I played a festival*! This was my set!

Redstock Set by cawhitworth

You! Me! Dancing!

* OK, it was our work summer party

So, this week, it’s Histon Feast Week. A Feast Week is a thing they have in Cambridgeshire villages that’s a bit like a week-long village fete. There’s a parade, and a funfair and… well, apparently, there’s a bunch of other stuff, but I can’t find out what it is.

See, the organisers of the feast don’t publish details of the week’s programme online. They do this deliberately, so you’ll go and buy a programme. They’re available from “most local retailers” for £2. That’s fine, they want us to support the feast and it helps fund it. That’s good. Except, by “local retailer”, they mean all the actual small local village shops, not the Tesco Express or Co-op or any of those kinds of things. Again, I understand – they want local people to support local shops and not national or multinational chains. That’s also good. The problem is, these local shops are the kind that are open from 9am until 4:30pm, Monday to Friday. I work from 8am to 5pm, Monday to Friday. I can’t buy a programme from a local shop because they’re not actually open when I’m in the village.

Even today, at the parade – where most of the village was out watching and joining in with the celebrations and having a jolly fun old time, no-one was selling programmes. None of the local shops were open. Of course, Tesco and Co-op were, and they were doing a roaring trade selling ice creams and sweets and fizzy drinks to people. But not programmes, because they’re not allowed to. Genius.

So, I’ve spent some of this evening noodling around in Ableton Live, putting together the bones of a tech house style track. The arrangement is a bit all over the place at the moment, I’m not totally happy with the pacing or anything and it needs more tension/release and whatnot, but the skeleton is there and maybe with a bit of tidying it might almost be worth listening to. Anyway, should you feel the need to listen to four-odd minutes of pounding repetitive bleepy beats, you can:

Tech house by cawhitworth

So, there’s a wonderful thing called the Gallagher Index, which is basically a measure of how representative of popular opinion the outcome of an election is – basically, a measure of the difference between the popular vote and how that translates into representation in parliament (or equivalent). There’s a Wikipedia article on it here, but basically all you need to know is that lower numbers are better.

Well, I’ve run the numbers for this election through a spreadsheet (which you can see here, if that sort of thing interests you) and the UK comes out as about 15.2-ish (we’re still waiting on results, but it’s unlikely to change). Which is sort of interesting to know, but what’s far more useful is to put it in some kind of context.

So, I added a column to the spreadsheet that compared us to the most recent election in, well, pretty much every other democracy in the world. And, in a list of 100 countries, we come 11th from bottom.

(the 2007 US presidential elections don’t fare much better, either)

So, yeah, are we ready to talk about electoral reform, yet?

Edit: At 648 of 650 seats declared, the index now stands at 14.98, which is a smidgin lower, but still bloody awful.

Well, tonight was the first Manchester Flashmob. I’m not going to write a full report because doubtless there’ll be one on the aforementioned website before long, but I’ll just jot down a few thoughts before I go to bed.

The event was intended to take place in the Filmworks – we were supposed to gather there, open our umbrellas, bob up and down and cheer periodically for about five minutes and then leave, no harm done. Unfortunately, someone (the media are currently blamed) had alerted the Filmworks and when we arrived the barriers were down and the security were out in force. Attempts were made to move the mob to Norweigan Blue instead, but we were thrown out of there as well, and ended up congregating in the centre of the Printworks. This worked fairly well, and several hundred people jumped up and down with umbrellas opened, cheered for a few minutes and then left. The media attempted to interview people as they left and were mostly left with the perplexing reason that “we’d come to see the rain man”.

During the event, I felt quite strange. I was cheering, jumping up and down and holding an umbrella, with several hundred other people, but the thing was, none of us were quite clear on why – there was a big, jubilant party atmosphere for no reason at all. Also, we all felt aggrieved that the Filmworks and Norweigan Blue wouldn’t let us in – but equally, none of us could have told you, if pressed, why they should have let us in. At some level, I guess you could burble on about repression of free speech and that, but the thing is, the whole Flashmob principle is so completely absurd that analysing it in those sort of terms is a pointless – it was never meant to be anything more than harmless fun and to talk about it in terms of more than that is daft.

What is clear is that Flashmobs are a strictly short-term phenomenon. As the media latch on to it, and the organisation becomes trickier (how do you attract enough people without attracting the “wrong” people?) they are inevitably going to “work” less well – as tonight showed; the media had caught on before the mob was due to take place and this had disrupted the apparent spontenaity of the event. The Filmworks closing their doors is understandable (the potential for something like this being hijacked for political/religious/terrorist/whatever reasons is obviously not insignificant), if disappointing, and it is probably to be expected that these sort of countermeasures will be commonplace for future mobs. A further Manchester mob is being planned, as are several more around the country, but I can’t see it lasting much longer.

But that said, we made North West Tonight and we all had a good time. Which is the main thing. Even if I did get accused of being in a cult.

(I didn’t even say “brolly good time” there, either. Oh, bugger…)