I am sure many Americans (and others) will be thinking “It’s too soon. He hasn’t done anything yet!” Or even “Dude can’t even pass health care already, but he’s been elevated to international sainthood?”.

But this isn’t about domestic politics, or about what he’s done yet. President Obama has changed how the world feels about America. He’s lifted the planet’s mood. This guy is global Prozac.

There’s more to it than just the Bush presidency being a total downer for everyone in the world who cares about multi-lateralism or just wants to do business with the US. The tidal wave of bad faith Bush’s presidency created washed away any chance of progress in so many international initiatives.

Obama’s not a game changer per se, but he’s changed how people feel about playing the game, or whether they even want to.

Or, as the Nobel committee says;

“Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play”.

Of course that’s not the view of everyone outside of America. I’m at an informal meeting of donors, government reps and NGOs to talk about independent media and economic development. It’s a pretty international crowd, and opinions are about evenly split on whether Obama’s peace prize is sublime or ridiculous.

A Norwegian colleague says he’s torn. On the one hand, it’s a rush, the kind of news that makes you gasp in disbelief and get the giggles. On the other, it reflects how the prize was captured by the Norwegian parliament in the 1940s and has since moved far away from its original vision. The ‘leader of the free world’ and its army would never have won the prize for fighting militarism, as Alfred Nobel stipulated in his will a hundred years ago.

My worry; does the award give Obama more impetus to get stuff done, or is it just a slightly embarrassing prize for him turning up and breathing?

Either way, at least on his next trip to Scandinavia Obama won’t come home empty-handed.

Kids, Chris de Burgh was never the hippest cat, but he has sold a gazillion records in a bucketload of countries. And he makes people happy – crazy happy, in fact, jumping up and down dancing and singing on a Monday night in Dublin where the economy has gone down the toilet, flushed away by a wet and dreary summer. The Irish Times critic was emphatically not happy, however, and wrote a sharp, witty and just a tad ungenerous review of the gig.

In return, the singer/songwriter of Lady in Red (I liked his earlier stuff much better) wrote a letter to the editor with the most good-temperedly vitriolic comeback to a critic I’ve seen in a long old time. It has all the essential elements.

First off, de Burgh gets in a dig against the Irish Times’ former music critic (Joe Breen, who’s actually pretty good – you just wouldn’t want to be Chris de Burgh, is all I’m saying). Then humorously points out how shitty it must have been for the critic to be the only person at a knickerstastically cult-like gig who by definition DOESN’T WANT TO BE THERE.

It’s all very parochial and petty, with the current and previous Irish Times music critics getting the classic small-country put down: ‘my friends know you and they say you’re crap’. But then de Burgh bangs this on the head, asking the critic if his career plan is to continue “to be an occasional critic in a country with the population of Greater Manchester”.

He closes with the classic rejoinder to critics everywhere, fake sympathy for a professional life spent “in the shadows, riffling through the garbage bins of despair and avoiding those who think that you are an irrelevance, an irritation to be ignored and laughed about.”

As fans of Chris de Burgh might agree, the good stuff never gets old.

Patten’s thankless work on policing in Northern Ireland brought about a huge leap forward and must have required no small physical courage on his part. His stint as the last governor of Hong Kong got valuable concessions from the Chinese that someone more worried about their ego and reputation couldn’t have delivered. And Patten’s and Javier Solana’s outwardly amicable and respectful managing of their conflicting EU foreign policy roles in the early 2000’s is a credit to both. Patten is uniquely qualified to be the face (and the brains) of Europe’s foreign policy.

There are other good reasons, too. The FT points out David Cameron’s likely discomfort with a fellow Tory being in such a prominent EU role. Also, putting Patten in as Number 2 may make it all that much easier to refuse Tony Blair the top job. And Patten has proven he can actually do all the deal-making and consensus-building the job requires (even more reason why the member states should think of Patten for President of the union, not least to preserve their own sovereignty).

But here’s my reason. Sometimes the good guys should win. I want someone in the foreign policy job whose judgment, experience and, above all, integrity I respect. Someone who may disappoint in the particulars, but who is sound on the fundamentals. In both organizational and political life, I don’t want to believe that only the cynics and brown-nosers, the bullies and yes-men will come out on top. Patten is living proof that successful leaders can be deeply moral and highly effective. That’s something we can all aspire to.

And think about the book he would write afterward…

Full disclosure: I’ve met Lord Patten a few times at the 21st Century Trust, an organisation of which I’m a fellow and he is the Chair.

A Brussels friend once said the Irish are so numerous in the European Commission because so many of the first wave of them were from big families and were therefore natural masters of deal-making and compromise. Until the last decade or two, probably most of the Irish population were middle children of large-ish families. We do seem to have a disproportionate number of countrymen in the European and other international institutions, and some of them have done remarkably well. (Alternative theories may include mass emigration in the 1970s and 80s and a bit of path dependence since whatever other qualities the Irish abroad may have, we love to give a leg up to our compatriots. Also, there are more people from big families because, well, there are more of them.)

More Hill staffers than I would have expected come from big families. (Alternative theories: lots are from recently immigrated families, or maybe the profile writers draw more attention to the big families because they’re unusual, or maybe beautiful people are inexplicably more likely to have many siblings…) Intuitively, people who’ve grown up in a large family will have been doing power-plays, coalition-building and breaking, and all sorts of tactical shenanigans since before they could talk. Perhaps the early practice gives them an edge?

I’ve never rated the emphasis placed in popular psychology on the roles of the Eldest Child, Middle Child and Youngest Child. I’m one of the 60% of my siblings who are middle children and I never noticed a particular bent towards peace-making amongst us. But maybe there’s something to it.

In any case, check out the Wyoming cowboy on page 2. I wouldn’t mind building a coalition with him.

It turns out that’s not an unusual reaction. Human brains are very good at rationalising the immediate aftermath of a disaster into business as usual. But, contrary to popular belief, not panicking isn’t all that successful a survival strategy. A book I read last year ‘The Unthinkable; Who Survives When Disaster Strikes’, says much of the planning around plane crashes, fires, etc. assumes that the first thing people will do is panic and run around doing stupid things that impede their escape. In fact, the most common and dangerous reaction is to just go limp, stay passive and assume that the nightclub fire is really not all that bad or that you should sit in your crashed plane seat until help arrives. Or that the hostage situation is all a terrible misunderstanding. That’s a very good way to die.

The studies show that the people most likely to survive, say, a plane crashing into their building (assuming they’re not unlucky enough to be on a floor above it), are the ones who don’t listen to their inner rationalizing voice, or the outer exhortations to stay put and ‘not panic’. They not only recognize early on that something’s seriously amiss, but have probably thought about escape routes already and are able to act quickly and purposefully. Then again, by definition, the survivor studies exclude the thought processes of people who don’t make it out, and the survivors themselves seem likely to try and string together some meaning from an arbitrary event using lashings of post facto rationalisation.

My disaster-preparedness is rubbish. I don’t have a stash of bottled water and dollar bills. My torch battery got used up in middle of the night reading sessions. And I don’t even have a gun to help me rob the essentials from better planners such as the Mormons. As soon as last night’s earthquake was over and I’d updated my facebook status, I got right back to watching the series finale of Grey’s Anatomy. 8 minutes later, Izzie’s dramatic death scene made me completely forget the quake had ever happened.

Which is another great thing about L.A. Turns out my tennis partner played the nurse handing over the paddles when the doctors trying to revive poor Izzie shouted “Clear!”. (But Jenny is good a team player who didn’t reveal any spoilers till the episode aired.) Jenny doesn’t watch Grey’s, but was very impressed by Sandra Oh’s ability to maintain a keen emotional pitch during numerous takes. As it was a dramatic climax and the penultimate scene of the season, they did about 50. It can’t have been easy for Katherine Heigl either, being rolled over and jump-started 50 times. I’ve often wondered what it’s like to be an actor lying in bed, trying to look ill and beautiful at the same time, and to emote high drama whilst hardly moving at all. Most of all, though, I wonder about the breasts.

So many actresses have had boob jobs that their breasts don’t naturally flatten to the side when they’re lying flat. They stand up like pyramids, ruining the line of the hospital gown. It’s especially disconcerting when the character in question is the most unlikely augmentation candidate imaginable. When Scully in the X-Files was fighting her alien cancer, I couldn’t focus on the dialogue at all because her tent shape was so distracting. It’s one thing to see girls running along Venice Beach with zero bounce factor, quite another for intellectual and moral centre of a gloomy science fiction series to look like she’s wearing a Madonna-style cone bra lying down.

(In a lovely piece of post-modern reflexivity, tomorrow Jenny is playing a woman on Nip and Tuck who’s getting a breast job. She’s already been to the special effects house to get fitted out for her surgery body and apparently the incisions look very realistic, though the skin tone is a bit light.)

And finally to the TMI bit of TMI. Cone bras may be acceptable or even required in the entertainment industry, but what about us girls who live on our assets in a much more subtle way? Without being too forthcoming about my own requirements, suffice to say that bra measurements are the only test in my life where I have consistently averaged an ‘A’. Over the last couple of weeks, I have made a transatlantic study of bra shops. I have two data points (Marks & Spencer in London & Dublin and Victoria’s Secret in Santa Monica) and two observations:

1. The normal distribution curve has moved to the right, and it is now far easer to find underwear for enormous knockers than averagely small ones.

2.It is now all but impossible to get an unpadded bra in a smaller size.

My theory for observation #1 is that the obesity epidemic means that the average breast size is increasing, so I am slowly becoming an outlier. Which is inconvenient, but not worth burning a bra over.

On observation #2, I wondered if the foam thing only seems like a staple but in fact is a years-long but essentially passing fashion (like FMBs or Ugg boots), or whether it is a signal that more modestly endowed women are not/not supposed to be satisfied with what their genes gave them. This raises the perennial question; how much are women’s fashion choices and body image determined by what the designers and the fashion press dictate is acceptable or desirable, or do the purveyors of fashion simply respond to our current anxieties?

Whatever the cause, the result is certainly more false advertising.

A note to commenters: I’ve already brought the tone around here down far enough for today. Let’s NOT have a thread about big breasts versus small ones…

Perfect example of a spoof that’s too plausible to be all that funny (or is it a spoof…?): today’s from George R.R. Martin saying he has engaged Howard Waldrop as his writing partner on Ice and Fire. It all sounds plausible, especially given the amount of abuse Martin gets from his overly entitled fans for being so late in delivering the latest of the unwieldy Ice and Fire series. (They grudge him watching football, seriously.) But the last bit where Martin says Waldrop will knock out the rest of the novel in a month or two while Martin is “in the hot tube with some babes in bikinis, sipping some Irish Mist and watching my TIVO replay of the Giants victory over the Patriots in the last Super Bowl but one” gives it away. Still, if old George really did want to outsource his sprawling epic, there are probably worse ways to go about it.

Secondly, I groaned out loud when I heard on the radio that our current Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, was in the White House to meet President Obama. Again, I’m not saying I’m proud of it, but my immediate response was ‘Oh no, once he meets Biffo, Barack won’t think we’re cool any more!’. But I’ve got to hand it to Reuters. They’ve put out a picture of the ceremonial handing over of the green muppet skin where President Obama looks an even bigger nob than Brian Cowen.

Finally, Bono. A couple of weeks ago, Bono made a much-awaited statement to the Irish Times to explain and justify how he can spend so much time campaigning for more taxes to be spent on development aid while he and his U2 colleagues engage in brazen tax avoidance. U2 have been putting their royalties through the Netherlands to avoid them being taxed in Ireland. (An income cap has been added to the previous system where artists based in Ireland didn’t have to pay tax on any royalties.) Bono made one main argument and also gave what is likely the real explanation of the discrepancy between his political stance and his personal finances. The argument: by expatriating profits to minimize their tax burden, U2 is simply part of a “system that has benefited the nation greatly” when “some very clever people in the Government and in the Revenue. . . created a financial system that prospered the entire nation”.

The idea is that just as many companies came to Ireland to take advantage of our low corporate tax regime, U2 is right to move part of its business to a lower royalty tax regime in the Netherlands. Bono says it’s hypocritical of Irish people to criticise him for avoiding tax because Ireland as a country has profited from other people’s tax avoidance. It’s a superficially appealing argument, but it’s a bit far fetched to say that because some time in the 1980s, Irish policymakers figured out how to undercut the rest of the EU on attracting FDI, we can’t now point out the inconsistency of a tax-avoiding millionaire rock star campaigning for an increase in government development aid. But the real problem with Bono’s defense was articulated in another context today.

Asking ‘where is the shame?’ of AIG execs and their brethren, Ezra Klein says “the virtuous selfishness prized by the market has been absorbed as an ethical philosophy”. He quotes a Matt Yglesias post that says “We’ve somehow managed to construct something of a post-shame society in which elites have convinced themselves that the rational agent model of human behavior is not just a useful modeling tool, but an ethical guidebook. There’s something to be said for the idea of a sense of honor and personal responsibility. ” Too true. The Edge defends himself saying U2 isn’t breaking the law. That’s not the point; just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s ethical.

But the real explanation for Bono’s aversion to paying his fair share is probably this:

“It hurts when the criticism comes in internationally. But I can’t speak up without betraying my relationship with the band – so you take the shit.”

U2 is a band of five, including Paul McGuinness, and Bono’s affairs are tied up with his colleagues. He can’t make a unilateral decision to pay more taxes, even if he wanted to. Fair enough, it’s a dilemma for him. To which the answer is, sort it out or suck it up.

To be perfectly clear to Bono (who I have a lot of time for), and other philanthropic/political activist millionaires:

1 Philanthropy is not an acceptable substitute for paying your fair share of tax. You earn more, you pay more. End of.

2 No, your time is not more valuable than your money. Pay up.

3 If you, the super-wealthy, object to paying tax because you don’t think governments are the best spenders of money, then roll up your sleeves and get involved in improving the policy and the processes.

(Which, in fairness, Bono is doing, and I have a lot of sympathy for him feeling damned if he does/doesn’t.)

Wrapping up, the only thing worth me being genuinely grumpy about today (apart from the ops off-site) is that, dancing and shillelaghs aside, Ireland is every bit as venal as everywhere else on the planet. We just do it with an occasionally charming manner and arguably cute accent.

And for what it’s worth, I propose we give green back to the Jamaicans. It’s a dreadful colour on people as pale as the Irish, and makes us look as if we all still have TB.

I do a fair bit of cheek-kissing and hugging, both socially and at work, probably more than most but not unusually so (I haven’t had any complaints yet). It’s really come in amongst the anglo-saxons in the past decade or so. Time was when only the French did cheek-kissing when they met. Perhaps as the result of many forlorn French exchange summers, or maybe just aping our more sophisticated Continental neighbours, the Irish and British middle classes began to do single-cheek kissing in the eighties and nineties.

I kiss a French person once on each cheek (twice if they’re a close friend or family friend), three times in total for a Belgian or Dutch person, and just one single-cheeked peck for a fellow anglo-saxon. In the last few years, a new variation has crept in. Married men who kiss me – just a peck – on the lips.

Cheek(y) kissing is now so common that perhaps for very good friends something more is called for? Or maybe it’s just an opportunistic twist in a situation where you can suddenly get away with kissing women other than your wife. God knows, I don’t dislike it (though I’ve never lingered), but I’m not in the habit of snogging other women’s husbands either (long live teh Patriarchy!). To call it a guilty pleasure would be to concede there’s something going on where it shouldn’t be – and there clearly isn’t, as none of my lip-kissers has ever made a pass at me – but I have to admit that I enjoy it probably just a little more than I should.

“Nobody ever imagined a bunch of Orcs would steal a database table…”

Stross’s stories are always about politics. His characters inhabit fully imagined universes where easily recognizable groups of people grapple with issues and contend for power. They don’t mope around describing the scenery either. Instead of taking half a book to figure out the implications of hopping between universes, Miriam Beckstein is packed and ready for her second trip, and trying to blast a medieval society into the information age by her fourth. Which is great because what’s interesting about fantasy worlds is not ‘how will the lead character get her head around this’ but more ‘but how would it work?’ What’s the plumbing like? Why would Ivy League schooled world-walkers keep their homeland in a feudal state of development? This is more than a fascinating conceit. It makes me understand the House of Saud a little better and reminds me of William Gibson’s famous quote; “The future’s here already. It’s just unevenly distributed.” So is the past.

But while Stross litters his universes with jewels of ideas other writers would lavish novellas on, I wonder if there’s something peculiarly leftist about the revved up short-handing of human progress. Civilizations are tagged pre and post-contact by a technological determinism that drives political, economic and social development on a linear track, albeit at the speed of a geometric progression. Stories abound where future-shocked characters say things like:

“But the UN is a government-“

and are told;

“No it isn’t,” Martin insisted. “It’s a talking shop. Started out as a treaty organization, turned into a bureaucracy, then an escrow agent for various transnational trade and standards agreements. After the Singularity, it was taken over by the Internet Engineering Task Force.* It’s not the government of Earth; it’s just the only remaining relic of Earth’s governments that your people can recognize.”

Iain Banks’ Culture novels are the epitome of the idea that if you magic away resource constraints, politics is about individual identity and the exercise of free will. It’s quite fair to argue that a society where technology has developed so far as to make scarcity unknown, and where digitized humans are impossible to murder, or even, really, to harm; this sort of society would be organized in a radically different way, if it’s organized at all. (Such a society could be described as ‘organized’ only insofar as emergent patterns and associations can be identified, rather than being structurally determined by design or consent.) How useful is it, politically, to speculate about what post-singularity life might look like? The description of elections in Accelerando as the acme of brand-driven, micro-marketed memetics isn’t all that satisfying. It’s politics as we know it, with more processing power and faster cycles. In the post-singularity politics of the Eschaton, people fight for liberty, not resources, because freedom is the only thing there’s a shortage of. But on closer inspection, the main struggle in Stross’s near-future writing is not for survival but for freedom, too.

Halting State is set in a pre-Singularity near-future where the commonest application of AI is as a spam filter that summarises an email as “job offer, vaguely menacing”, 70% likely to be spam, but probably worth a look. Halting State does what near-future SF does best; extrapolates current trends and technologies into a recognizable scenario that critiques the present day. It’s a Britain I certainly recognize.

We still have bendy buses, but the Republic of Scotland is the new Celtic Tiger and uses Euros instead of sterling. The band-aid covered Computer Misuse Act is still going, though with Scottish revisions post-independence in 2014. The lumbering infrastructure of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act has shaped society, but the local PC plods are still as hopeless with IT crimes as they are today. The appearance of Euro-spook Mehmet indicates that Turkey may have joined the EU and the present-day power grab of the EU Council of justice and home affairs Ministers paid off. Britain’s slid further down the slippery slope to a surveillance state. Law enforcement have always lived in a different world, and now they inhabit a data-rich version of reality called CopSpace. The Tube is dirtier, and even more screwed up by under-investment and the skewed incentives of public private partnerships. Global warming has made London sweaty from April to November and driven up the cost of flood insurance. Going behind the school bike shed at the age of fifteen with a younger girl puts you on the sex offenders list for life. But at least the cops take Paypal.

It’s all a bit depressing, really. (Especially if you’ve spent a good chunk of your career fighting the expansion of state surveillance and still can’t understand why the UK has the best thinkers, writers and activists on this stuff, but some of the worst policies by far.) But in Stross’s oeuvre, the Singularity will somehow give us a pass on Big Brother’s Brave New World. I’d love to hear how. Of course, the singularity is a qualitative change about more than just faster processing power, and a self-replicating cornucopia machine will put a lot more than the means of production in the hands of the workers. But in a fictional universe where technology drives the politics, how might we get from a pre-Singularity panopticon to a world of free-floating and interchangeable individual, corporate and government identities?

I love that towards the end of Singularity Sky, Rachel channels John Perry Barlow:

“We’ve been trying for years to tell your leaders, in the nicest possible way: information wants to be free. … Then along comes the Festival, which treats censorship as a malfunction and routes communications around it. The Festival won’t take no for an answer because it doesn’t have an opinion on anything; it just is.”

I got involved in Internet policy in the first place because I thought this kind of escapist rhetoric was precisely how the cyber-libertarians were going to sell the farm to big business and repressive governments. The Internet has massive ability to spread knowledge and ideas, and it was designed to route around and rout out single points of failure. Many early adopters, of a decidedly libertarian outlook (what with being young, white, affluent and male), took this to mean the Internet is antithetical to centralized control. The evolutionary ideal of the Internet had it developing antibodies to censorship and undermining authoritarianism in all its forms.

The reality, though, is that the Internet and its associated tools are developing as the ultimate technology of control. Far from being much able to influence developments in the opposite direction, my professional life has just given me a bird’s eye view of the coming train wreck. So, eh… read Charles Stross. (and Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson.) His books help us think through these issues, follow current trends to their logical conclusions, and make it clear that some worst-case scenarios are anything but fiction.

But I’ll leave the last word to Harald Alvestrand, a former chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force who I’m lucky enough to know through my work. A few months ago I asked Harald what he thought of the singularity and when we might reach it. We defined terms, and agreed the singularity might mean the exponential increase in technological progress that takes in computing, nanotech and cognitive science. Harald said the singularity’s already here, it has been for quite a while, and that it’s an exciting time to be alive.

• I especially loved this since so much of my daily work is affected by the efforts of a UN body to take over some Internet numbering/naming functions.

Gregory’s extravagant pork-barreling in the early 80s was much vindicated by his decades long commitment to one of the poorest parts of Dublin. My generation probably remembers him best as the man who refused to wear a tie in Dail Eireann. Obliging little conformist that I am, I remember my ten year old self wishing he’d just wear a tie so he could get on and do things for his constituency. Later, I realised that it was precisely because Tony Gregory refused to roll over and play nicely that he was able to get things done and command voter loyalty for decades in one of the most alienated parts of the country.

“(The Church) should also protect man from the destruction of himself. A sort of ecology of man is needed,” the pontiff said in a holiday address to the Curia, the Vatican’s central administration. “The tropical forests do deserve our protection. But man, as a creature, does not deserve any less.” The Catholic Church teaches that while homosexuality is not sinful, homosexual acts are. It opposes gay marriage and, in October, a leading Vatican official called homosexuality “a deviation, an irregularity, a wound”. The pope said humanity needed to “listen to the language of creation” to understand the intended roles of man and woman. He compared behaviour beyond traditional heterosexual relations as “a destruction of God’s work”.

No surprises here, I know. This is doctrine, at least for those as believe in papal infallibility. But what pierces me is the vehemence of the delivery. It tallies with the vindictive efforts of the Proposition 8 people to nullify marriages celebrated during the brief window of legality. Why would you do that except to inflict pain? Pope Benedict’s comparison of the natural instincts of people born to fancy and love each other with our bloody-minded destruction of the environment is just horrifying. It’s ugly and utterly unworthy. The violence of the rhetoric belies the strength of the reasoning. There can be no truly Christian argument against gay marriage. Even if you genuinely believe your own straight marriage is somehow lessened because gay people can marry too, why does it follow that you wouldn’t suffer it anyway in order to give other people that joy?

I think if the revolutionary Jesus of the New Testament ever thought his ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’ message would be perverted and abused in this way, he’d have given us a few reminders like ‘judge not lest ye be judged’ or reminded his followers of the special power of religious hierarchy to corrupt. Oh, hang on, he did already!

I’ve sat with the Rick Warren inauguration thing for days, hoping to feel less angry and betrayed, hoping to see a chink of light in the reasoning behind it – anything beyond the tortuous over-thinking and callous calculation it betrays. I give up. Why couldn’t Obama give the people who voted for him one perfect day of happiness? God knows things are gloomy enough besides. And God knows too many people have spent the last 8 years excluded from the party. We live in a fully imperfect world the other 364 days, and reason says Obama can only disappoint us in the future, no matter how hard he tries. So why not share this one beautiful day of unadulterated happiness?

Here’s what it comes down to. The religious fundamentalists simply don’t want other people to be happy. The only joy they can conceive of is that which they allow. There’s no rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s for them. The law of their angry God is inadequate by itself, and needs to be enforced by the laws of men and the power of the state. Their joy is won only in a zero sum game. Sharing it destroys it. Why else do they fight so hard to exclude gay people from the ‘sanctity’ of marriage?

But we’re not two year-olds. We are grown-ups who know that sharing our precious toys doesn’t ruin them forever. If marriage is so great – and I think it is – then why hoard it? Why keep the light under a bushel? There is something so selfish and grasping about the religious right’s vendetta against gay marriage. It’s unworthy of anyone who professes to follow Christ.

I keep on keeping on in the Catholic Church, mostly because it’s what I was brought up in and where I most feel the pain and joy of just being alive. I’ve even been lucky enough to find a home from home in a Catholic community that not just welcomes but celebrates every person in it. But days like today force me to ask myself if it’s even the right thing to continue to associate myself with an institution whose leadership behaves so shamefully. If I believe Barack Obama should dissociate himself from Rick Warren’s Prop 8 hatefulness, what right do I have to keep going to a church I love but that doesn’t fully love all its members?

I can’t argue myself into it, or perhaps even justify politically and intellectually why I should go on enjoying my community of faith. But I do feel it comes down to the joy. The happiness for and amongst others I experience there, and the practical hope that I can keep on doing my bit (whenever I truly figure out what that is). Shutting down or shutting off that profound source of joy would make me feel the bad guys have won. The religious right don’t have a monopoly on happiness, and we shouldn’t let them think they can.

Nowadays, if a few of the adult children are left to our own devices in my parents’ house, we make Spaghetti Bolognaise. It’s nothing like the real thing. It’s much, much better. Fry the onions in salty butter, brown the minced meat with them, plop in a can of Campbell’s tomato soup, simmer and serve on a plate of spaghetti. Nothing communicates comfort to me more than our bowdlerized version of this classic dish. For a few years in our teens, we used the new jars of pasta sauce, but reverted to Campbell’s in time for college.

Novelty is the last thing we want. I provoked a stand up row with my next youngest sister two summers ago by insisting on whole wheat spaghetti. Over dinner, Leah was gracious enough to concede that the brown pasta was surprisingly good. But it gives me a little pain even now to think of how angry we both got about something so trivial on one of probably only a dozen evenings we’ve had together in the last couple of years. Family food is important stuff, and is not to be messed with.

I’ve often assumed that some time in the seventies, magazines popularized the use of Campbell’s soup as a cooking sauce, and that’s where we our family recipe came from. But I’ve just started reading Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” and learnt that Campbell’s soup cooking was a 1930s phenomenon. The Group is about a clique of Vassar girls who graduate in 1933. It is a wonderful piece of inter-war social history, and a great yarn. Kay’s husband is the appalling Harald, a talentless bully who admires Robert Moses’ freeways and civic planning, and believes scientific intelligence and the technocracy will, after a brief struggle, make capital irrelevant and bring about the ascent of “his class, the class of artists and technicians”.

Part of Harald’s forward-looking ethos is his cooking repertoire which consists of tinned minced clams (yurk!) and;

“a quick and easy meat loaf his mother taught him: one part beef, one part pork, one part veal; add sliced onions, pour over it a can of Campbell’s tomato soup and bake in the oven. Then there was his chile con carne, made with canned kidney beans and tomato soup again and onions and half a pound of hamburger; you served it over rice, and it stretched for six people.” Harald also “put garlic in everything and was accounted quite a cook”.

Harald rails against conservatives’ aversion to canned goods, insisting that modern machinery and factory processes have eliminated all danger of bacterial infection and that Campbell soups are better than anything the home cook could achieve. Kay enthuses about innovations like Pyrex, iceberg lettuce and Corn Niblets. It’s the culinary equivalent of the Italian futurists, except twenty years later in a bourgeois kitchen.

This points to a subtle but important distinction. Just as one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, Harald’s chile con carne is clearly vile, while the almost identical Farrell bolognaise is an institution of family life. His attachment to Campbell’s soup represents a misplaced trust in modernity and his bizarre recipe of class resentment, 1930s corporatism and machine love. Our love of Campbell’s, by contrast, is charming, retro, and not at all smug.

Especially at this time of year, family food traditions are created every five minutes and followed faithfully for life. I know on the face of it they’re completely arbitrary; this year’s make-do becomes next year’s holy sacrament. But one whiff of frying onions with tinned tomato soup and I’m ten again, sitting elbow to elbow on a converted church pew, worrying about homework, laughing at the baby in its high chair, and hoping we’ll have ice cream with wafers for dessert.

After too many years of Americans being unpopular abroad, now everyone wants to talk to them and wish them well. My first suitor was a Moroccan builder who flagged me down in the street. He wanted to know if I was American and could vote for Obama. I’m not, so we both fervently shared our hopes about the US election.

Later, in a bookstore, a young woman working there wished me the cheeriest hello I’ve ever received in a Parisian shop. I told her I’m not American and don’t have a vote there, but figured wearing a shirt was one way to say what I think. She said she wished you could get them in France. She asked what date the election was, and talked excitedly about how wonderful it is to see so many Americans walking around the 5th wearing ‘hope’ buttons.

I know there are many in the US who think the support of ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ is something you can do without. But much of what animated the French in opposition to Bush is their almost fan-boy type love for what they see as truly American; an open-hearted curiosity about the rest of the world, and the sometimes naïve desire to make it a better place. Often in France, you get the sense of an old, old culture made weary and cynical by its long experience. Today, on a beautiful autumn day in Paris, America’s hope made an old city feel young again.

Joan Didion wrote that she came to regard her enemy, migraine, as a friend. Susan Sontag pointed out that describing illness with military metaphors has certain failings, not the least of which is to make ill people feel defeated. I don’t hold with making an ally of migraine, but I will grant you that the first day after the enemy decamps is a Red Letter Day. Today I am so full of vim and vigour that it seems a shame to waste all that energy on work. (Sadly I have so much to catch up on, I’ll have to.) The world is a bright, clear and shiny place today, even if my 401(k) is worth 53% less than what I’ve spent on it. So be it. Feeling like this, I could work until I’m 106, rather like that cheery nun who hasn’t cast a vote since Eisenhower, and who’s thrown her veil in the ring for Obama.

To business; why are triptans so expensive? Fair enough that nobody knows whether migraines are caused by bad chemistry or bad wiring. (Presumably it all looks the same at the molecular level.) So we’re not quite sure why triptans work so well for some people. But when they work, they are transformative within minutes. In Belgium, a month’s supply used to cost me about $100. Here in the US, my gold-plated insurer gives them to me more or less free. But someone’s making a lot of money either way, and migraine has such a huge impact on productivity/absenteeism that getting the cure for cheap would help hundreds of thousands of people and their employers. When did we invent this miracle drug, and will we be sharing the bounty any time soon?

On another CT post of mine today, commenters geo and Delicious Pundit gently point out that it’s silly to hate on a relatively decent place like L.A. I agree. There are worse places to be dragged to by your job. It’s several months since I felt a true twinge of jealousy of a friend whose work took her to Astana for a few years (turns out they have quite good skiing nearby). L.A. has quite a few good things. Among them, Delicious Pundit exhorts me to “come to the Sunday Farmers’ Market in Hollywood and get some avocados and strawberries (Gaviotas, the kind that don’t ship), some tamales, and maybe some watermelon lemonade from the nice people who come down from Solvang.” Which sounds very nice indeed.

The best thing about L.A. is of course the weather. Nuff said. The first moderately ok thing about L.A. actually reminds me of Brussels: it’s a bit crap until you get used to it, but there are lots of good day trips and weekend trips to be made nearby in the meantime. So far, I’ve driven to Ensenada in Baja Mexico, Joshua Tree National Park, a couple of presidential libraries (both Reagan and Nixon are well worth a visit, whatever your political preferences), San Juan Capestrano, Santa Barbara and Solvang, and down the coast to L.A. from San Francisco. There’s no shortage of places to go from L.A., and they tide you over while you wait to find the city less soul-destroyingly ugly. Now that I’ve become indifferent to the strip malls and freeways, I’ve begun to like some of the nicer bits.

Good things about L.A.: many, many outdoor things, 5k and 10k runs every weekend that let joggers explore the city, some good cinemas and lots of cultural stuff scattered around a 30 mile radius. Life for me picked up an awful lot when I got a car and moved away from the office.

Bad things: well, let’s not focus too much on those, but I was surprised at how dirty the sea water is, and it’s a bit sad that so many good, independent book shops seem to be closing down at the moment. (Oh god, reading this back it sounds so Stuff White People Like, I’m mortified.)

I’m drawing a blank, but am sure there are plenty more good things, right?