There's Lovely

Wales will always feel like home although perhaps it's blasphemy for me, being Saesneg, to say so. Coming back, even to a new part of the country, feels cosy and familiar. I lived in Wales for twelve years and still want to belong to it, if that is at all possible for an Englishman.

The relationship between the English and Welsh is a close one, still sore in places. We've been exploring some of the monuments to our joint history here in North Wales: the castles built by Edward I at the end of the 13th century. This was when Wales was subdued by the powerful English crown. By building massive castles like Harlech and Caernarfon, Edward followed up his military victories with psychologically crippling blows. These fortresses are massive, beautifully designed and brutally imposing. Today, of course, they serve the Welsh, boosting trade and tourism; nobody thinks of them as English castles anymore...

And outside of the towns, the mountains rise up, covered in grass and sheep, mottled and dappled by the shadows of the broken clouds that scud across the sky and obscure the peaks. Up and down the steep-sided valleys run tiny green steam trains on their narrow rails, belching yellow smoke into the clouds, their carriages full of waving passengers. The hills that aren't green are black, piled with broken slate from which burst blooms of purple rhododendron. And through all this twists the road, rising and falling and turning.

There's water everywhere. It rains, of course, but it also bubbles up, trickles down the mountainside and collects into streams that rush and gurgle over edges, bursting down in falls and cataracts. It drips inside the mines, sliding over the smooth rock in the darkness into the black stillness of an underground lake. Meanwhile the sea sparkles in the sunshine, rushing and moving, breaking against the cliffs and the cries of the gulls.

It's magical place; a great big country folded up into a smaller area. And this corner feels concentrated, more intensely Welsh than the rest, almost a caricature.

It's easy to leave, knowing we will always return.

Old England

More differences. British rain is soft, gentle and pervasive. As I sit and write this, there is a fine tracery of silver drops on the window, a delicate curtain of light. That doesn't happen in Houston where the summer storms unleash a rushing fury of fat wet bullets onto road and roof.

Of course the difference I can't get over with America is that it is just so new: shiny and young. Like a young adult, it is perhaps sometimes too earnest, too eager, when British sensibilities might tend to dry reticence.

I'm happy to think of us as a nation of fuddy-duddies and whilst we have been catching up with family and friends I have been revelling in the dusty dotage of England.

Last week we were in Leicestershire where we visited the house where Lady Jane Grey grew up - now a stately ruin set amongst parkland, overrun by peacocks and deer. We also went to the site of the Battle of Bosworth, which is where I took the picture at the top.

Billed by the visitors' centre as the 'second most important battle in English history' with the tag-line 'Two Kings, One Day', Bosworth, fought in 1485, was the decisive battle in the Wars of the Roses - a dynastic struggle for the crown between generations of rival heirs that took up all of the fifteenth century.

The Plantagenet ruling family splintered into Yorkists (white rose) and Lancastrians (red rose) who fought, usurped and executed each other into extinction until, at Bosworth, the last Plantagenet king (maligned Richard III) was defeated and killed by an upstart princeling called Henry Tudor.

It may be five-hundred years ago, but this is all desperately recent stuff. Henry became Henry VII and after him came Henry VIII and he is essentially the central knot of English history, what with the Split from Rome and everything. To this day there remains a fierce rivalry between the counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire, even if it is now limited largely to football and cricket matches.

Ooh, look! Speaking of cricket, here is some real village cricket being played on a real village green. Yesterday we went to dangle great-grandchildren in front of my grandfather who lives in a little village on the Wiltshire/Hampshire border. His house is right on the green and so were these chaps (albeit inbetween showers). I took W out to have a look and found myself having to explain not just cricket, but greens and even villages. There were maybe fifteen or twenty people watching and most of them were players. At the end of each over, the scorer hoisted up a board of numbers above his head and pointed it at us for us to see, waiting until I'd nodded or waved before he turned away. It was achingly quiet, only the sounds of the game and the breeze in the trees could be heard.

The cricket is quite new compared with the Tudors - organised village games only began in the seventeenth century - but the green and the thatched cottages around it present a scene which is older than England itself: for over a thousand years people have lived like this.

It's bewildering. But I'm about to head off for a pub lunch in Salisbury - if that can't help me find some perspective, nothing can.

Return of the Native

There it was: the first tiniest hint that my brain has been rewired for America.

The man in the shop looked on, his smile becoming increasingly waxy, as I tried again and again to swipe my card to pay for my purchase. Every now and again he would say, in a dull unbelieving voice, "No, insert your card please," and I would swipe again. We stood there, trapped in a loop, for about a day and a half.

Chip & Pin! Yes, of course, the card goes in like that. But definitely not a new thing, definitely introduced in the UK before I left. I had just forgotten. And this doesn't matter either, wouldn't matter, except for the fact that I had no obvious excuse.

In America, my accent allows me to be ignorant of all sorts of things. I can ask stupid questions all day long and people are delighted to help. But when I stood there in the shop, with my British accent and my British bank card, the man had no reason to assume I had been America for three years. In his eyes I was just an idiot who bumbled along not knowing how to buy things.

And then sometime later, I had to navigate a mini roundabout. Total chaos. Worse because there are roundabouts in America (some in New England and two in Houston if you can believe such a thing) but, of course, they spin the other way, like the fabled antipodean plug holes.

These were just hurdles and I'm over them now, having reasserted submerged behaviours. But I did not expect coming back home to pose such problems, that familiar and known things could be obstacles. I shouldn't have to work things out like I'm in a foreign country.

But I do.

Time/Travel

We've done it again: flung ourselves across the world in an aeroplane and wound up somewhere else, somewhen else. It's a bizarre thing to do, at once both numbingly routine and mind-bendingly exotic.

I get annoyed by some of it, obviously. The way the chap in front swings his seat back into my face before we've even taken off, for one thing. Another is the utter disconnection from the outside world; hopefully soon we'll look back, agog, at Internet-less flights the way we currently remember the days of smoking on planes.

The other thing that irks me is the way time goes out the window. Not the jet-lag inducing missing hours, but the lack of consensus. Time becomes fractured: some passengers are working off the destination time, others still clinging to where we took off from; some try to sleep immediately, some are determined to stay awake. And then there are the passengers who are making connections from or to a third continent and who knows what their clocks are set to.

The airline has its own ideas of course and will dim the lights, or serve you lunch in an attempt to help the transition. But all the while the sun or stars are peering in under open blinds, ever-shifting guides offering their own opinions.

The bare facts of our flight are that we left Houston at 4pm and landed 9 hours later in London at 7am. The advantage to losing six hours en route is that the journey passes very quickly, if only in hindsight.

My favourite bit of the journey is breakfast. It's the beginning of a new consensus. One can't argue with croissant and coffee and, with even just a light dusting of sleep, it is relatively easy to convince one's brain and body that some sort of night has been squeezed into the impossibly small space the schedule allowed.

Tell a lie, that's my second favourite part. The best bit is obviously getting out of Arrivals and into the grey concrete embrace of the Terminal 3 car park. If that sounds like sarcasm, be warned: I am VERY excited to be home again. The coolness of the breeze, the Belisha beacons, the indecent haste with which roads twist in the confined space, warping into an epidemic of roundabouts, these are the first delightful impressions of Britain.

And now we're safely with my in-laws. The boys are buzzing, full of energy, and the gentle sun is shining. The afternoon ahead offers the irresistible prospect of a quick pint with one old friend and a mad dash into London to see a show.

I couldn't sleep, even if I wanted to.

High Time

I'm packing and just had to ask myself if I have a sweater. I make that three reasons why it is high time I went back home for a bit.

1) it's too hot in Houston
2) I'm talking to myself
3) it's a jumper.

Could AV Been

On the whole, I'd much rather have a government that I disagreed with than an electorate that disagreed with me. And right now I have both. At least when a government gets things wrong I can moan about it or swear at the television; the chances are that I will find someone sympathetic to discuss it with. But the mistakes or delusions of fellow voters are sacrosanct and one is not allowed to query them, let alone over rule them.

Nothing, conversely, feels better than when one is part of a national consensus that sweeps a new government into power. That last happened in 1997 and it was very exciting. The resulting Labour administration did pretty well, tackling child poverty, investing in health and education, and so forth, but expectations were not met from the off: Labour's landslide was so great that Blair cooled on a commitment to offer a referendum on AV.

With the Tories enfeebled and dejected and other reforms taking place, such a referendum might have been accepted - although there would still have been strong resistance from Labour. And what if AV been in place for the last three elections? Well, AV doesn't prevent landslides, in fact it can exaggerate them, so Blair would certainly have been returned convincingly in 2001 and the 2005 election would have resulted in a slightly greater Labour majority than actually occurred.

What would have changed, then? Well, the Conservatives, who nearly fragmented anyway under Iain Duncan Smith, would have faced a catastrophic collapse in numbers of MPs. Certainly they could have slipped into third place behind the Liberal Democrats. Yes, the Lib Dems, remember them? The old ones I mean, the good ones who opposed the war in Iraq, and Trident, refused to countenance tuition fees for students and were honest about wanting to raise taxes on higher earners to pay for things like schools. Whatever happened to them I wonder?

Here's what would have happened in 2010 under AV. I think the Tories would have been in a weaker position than this after 10 years of AV, but even here the chances of a Lib-Lab coalition are much stronger and any Lib-Con pairing would have been much more balanced. A 'big three' cabinet post would have had to go to them (Cable as Chancellor anyone?) And I doubt very much that the Lib-Dems would have felt compelled to ditch core policies like, say, opposition to tuition fees. And what else might Clegg (or Huhne?) have demanded from Cameron as the price for cooperation? Maybe even a referendum on a switch to STV?

A Bad Night

Well, that was a shitty night of politics.

In the English local elections, the duplicitous Lib-Dems had the stuffing kicked out of them for being in the national government, whilst the Tory vote didn't really suffer at all. Labour made up some ground, but from such a low base that it hardly matters.

Worse still, having previously exterminated the Conservatives, Scottish voters turned on the Liberals as well. But, this being Scotland, they didn't have to put up with supporting an uncertain Labour party - there's the Scottish Nationalist Party to vote for instead! The SNP did so well that, all of a sudden, independence from the UK is back on the agenda, three years after the economic crisis seemed to have kicked it into the long grass for a generation.

I'm not sure whether Scotland would be better off as a separate country and I don't really care. I know that it would be disastrous for - well, what would you even call what was left? England, Wales and Northern Ireland? It's hardly 'Great Britain' (a term specifically coined after the union of England with Scotland) and it's certainly not a United Kingdom, there being only one crown left to share between the residual components.

Never mind sorting out the divorce settlement would tie up the governance of Britain for several years. What share of the national debt would the Scots take on? Should they retain part ownership of our nuclear weapons? Are they really going to compete separately in the Eurovision Song Contest?

And the cherry on top of this cake of electoral crap is the sure fire failure of the nation to embrace a change to its voting system. First Past the Post is here to stay for a generation at least. Is AV a rubbish way to elect a government? Yes it is. Is it better than FPTP? Yes it is! Do we get any closer to the Holy Grail of fair elections that is the Single Transferable Vote (STV) by sticking with FPTP? No we do not.

So a Bad Night for Britain. Most worryingly, the Tories have come out of this quite well which, when you consider the way they are merrily eviscerating public services, is an absolute disgrace.

And it's four years to the next Westminster election. If the Lib-Dems continue to be made an example of by voters whilst the Tories are allowed to get off scot free, then there's a good chance of a Conservative majority in 2015. Labour certainly have neither said nor done anything to suggest they're ready and I doubt they'll manage it before the election after next at the earliest.

And the Lib-Dems? Full disclosure: I was a member from around 2000 until, well, until Nick Clegg got elected leader actually. I think that had they propped up Labour a year ago they would be in a worse position now. The Tories (and especially the Tory press) would have spent the last year in an apoplexy of rage and vitriol. Perhaps it would have been better to let the Tories try to govern as a minority, but that too would have let the Lib-Dems vulnerable to criticism for refusing to the opportunity to be a grown-up party of government, willing to compromise or take hard decisions.

As for what happens next, well, they are in very serious trouble. Oblivion beckons. It may be that they can more openly oppose their coalition partners from now on, but the damage to their reputation has been done and it is probably irreparable. They will try and tough it out, as all politicians do, but perhaps the failure of the AV referendum is a good excuse for them to publicly change tack. If Clegg were to resign as leader, he would take a great deal of the poison with him, especially if Cable or Huhne (and who else is there?) were to take over. The new leader would have the chance to reset the relationship with the Tories and with voters, but he would almost certainly not want to walk out on the coalition. Only the Tories benefit now if Cameron calls an election - the other parties have no money to mount national campaigns and Cameron would find it easy to sell the country the line that it needs strong, single party government.

They have to try and regain some credibility and opposing the Tories from within the government is the only option. I don't think Clegg can do that and he should go. The sooner, the better.