silence independent thinkers or anyone who could be seen as a loose cannon. They despise those Milliblands et al. who climb the greasy pole, toe the party line and so on. And quite rightly.

But then when someone who is charismatic, who is an independent thinker, who will not toe the party line comes along, apparently he is unfit for office. You can’t have it both ways.

Plus, the notion that over a million Londoners voted for Boris Johnson “just for a laugh” is highly patronising. I am pretty misanthropic, but even my hatred for the electorate does not stoop this low. I do not doubt that some people voted for Johnson on this basis, but to put his victory down to this phenomenon alone is surely wide of the mark. It makes you look petulant.

Also, I surely need not say that voting against Boris Johnson because he is a character is every bit as pathetic as voting for him for that reason. Yet, as far as I can tell, it is the number one reason why people have been so averse to a Johnson victory. It is also odd that people should complain about Johnson for being famous for being maverick, only to vote for Ken Livingston who… is famous for being a maverick.

To say that because Boris is a bumbler when he talks means that he will be a bumbler in control of London is pathetic. Political leaders don’t “run” anything — that’s the job of the civil service and what have you. Boris Johnson won’t be sitting in front of a real-life game of Sim City. Political leaders are public figureheads who canvass opinion, bring ideas to the table and direct policy and they are only one (albeit prominent) branch in a large tree. I see nothing in Boris Johnson’s character that will prohibit him from doing this job just fine.

And being a clown is, at least, a whole lot better than being malicious. Because that is what Livingstone is. While the character assassinations of Boris Johnson are ten a penny, people on the left tend to be an awful lot more quiet about Livingstone’s many failings. His inexplicable inability to simply apologise to Oliver Finegold for his drunken remarks; his failure to distance himself from homophobic Islamist Yusuf al-Qaradawi; his hokey-cokey in-out-in-out, I’m not running, yes I am but as an independent, then I’ll rejoin the Labour party, shake it all about. Don’t forget also that he rushed to the door like a yapping dog with its tail wagging to make excuses for the brutal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.

Of course, Boris Johnson is not just a clown. He is a toff. And he is a Tory. Booooo!

Well, all I can say to that is, grow up. This is just the most pathetic way to discuss politics. If you have to resort to invoking the days of Thatcher to persuade people not to vote Conservative, you must be scraping the barrel. Yet it is a staple of British political discourse.

The Labour Government could go round the country literally raping everyone. When someone calls them up on it, you can be sure the Government will turn round and splutter, “Ah yes — but the Tories brought you the POLL TAX. Booooo!” And the sheep on the left will be won over. They will hi-5 each other for what they see as an excellent sucker-punch (which is in fact a tired, over-used, irrelevant line), hiss at the Tories and let the Labour Government get back to raping everyone again.

I am in little position to comment on how bad Margaret Thatcher’s government was because I am too young to remember anything substantial of it. But it seems to me as though Thatcher is vilified mostly for ushering in some changes that were no doubt difficult to take at the time but which were necessary in the long run. Socialism is a discredited ideology — almost the entire history of the twentieth century should tell you this. Almost every other comparable country has gone through a similar process. Besides, Labour has done little to reverse this, so to turn to them while blaming Thatcher is hollow.

Even if I am wrong on this, you must realise that invoking Thatcher will not cut it much longer. For one thing, this stuff happened twenty or thirty years ago. Many voters (like myself) now do not even remember that far back, and politics and the Conservative Party are operating in very different environments now. It’s not fair on today’s Conservatives to punish them for the actions of the previous generation, and it takes the people with whom you are debating for mugs to crudely reduce everything to this. And it makes you look like a tosser as well.

The thing is, the Conservatives may have the Poll Tax (from twenty years ago). But Labour have the Iraq War (with goodness knows how many people killed) from this decade. There was their bullying approach to the media that went along with the Iraq War in this decade. They have created a climate of fear and general suspicion of anyone with “Mongolian eyes”, leading to at least one unnecessary death in this decade. They have turned this country into the most spied-upon in the world in this decade. They have begun to construct the database state, with all the security risks that entails, along with the hopelessly expensive ID cards in this decade.

They have abolished the 10p income tax rate. That would be bad enough from the Conservatives, but for a “Labour” government it shows a scandalous disregard for the concept of the progressive tax system. Labour have treated the voters with utter contempt, taking their position in power for granted.

Although I have moved on to the more general point about the standard of political discourse, this is related to the recent Mayoral contest. You could argue that all that has nothing to do with Ken Livingstone. But he helped legitimise all this by re-joining the Labour Party at the height of Tony Blair’s courtship with George Bush.

With all of this blood on their hands, with their power-grabbing, and their utter contempt for civil liberties, what is it that keeps them in power? The best response is “Maggie stole my milk… in 1970″? Get real. This approach has literally allowed the Labour Government to get away with murder. Why should I be prepared to give this Labour mob another chance?

You could argue that whatever Labour do, the Conservatives must always be worse because they are more “right wing”. But this argument does not cut it either. For one thing, it is precisely this approach that allows Labour to get away with all of this. The left just shrug their shoulders and mumble, “could be worse”. The Conservatives, on the other hand, are scrutinised for slightest bawhair of a possibility that they might infringe on people’s liberties. I am certain that the Conservatives would never have been allowed to get away with the Iraq War, the creeping privatisation of the NHS, ID cards and you name it in the way that Labour have been. This alone is reason enough to vote Labour out.

Furthermore, to expect the Labour Party to take a liberal approach is asking too much of them. Their traditional ideology is not liberalism, contrary to what some might tell you. It is socialism. Say what you like about the Conservatives, but at least they have a liberal wing in their party. With Labour you just get one kind of authoritarianism or another.

As for the argument that Boris Johnson will not be a good leader because he is a toff, that is just nonsensical bigotry of the highest order. Being of a certain social class should be not a barrier to holding office. After all, Boris Johnson did not choose his father.

Anyone who knows me will know that I am not rich in the slightest. But if I happened to have been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, I would like to think that I would not be subjected to this kind of bigotry. Justin in the comments at Nosemonkey’s says,

I tell you what, I will [get over the class prejudice] if they will. You obviously haven’t been swimming in some of the Tory cesspits I have in the last few months.

I am not a “party identifier” — at least not between Labour and the Conservatives. I was brought up by SNP-supporting parents. As I grew up I drifted towards the Liberal Democrats. From this position, I see a great deal more “snide remarks, personal attacks and class prejudice” from Labour supporters than I do from Conservative supporters. In fact, it is one of the things that has ultimately turned me completely off the Labour Party over the past few years.

I obviously haven’t been swimming in Justin’s Tory cesspits either. But if anyone can find me an example of someone saying that you should not vote for someone because they are too working class to do their job properly, I would happily accept defeat on this point. But I have never heard it said. But to complain that someone is too posh is par for the course.

Besides, to attack the Conservatives for being full of toffs misses the fact that plenty of Labour members are also toffs. Tony Blair isn’t exactly a miner. And the stuff about Gordon Brown being from a working class area only tells half the story. I have lived almost all my life in that same working class area, and people round here know that he was a privileged son of the manse who got special treatment during his education. So it’s vote Tory, get a toff; vote Labour, get a toff. Not that this should matter in the slightest of course.

To bring all of this back to where I started, remember that I am not a supporter of Boris Johnson. My point is that Boris Johnson as Mayor of London is not remotely as offensive as some people are making out.

This is a personal view, but I would never vote for someone seeking a third term unless they were exceptionally appealing. But the third term is when the rot sets in, if it didn’t during the second term. That’s when power gets to their heads. That’s when they lose touch of reality. In this light, a change is not all that bad.

Believe it or not, Labour do not have a divine right to power. Even Scotland, with all of its Labour rotten boroughs in the west, realised this last year. Just like in London, “the enemy” got in instead. While you may argue that the SNP are not Tories, they are nonetheless loathsome. But guess what. Scotland didn’t implode one year ago when they were elected. In fact, the SNP administration is a breath of fresh air, and it’s certainly a lot better than the prospect of a third Labour-dominated Executive. I don’t see why Boris Johnson should be different.

Of course, he could very well be a disaster. But the point is that candidates shouldn’t be judged on their background, their hairstyle or the colour of their rosette. They should be judged on their policies and their record. I’ve skim-read Boris Johnson’s manifesto and I have not seen anything particularly offensive and I see nothing that disqualifies him in my mind. Even if people do disagree with Johnson’s policies, this is fair enough — but I didn’t hear any of it. I just heard about his posh accent.

I am greatly saddened by the nature of the debate and the sheer hypocrisy that so many people are showing. Too many people are making terrible excuses for a disastrous Labour government. I blame these people for the road this country is headed down.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Maybe I am asking too much. But any notion I had before that political ideologies are formed, debated and voted for on the basis of rational, intelligent thought have been shattered this week. What Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky said was true after all. Voting for a political party is just like supporting a football team for some people, with accident of birth and plain old prejudice at the basis of their support. I’d prefer it if these people could leave their childish desire to be part of a tribe in the football ground rather than in the ballot box where they are controlling my life.

The cheesy line goes, “if you don’t vote, you get the politicians you deserve.” Well, it’s not true. Politicians can’t do anything without votes. But if you vote for someone because they are the “least worst” or because “at least they’re not the Tories”, then you do get the politicians you deserve. My anger stems from the fact that I do not deserve these politicians.

Update: I’ve written a second post on this topic. I hope this concisely clarifies my intentions with this post. I also respond to the feedback.

In case you were wondering, this is an even more quiet place than usual just now because I have exams at the moment. Sorry I’ve not been more active at replying to comments in recent weeks. I found the first exam more stressful than I should have, so I decided to take today off to relax. So it’s a good opportunity to stick a lazy post up here.

I’ve been tagged by a meme twice in recent weeks. One of them will be more exciting for you readers, and I have been meaning to write a post like that for about a year anyway. But I will do this one first because the other one will take a bit of preparation. Because I need to preserve all that brain power for the exams.

This is from Angry Steve. I can’t actually see what the common theme that runs through this is. Still, if you have been tagged in a meme and you don’t take part the punishment is fifty lashes in the blogospheric dungeon. So here goes.

1. The rules of the game get posted on the beginning.
2. Each player answers the rules about himself [or indeed herself].
3. At the end of the post, the player tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they’ve been tagged and asking them to read his [or her] blog.

What I was doing ten years ago:

According to my excellent maths skills, I was 12 years old. So I was probably being exceptionally annoying at primary school. I was probably preparing myself mentally for arriving at the big school with all the big bullies.

Five things on my To-Do list today:

Well, I am posting this last thing on Saturday. So here is my to-do list for Sunday.

1. Watch the GP2 race
2. Go for a walk round the park
3. Watch the Spanish Grand Prix
4. Begin revising for my next exam
5. Uh, go to bed

Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Given that I would be financially secure, I would ditch all of my formal commitments and get round to all of those leisure activities that have been building up. The pile of CDs that I bought way back in October and still haven’t had the time to listen to. The DVDs. The books I bought for my summer reading in 2006 and the books that have been added to that pile since. The issues of The Economist which I unwisely purchased a three year subscription to before realising that I didn’t have the time to read a single bloody issue.

Three of my bad habits:

1. Weighing up the possibilities for so long that the opportunity completely passes by
2. Eating too quickly
3. Fingernail biting

Five places I’ve lived:

1. Glenrothes
2. Kirkcaldy

Uhh… and that’s it.

Five jobs I’ve had:

1. Lifting furniture about for an antiques shop run by a family friend
2. Sales assistant at Woolworths

Uhh… and that’s it.

Five books I’ve recently read:

Hmm difficult one. I don’t often get a chance to read a full book (I think my pace is about two per year). But I have read most of a few books at university so I’ll put the details here.

1. The Economic Development of Modern Scotland, 1950-1980, Richard Saville (ed.) — Skim-read many chapters for my exam on the Scottish Economy. It’s not very “modern” any more though — it was published in 1985 (no modern perspective on oil, little if anything about electronics, poll tax what poll tax?). Good chapters on the Highlands and Islands Development Agency and the Scottish Development Agency though. Shame they never came up in the exam!
2. The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan — Food for thought for proponents of “more democracy”. I thought it would be really useful for my dissertation. It was kind of, but I enjoyed the read more for the bits that weren’t much to do with my dissertation.
3. A Logic of Expressive Choice, Alexander A. Schuessler — A theory on voting behaviour and things like that (cases which should be collective action problems but aren’t). It gets a bit technical towards the end, but the early chapters are fascinating to read. If you want to know why the US President is just like a can of Dr Pepper, this is the book for you!
4. Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner — Finally something I read in my spare time. Quite fun to read.
5. The Worldly Philosophers, Robert L. Heilbroner — I found this book very boring; it took me over a year to read. It’s okay when it’s talking about people you’ve heard of. But in the chapters about people I’ve never heard of, it was a real struggle to read.

Five people or communities I’m going to tag:

Well first of all, bollocks to leaving a comment as per rule 3 at the top. It’s bad enough tagging someone as it is. I will tag five people here and if they notice it they can carry on the meme if they wish.

1. Colin
2. Jeff
3. Mat
4. Rhys
5. Sarah

It was my turn to write this week’s Scottish Roundup (nominations always welcome of course, even if it’s nothing to do with politics). I keep an eye on the Scottish blogs throughout the week in preparation, and towards the end of the week it became pretty clear that one particular wee stooshie had to be covered.

Labour blogger Kezia Dugdale has been involved in a campaign called Scotland for Obama. SNP blogger Calum Cashley was none too impressed. Then a number of other bloggers — SNP supporters among them — decided to take Calum Cashley to task.

I have to confess that I’m not a great fan of Calum Cashley’s blog. To me, it seems unnecessarily confrontational, negative, sarcastic and maybe even a bit boorish. It’s certainly not the sort of thing that would persuade me to vote for him come election time. But despite the response to his most recent post, in this instance I’m probably more inclined to agree with Cashley.

Maybe it’s just a reflection of my increasingly anti-political or apolitical (certainly in terms of party politics) viewpoint (I will consider the roots of this in a future post if I can get round to it). But there is something about the amount of attention that the US Presidential election receives that rubs me up the wrong way a bit. It’s not that I don’t recognise that the position of US President isn’t an incredibly powerful one. But political campaigns in general are starting to really get my goat.

Mostly, it is the implication that a campaign like Scotland for Obama will make a difference. It just comes across as a bit attention seeking. “Look at me and look at how much I care!”

I am pretty sceptical of most political campaigning. Of course, I have my views. But I have never joined a club, I’ve never gone on a demonstration and I’ve never worn any political t-shirts. This is because I know it will make next to no difference.

Come election time, of course, I love it. I stay up all night to watch the results. It’s great fun to cheer on the good guys and boo the baddies. As Jeff says in the tagline to his blog, “Elections - Probably the Best Spectator Sport in the World”. But beyond that, what does political campaigning mean?

Do I need to go on a rally to prove how much I care? Not really. Will the Scotland for Obama campaign make a jot of difference to the outcome of the election? I hardly think so. In fact, as Calum Cashley rightly points out, if enough Americans find out that those pinko Europeans are campaigning in Obama’s favour, if anything it will probably have a negative effect.

I am not sure it’s my position to tell Americans how to vote anyway. I know it has been pointed out in the posts I have linked to above that Scotland for Obama is not intended to tell Americans how to vote. But the point still stands.

Imagine if the boot was on another foot. What if somewhere in America a group of people gathered to express their support for, say, David Cameron. What would you think of it? I would think they were the most enormous fools. I would roll my eyes. I might ignore them. But it would more likely make me even less inclined to vote for Cameron.

The thing is that our viewpoint is unquestionably altered by the fact that we don’t live in America. The issues, the agenda and the political climate are completely different over there.

I know that whenever I have heard visiting foreign students express an opinion about Scottish politics (there is no shortage of this in the Edinburgh Uni politics department) it has often been the most ill-informed bum drizzle. You can’t blame them for that. They cannot possibly have as good a feel for the issues as someone like me who has barely set foot out of Scotland. They are projecting their views on American (or whatever) politics onto a map of Scotland. But it’s a square peg in a round hole.

I recognise that the same phenomenon would occur in reverse. In deference to this, I mostly keep my viewpoints on other countries’ politics to myself. I have my own opinions, of course. I do care what goes on in other countries. But you wouldn’t find me going around the place wearing an Obama badge or anything like that.

I have done a few of those online quizzes that tell you which candidate you should vote for. The results are here and here. When I did those quizzes though, there were a number of questions that I didn’t have the first clue about. In some cases I had not even heard of the issues and I couldn’t possibly have an opinion on them.

The same even applies when you’re in the same country. When I tried out Vote Match London about a quarter of the questions were about issues that I had never heard of, and half of the questions I had no opinion on whatsoever. For what it’s worth, it told me that I should vote for Boris Johnson. Would I vote for Boris Johnson if I was an actual Londoner? I simply don’t know because I’m not a Londoner.

And here is the thing. I am sure that London does not need my help to elect their Mayor. Equally, the USA does not need to hear my views on the Presidential campaign. An argument against this has been put forward by Political Dissuasion:

Would you criticise me for organising a rally against Robert Mugabe’s treatment of the people of Zimbabwe, where people are dying, starving and being jailed for actions and rights that you and I take take for granted?

There is quite a noticeable difference between the USA and Zimbabwe. One of them is democratic and the other is not. For all of its faults, at least in the USA there is a reasonable expectation of free speech, a reasonably free press, reasonably free markets and so on. None of this exists in Zimbabwe. So the people of Zimbabwe need international support so much more. Even then, I would limit myself to saying that I think Zimbabwe should be freer. Once they have the “rights that you and I take for granted”, I am sure they will be able to conduct their own affairs without the help of the likes of me.

The USA needs no help in this regard. They have their freedoms that they take for granted. If I were to stick my nose in, I would most likely be batted away. And if an American sticks his nose into my country’s politics, I would bat him away as well.

There is the other argument that US politics affects us all, which I suppose is true to an extent. But does it really affect us? I have my doubts. The likely winners of the election are much of a muchness. People like to pluck out the Iraq War as an example of how much American politics affects us, but these people forget that most Democrats were all for invading Iraq at the time as well!

Incidentally, I do have an opinion on the US Presidential candidates. As it happens, I favour Barack Obama. But I don’t pretend that this is based on any nuanced policy view. It is based on the fact that John McCain is a baad, baad Republican and that Hilary Clinton is a screeching maniac. Honestly, Clinton drives me nuts. She is like that teacher you could hear giving someone a row from the opposite end of the corridor.

There are other reasons, which I covered here. I really dislike the tone of Clinton’s campaign. You can just tell that she came into the campaign thinking she had a divine right to be President. The message of experience is total bunk. Her sumtotal of experience is limited to being married to a former President. Big wow.

At least Obama’s message is more positive. But here is another area where I agree with Calum Cashley. If the American public buys into all of the hope rhetoric, it is lining itself up for disappointment. We have seen this in Britain in the 1990s. Labour pulled off the exact same trick. “I’m here to save you from those awful conservatives!” Well we all know how that turned out.

The truth is harsher. No matter who you vote for, the government gets in. I’d love to see Barack Obama usher in a new era of hope for America. But if he actually does it I’ll eat my hat.

All of that said, I don’t criticise Kezia Dugdale or anyone else for getting involved in Scotland for Obama. It is a harmless campaign and if the people involved get a buzz out of participating then that is all good. We are all adults living in a democracy. By the same token, Calum Cashley is perfectly entitled to chip in, and I don’t think the points he made were as awful as some people are making out.

I had a new year’s resolution this year. As part of my current crisis (i.e. having to become responsible), I am trying to get my notoriously bad sleeping pattern in order. Amazingly, I have stuck to the first part of the resolution.

For the past three months, I have been keeping a log of my sleeping patterns. It’s quite detailed. Every morning I open up my big Excel spreadsheet and record the time I went to bed, when I think I fell asleep, when I woke up and when I actually got my lazy arse out of bed. I also note when I set my alarm for. From all of this I work out how long I am unable to sleep, how long I sleep in and… well, how lazy I am.

Obviously it’s not an exact science. I obviously can’t tell exactly what time I fall asleep at, but I think I have a good idea — often because I end up listening to the radio (with its regular half-hourly bulletins) because otherwise I just get frustrated at not being able to fall asleep which makes the problem even worse.

So I am three months in. My excellent maths skills tell me that this means I am a quarter of the way through the project. A good time to look over the data. That can mean only one thing: graphs.

This first graph shows rolling seven day averages for the five variables that are measured as clock times. The labels are probably self-explanatory enough.

This second graph shows the variables that are measured in lengths of time. ‘Insomnia’ is the length of time it takes for me to fall asleep (i.e. the difference between the time at which I fall asleep and the time at which I go to bed). ‘Asleep for’ is self-explanatory, and ‘Lazy’ is the length of time I spend in bed after waking up. Stacking these shows the amount of time I spend in bed per day, which you can read off the y-axis.

One thing that I have noticed is that my sleeping patterns appear to be in cycles. There are fairly distinct peaks and troughs and it doesn’t look quite as ‘random’ as you might expect.

I will spare you from the boring details that led to every peak and trough. What I have learned from generating these graphs is the fact that even the slightest disruption to my routine can have massive effects on my sleep.

For instance, the pronounced peak that happens in around week 3 of February came about because I had a reading week on just one of my courses. This small change led to me falling asleep one hour later than normal and sleeping a further hour longer than normal.

The broad trend, though, had been good. The lines were going in the right direction (of course I am trying to sleep earlier in the day). But since the middle of March it has all gone wrong.

It started when I travelled up to Dundee to attend a friend’s birthday outing and opted to take the first train home (so I didn’t get to sleep until a disgusting 8am). This was exacerbated by the Australian Grand Prix which, of course, I had to watch live (you have to get your priorities straight, you see). Later that week I (almost) inexplicably woke up hours earlier than I expected to.

All of this left me rather more sleep-deprived than normal. Ironically, of all the variables, the most important one — length of time spent asleep — is fairly stable at 8 hours, which is said to be the recommended amount of sleep. But this week it fell through the floor to a seven day average of 6 hours.

It felt okay at the time, but I know from experience that this situation can only last so long until it catches up with you. Combine this with the Malaysian Grand Prix (which I also had to watch live) and the fact that I no longer have any classes, and the result is the mess you see towards the end of the graph.

So now I am at a situation where the earliest I have to get up all week for the next few weeks is 4pm. With no incentive to get up, I just don’t. A hefty dose of self-discipline is clearly in order, but more than once in the past two weeks I have slept straight through four alarm clocks without having any recollection of switching them off.

The result is now that I am falling asleep at around 5am if I am lucky, and waking up at around 2 if I’m lucky. Smart alecs might point out that I should maybe try going to bed earlier. But if you look at graph 2 you will see that I am already spending an average of 3 hours in bed without being able to get to sleep.

These seven day average graphs are nothing though. I have also generated separate graphs for each of the variables showing daily changes (in blue, of course). The red line is the familiar seven day average, and there is a grey trendline (though in this particular graph is is almost indistinguishable from the gridline marking 8 hours).

As you can see, it fluctuates wildly during my ‘routine’ weeks. Despite the ‘overall’ consistency of the seven day average, and the reassuring fact that the trendline is almost parallel to the x-axis, the fluctuating blue line is alarming. I suspect that this is the root of most of my problems.

In extreme cases, I will get little more than 2 hours. This obviously has to be offset sometime, so a night soon afterwards I will be knocked out for 12 hours. Those two days alone would be enough to send my entire sleeping pattern askew, never mind having a similar pattern repeated several times in a matter of months.

The silver lining is that the end of this graph actually looks quite good. As you can see, I have not emerged from this peak yet, but it looks as though it is a peak to compensate for the previous trough. And the wild fluctuations have stopped — mostly because I don’t have any early starts for the time being.

The problem is that once it all settles down it will almost certainly be into a routine something along the lines of sleeping from 4am until 12 noon. This has been the way of it for years now. The difficult part is shifting this so that it is, say, midnight until 8am.

Why am I a nightowl? Well, one possibility is the fact that I haven’t had anything resembling regular early starts since the distant days of school. But even then I stayed up late and was seriously sleep deprived. According to my mother, I was even a nightowl when I was a baby. It looks like I was born this way.

Now, the task is working out how I can adapt this inconvenient personal trait into something that I can manage in my adult life. (Can you tell that this is a stressful period for me?…)

First things first. I have upgraded to WordPress 2.5. The new admin panel takes a bit of getting used to, and it is a little bit buggy for my liking. But then again that is probably because I am using so many plugins.

For the first time I upgraded using the astonishing WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin. I’ve been meaning to use it for a while, but forgot about it until James O’Malley reminded me. So thanks for that James. Upgrading vee8 and doctorvee was flawless, although something funny happened to Scottish Roundup. Fixed it in the end (I hope), but it did make me scratch my head, especially as the other two upgrades went so smoothly.

Another thing to point out is that I have finally got that OpenID plugin installed. It doesn’t work exactly how I’d like it to, but it will do. Don’t be freaked out by it if you leave a comment and you don’t know what OpenID is. You can leave the OpenID field blank.

You might be wondering if it was even worth me upgrading this blog. It is rather shit of me to have posted next to nothing for the past three weeks and come back with a dull admin post. Well here’s what’s happening.

Last week in the comments of this increasingly quiet blog, a very public sociologist wrote:

Looks like F1 has stolen you away from us.

It’s kind of true. When I launched vee8, originally I had every intention of posting here (almost) as often as before.

What I was forgetting was that because of my mad hectic busy important 24/7 lifestyle and / or laziness, I was blogging less and less here anyway. In all seriousness, I am in my final year at university. And while I still have luxuries such as not having to get up before lunchtime, it does mean that I get shards of guilt searing through my conscience every time I write a blog post or open Google Reader. After all, I should be studying.

For around — ooh, let’s see — the past year, I have had hardly any time to blog, or indeed read blogs. Google Reader always has 1000+ items for me to read. I think I’ve only got it down to zero about twice in the past year.

Plainly, even pretending that I can keep on top of all my RSS feeds is a nonsense. I have come to realise that I don’t have the time to read blogs in the same way as I used to. I have probably gone for weeks without even reading blogs actually (excepting Scottish blogs which I have to read for the Roundup). And the thing is that I don’t really miss the blogosphere — especially the politics blogs. (My years at university studying politics have ironically made me deeply apathetic.)

“Boo, hiss,” I hear you cry. But that’s the way it is. Once I got fed up with Guido et al, it was just the start of the ball rolling and reading hundreds of posts like this is no longer my idea of fun.

This is not to say that I will retreat from politics or political blogging — and definitely not blogging as a whole — altogether. But I have to face up to the fact that as a student I have increasingly found that I do not have enough time to engage in it properly.

So many of the posts I have written over the past few months have been about topics that were lingering in my head for weeks or even months. For instance, the one about road tolls was written in my head in December as a response to Calum Cashley. I didn’t get the chance to actually write it until March. See if you can spot more (a fun game for long journeys, I’m sure)!

And that’s what it’s like when I am a lazy student bum! So what on earth is it going to be like when I actually get a proper job?!

At the same time, last month I launched vee8, a dedicated Formula 1 blog. The original intention was to spare the many readers here who do not like F1 from having to read what can at some points during the year become a blog almost exclusively about F1.

But in its first month I think vee8 has quite unexpectedly taken a life of its own. I am enjoying every minute of it. It is such a refreshing feeling to be blogging about something that actually matters rather than that politics nonsense! Seriously though, I have been staggered by how much fun I am having with it and how successful it has been.

I try to avoid talking about stats because inevitably someone takes offence at the showing off. So I’ll say this up-front. The following may be a reflection of how bad this blog is. Readership here has, after all, stagnated over the past 2 or 3 years which shouldn’t really happen (as someone once told me, telling me off for showing off my stats, “it’s a viral thing”).

But at vee8 — which, I remind you, is little over a month old — I am already getting as more “returning visitors” than I am on this blog. As I say, that is probably partly down to the fact that I post here far less often than I used to, while there is usually daily content at vee8. But I’m still amazed at how quickly it has got a solid readership. Obviously it helps that I had plenty of F1 fans reading here originally, but boy — if only I found it this easy to get readers the first time round!

Long story short. I am now running three major blogs. Scottish Roundup has to have a new post every Sunday, so a lot of my Fridays and Saturdays are spent making sure that happens. vee8 is fresh, new and exciting and this season looks like it’s going to be a corker, so a lot of my attention is now focussed there. This one is my personal blog, so I don’t feel like I owe it much attention.

Just two years ago this was my only blog. Now it is just part of my wider blogging activity. With that fact along with impending adulthood, I am having to steer a new path for this blog.

I am probably being melodramatic (it is 4am), so I will say that probably not much will change. In fact, the changes have already happened and I just need to adapt to it.

I stopped being part of the conversation in the wider blogosphere a long time ago without ever meaning that to happen. I just don’t have the time to follow it. So that probably means writing fewer, more in depth posts on a miscellany of subjects.

You might well have noticed that already. The previous five posts here were about coffee, Autechre, income tax, Freeview and Radio 5 Live — quite a mixture. And that takes us practically to the beginning of March. To think that I used to write an average of six pithy posts per day about the day’s current subjects!

It won’t pick up any time soon. Those shards of guilt will be extra painful as it’s exam time. But I have just three exams, and then it will all be over! The difficult part comes after that — looking for a job. (My status as a person, incidentally, is another thing that it making me more reluctant to blog here… Google and all.)

I just remembered that almost a year ago I hilariously joked about giving up blogging. Now I am looking back on the past year thinking it was actually quite prescient.

Anyway, please forgive the navel gazing. I am planning to return tomorrow with anothe