How to use a Swiss supermarket checkout

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Mike Knell

Welcome to Switzerland! I guess you’re going to want to find some food to eat, right? It’s either that or eat at restaurants all the time, and that’s going to get pretty pricey quickly. The good news is that there are plenty of supermarkets here, and they’re generally well stocked (some even have little sections for homesick foreigners with things like Marmite and Bisto). Both of the major supermarket chains are actually cooperatives, but you wouldn’t know that from day to day. Yes, one of them is called Coop, but Coop is less famous for being a co-op than Migros.

You’ll find meat is pretty – no, very – expensive, but Harsh Truth Time – it’s expensive because people here generally like their meat to be locally raised and humanely treated, and there’s very little of the “race to the bottom” in price that you find elsewhere. As raising meat is a labour-intensive task and labour is expensive here due to the annoying Swiss habit of paying a living wage, and as there just isn’t the space for large-scale livestock rearing due to all the mountains, yeah, this is a good time to reduce your meat intake. I think it’s reasonable to say that it’s not that meat is too expensive here relative to income, it’s that it’s too cheap elsewhere.

Anyway, I digress. Let’s assume you have found your supermarket, you’ve found it open (extra marks for being a competent enough expat to know that you might need to look the hours up), and you’ve put some things you want to buy into your trolley. If you’re really new to this you’ll have spent some minutes during your visit staring and thinking “My goodness. That really is a lot of (yoghurt/cheese/Dar-Vida/Zopf/energy drinks/chocolate).” You’re probably wondering what this Rivella stuff there is so much of on the shelves is too. All you need to know is that you should pick a colour of Rivella as your favourite and stick to it religiously, even if you never actually buy it.

If you’re in Migros you’ve probably also spent 20 minutes looking for the beer and wine. For legal reasons they keep it in an unmarked back room. Ask a member of staff. They might detect your foreign accent and pretend the room doesn’t exist – this is because they’ve had too many bad experiences with visiting foreigners starting fights at the checkout after getting tanked up on cheap Migros “M-Budget” booze. Make it clear that you’re not a tourist and be persistent and they’ll eventually show you where to go.

Ready meals are limited in scope and availability. As far as Swiss society is concerned, single men live entirely on Red Bull (well, M-Budget Energy Drink) and cigarettes. They get their mum to cook them something more solid at the weekend, or they go off for army training and get fed there. Everyone else is either a woman and therefore either a housewife or a member of the Federal Council (but should be able to cook either way) or a man (who has women to cook for him).

There are a few tricks you need to know in order to blend in at the checkout, so I figured I’d help you out by outlining them here.

In general, the number of checkouts that are open will be the number that is needed for the current customer load minus one. Hiring people is expensive, so hiring them to sit behind checkouts doing nothing but twiddling their thumbs is a waste. And waste is a sin.
Once you get to the checkout, put your stuff on the conveyor. So far so good.
When it’s your turn, you must greet the cashier with the most terse, cursory “Grüezi” you can gather. Anything more is dangerously effusive. Not greeting them at all, however, is unthinkably rude. If you’re one of those foreigners who thinks it’s okay to yak on your cellphone through a transaction like this, you should be ashamed and people will roll their eyes at you for being so rude.
The cashier will probably select one of two or three bins at the bottom of the checkout to propel your purchases into at high speed. Under no circumstances should you start packing your bags during the scanning period. Instead, stand watching the cashier.
Once all your purchases have been scanned, the cashier will ask if you have a loyalty card. (“Cumulus?” if you’re in Migros, “Supercard?” in Coop.) Dig around in your bag for a while and hand them the wrong card. Everyone does this at least once – they’re both blue, and both major chains have orange logos, so it’s easy to confuse them.
The cashier will ask you for money. When this happens you must look extraordinarily surprised (understandable, as a lot of transactions in Switzerland just involve sending you a bill a few weeks later).
Start scrabbling around in your bag to see if you have any of this “money” stuff with you. Take your time. When you find it, you must do one of the following:
- Pay with a thousand franc note
- Spend 5 minutes carefully counting out the exact amount down to the last 5 rappen. For maximum points, lose your place halfway through and have to start again.
- If the amount is, say, Fr17.00, giving the cashier a 20 franc note plus the 7 francs in coins you have because it makes for less fiddly change will confuse them. They’re trained professionals – it’s not your job to be creative about making change. It’s not impossible that they’ll frown at it, point out to you that it was 17 francs, not 27, hand you back the coins and make Fr3 change out of the 20.
You may be asked “Sammeln Sie Märkli?”. This is for the advanced course only. For the time being, unless you want a number of small stickers it’s safe to answer “Nein, danke”. If you want to bluff your way in being Swiss, enthusiastically accept and count them carefully. They’re basically savings stamps – you know the sort of thing, fill up 2 cards and get a half-price casserole.
You’re done! Oh wait, no. You need to pack your shopping.
First, however, now is the perfect time to empty your pockets, tidy your bag, and be sure your wallet or purse is well organised. Again, take your time.
This is the point where the multiple compartments at the end of the checkout become clear. The cashier will start serving the next customer, but will propel their groceries into a different compartment to prevent cross-contamination.
Start packing your shopping now. I hope you brought a shopping bag to put it in or you bought a paper bag for 30 rappen at the checkout, as otherwise all there are for free are small, very flimsy bags designed to hold a sandwich and a drink and not much more. Don’t complain – using new shopping bags every time is regarded as extremely wasteful in environmentally-conscious Switzerland. Instead get used to carrying one with you.
Your target time for finishing packing your shopping is about 10 seconds after the cashier has to cycle back round to the compartment your groceries are in. If they don’t have to do some weird gymnastics like putting things on the side of the conveyor so they don’t drop all the way down and get stuck in with your stuff, you packed too fast. Try to relax next time and don’t be in such a rush, okay?

Two weeks in

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Mike Knell

Two weeks into the social media experiment (well, two weeks and two days), and I guess I should make a few observations:

I’m not sure where I was finding all the time I was spending on these things before, as I don’t think I have a significantly increased amount of free time. The time spent writing these hasty blog posts is still being squeezed in among everything else.
It probably doesn’t help that I chose May, traditionally the craziest month of the year due to a string of public holidays, nursery closures and other interruptions, for this experiment. I’m also in the middle of transferring between groups at work, which is making things.. exciting, and have had to do quite a bit of single parenting, which adds to the workload. In other words, I’m swamped in so many ways that losing one distraction has been a fairly minor change in the big picture.
I don’t miss it. I really don’t. I still drop into Facebook et al every day or so, but only to check for stuff I’ve been directly mentioned in or direct messages or whatnot.
I really still don’t miss trying to read everyone on the Internet’s opinion about everything. Moreover, I’ve stopped really worrying too much about what people on the Internet think, because I’ve been on the Internet long enough to be able to script it for myself anyway. I don’t need Twitter to constantly remind me that I know a lot of left-leaning liberals, not least because I am one myself. Facebook, incidentally, tends to be a bit more right wing.
The above is mightily refreshing. I’m still way happier getting my news of what’s going on in the world from the Guardian’s iPad edition (which I read more or less of every day, just like a regular paper, I guess) and BBC News Online. I’m still amazed that there are things appearing in news bulletins or the morning paper I didn’t know about previously.
As someone who’s mostly stuck in one place thanks to family or work commitments, it’s a kindness not to have to read all the interesting posts about what exciting places other people are getting to go to when I’ve hardly left the boundaries of the canton of Zürich or got further than home, work, nursery and the routes between them in three months. I really don’t miss those.
I still check myself when some interesting factoid or whatever pops into my head, I think “I should tweet that”, and there’s actually nowhere for it to go. I was particularly sore when I wasn’t able to make use of “The Little Englanders have spoken, and they’ve made it clear just how little they want their England to be” the day after the local elections. At least I got to use it as an example. Right? Still, it can’t be denied that most of the (to date) 13,868 tweets in my Twitter account are, well, pointless bollocks.
To summarise the above – I have a lot less to say that’s interesting that I thought I did. Harsh, but probably true.
The experiment will continue.

Flughafenlauf

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Mike Knell

In case you’re wondering, I didn’t get around to posting anything last night because my brain had turned to mush and dribbled out of my ears. Was kind of tired.

Today’s exciting racing adventure was the Flughafenlauf – yes, that is indeed a lap around Zürich airport, which is 17.0km. As is my way I’d assumed it was almost entirely flat from the profile, but in reality it’s more undulating than is first obvious. It’s almost “pan flat” from the point of view of a Swiss race where the designation applies to more or less anything that doesn’t actually go up an Alp, but by foreigner standards it was reasonably bumpy.

One thing that always confuses me while hanging around at race starts is how many people seem to be incapable of performing the simple task of wearing a race number correctly. It’s easy – you take four safety pins (they have them at the start and everything) and pin your number to your vest. In the front. Get it the right way up for extra points (Is it standard to wear number 13 upside down in running as it is in cycling?). That way marshals can tell immediately that you’re a runner, thus removing any embarrassing incidents where you might get directed away from the finish or off the course.

Places your number does not go:

On your back (unless it’s one of the rare races which issue you with two numbers, or you’re running the entire distance backwards)
On your trousers, especially flapping around on one of the legs. Seriously, why?
On a number belt, unless you are actually participating in a triathlon.
On a number belt, especially if the result is that I saw earlier today on a large gentleman who had his number on an overly-tight number belt perched just above his beer gut.
On your hat, if you’re wearing one.
In your pocket. (Yeah, I’ve seen this.)

It’s true that in chip-timed races it actually makes slightly less difference how visible your number is. However, in the event of chip timing breaking down times often have to be derived from looking at video footage of the finish, so have that number clearly visible anyway.

Anyway.. oh yeah, the race. Well, it started with a downhill kilometre that made sure everyone went off too fast. Then it went into a few km of fairly narrow riverside paths to make it tricky to pass the people who’d gone off too fast and were already suffering a bit. Then it went up and around and through a village and down again and back along a straight before going up and over an overpass. Then it went along a bit, and then by about 13km everyone was getting sort of bored and thinking it would be okay if the race were over. Then at about 16km the race nearly was over, but before the finish it was straight up a fairly stiff little hill that had a lot of people slowing nearly to a walk before jogging round and up a little further into the finishing straight. I got up the final hill without walking by looking for one of those gnarly, sinewy old blokes of about 60 who aren’t that fast any more but can just keep going at a given pace forever and following him up the hill. Seemed to work.

I’d been passing people fairly constantly right through the race, and my watch said 1:14:29, which is a pace of 4:24/km. Official time was 1:14:44 – 72nd of 312 in M40 (“men 40-49″ – I’m in this despite being 39 as I was born in 1973), 205th/993 across all men. Had I been a woman I’d have been 23rd overall. So unfair. Then again, had I still been in M30 (men 30-39) I’d also have been further up the rankings. Yep, those of us in the veteran groups are apparently faster than the 30-something children.

Anyway, the nifty prize we all got for finishing was a jar of honey and a Spitzbube, which I think is pretty cool (and tasty):

And then we ate bratwurst and had coffee before saying “thank you” to the friends who’d very kindly come out to keep an eye on our 2-year-old while both her parents were running. The apres-race is always the best bit at the ZüriLaufCup.

I now have no races coming up, which is probably a good thing as I need to nurse a chronic case of jogger’s nipple (last weekend’s hadn’t entirely cleared up before I ran today). I need to remember to buy either a roll of surgical tape or some pasties.

Albums: The Visitors

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Mike Knell

Every now and then I come across an album that I enjoy so much that I have that “Where have you been all my life?” feeling about it. I’ve come across two albums of this calibre over the last year (both thanks to Spotify). One is the Buggles’ The Age of Plastic, an album which people who know my musical tastes will be surprised I didn’t know about already. The other is the final studio album by defining 70s popsters ABBA, The Visitors.

ABBA are a pretty extraordinary act, when you think about it. They came together at precisely the right time, with precisely the right mixture of talent – not just the four band members, but people like manager Stig Anderson and engineer Michael Tretow were critical in creating the “ABBA sound”. Well, that and a deep grounding in the kind of bouncy schlager that dominated Swedish and German pop in the sixties and which could be detected in their output throughout their career. And like the Beach Boys, they were mostly remembered slightly dismissively as having produced the kind of bubblegum pop your parents would like despite having taken some fairly unusual turns in the musical road as the years passed. And so as the Beach Boys (well, Brian Wilson) produced the legendary Pet Sounds as their last “proper” album before Wilson imploded, so ABBA produced The Visitors as their last album before the band broke up for good (and has never reformed, despite a rumoured $1 billion offer to do so for a tour in 2001).

There had been hints of what was to come on the previous album, Super Trouper, just as Brian Wilson had signalled his musical intentions on the pre-Pet Sounds Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) (yes, two exclamation marks) with the complex arrangements on tracks like Salt Lake City. Super Trouper‘s lead single was The Winner Takes It All, which is not only one of ABBA’s finest tracks but one of pop music’s finest explorations of the end of a relationship. Agnetha and Björn both still maintain it wasn’t about them, but along with most of the universe I find that hard to believe, or that it at least must have had some relevance given the way in which Agnetha seems to pour her whole soul into the lead vocal. (Incidentally, while listening to this earlier I noticed an entire layer of backing vocals I hadn’t registered before – there’s a soaring soprano that appears deep in the mix at about 4:25. Listen loud.)

So after some reportedly “awkward” sessions, and after Frida and Benny had broken up for good measure (seriously, a band consisting of two now-divorced couples manages to hold it together to record an entire album despite not really needing the cash? That says a lot for Scandinavian sensibilities and civility) The Visitors hit the record shops.

With a lead single that was.. another song about dying relationships (One of Us):

One of us is crying
One of us is lying
In her lonely bed
Staring at the ceiling
Wishing she was somewhere else instead

And a second single that was.. basically a sequel to The Winner Takes it All, although this time it was about (or, uh, not about) Frida and Benny rather than Agnetha and Björn – When All Is Said and Done:

Here’s to us one more toast and then we’ll pay the bill
Deep inside both of us can feel the autumn chill
Birds of passage, you and me
We fly instinctively
When the summer’s over and the dark clouds hide the sun
Neither you nor I’m to blame when all is said and done

Okay, let’s put on the album itself. There’s got to be some more cheerful material there, right? Well, side one kicks off with the album’s title track, and it turns out that the visitors it speaks of are Eastern Bloc secret police coming to take away a dissident. It’s weird yet compelling stuff, with a stubborn chugging beat that makes it one of the most perkily sinister tracks out there.

Head over Heels is more conventional ABBA fare, but Soldiers is (probably) despite its perky beat about the fear and powerlessness felt by noncombatants caught up in war. I Let The Music Speak is a standard ABBA anthem that feels like it belongs in a musical (and guess what Benny and Björn did next..). Two For The Price of One is a perky little song about some dude’s small-ads-driven quest for a menage a trois which doesn’t quite turn out as he expected.

After the perkiness, back down we go with Slipping Through My Fingers, Agnetha singing a mother’s lament at watching her daughter growing up and become more distant and regretting all the adventures they didn’t have a chance to have while she was younger:

Sleep in our eyes, her and me at the breakfast table
Barely awake, I let precious time go by
Then when she’s gone there’s that odd melancholy feeling
And a sense of guilt I can’t deny
What happened to the wonderful adventures
The places I had planned for us to go
Well, some of that we did but most we didn’t
And why I just don’t know

This segues into Like An Angel Passing Through My Room, the last track on ABBA’s final album (before the CD re-releases and extra tracks came along and screwed up the album’s sequencing):

Half awake and half in dreams
Seeing long forgotten scenes
So the present runs into the past
Now and then become entwined, playing games within my mind
Like the embers as they die
Love was one prolonged goodbye

It’s a quiet, reflective track, sparsely arranged and the only ABBA track to only have a single vocalist (Frida got the nod). It turns out that this track went through an awful lot of iterations before they settled on the version on the album – there’s even a disco mix which got abandoned for the entirely valid reason that it sounded way too much like Lay All Your Love On Me, which from listening to the 9-minute compilation of demo versions on the 2012 rerelease is painfully obvious.

If when you think of ABBA you think of Dancing Queen and Gimme Gimme Gimme, I highly recommend checking out their last studio album. It’s really worth a listen because, like Pet Sounds, it shows a completely different and often overlooked aspect of the band that their best-known material doesn’t show off. It probably says a lot that when ABBA Gold was released in 1992 and kicked off an entire ABBA rehabilitation and revival after everyone spent the 80s thinking they were desperately uncool, it only included one track from The Visitors.

May Madness

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Mike Knell

When you have a small child, and you both work so they spend their days at daycare, the holiday-filled month of May takes on a whole new meaning.

This month sees three public holidays in the canton of Zürich – May 1st (International Day of Labour, comrades), May 9th (Ascension), then May 20th (Whitsun). Some of the more Catholic cantons add Corpus Christi to this haul, so have a fourth holiday on May 30th this year.

To add to this, our daycare traditionally closes on the Friday after Ascension to give the staff a four day weekend (which I find it hard to begrudge them) and close early on the Wednesday before to give time to clear up.

What this all adds up to is that May is a month in which it’s pretty impossible to get anything started, as routine falls apart every few days. Routine is always a good thing when living with babies and toddlers – this is time to get up, this is time for lunch, this is time to get ready for bed – it makes things a little more certain and a little more stable. Change stuff around and it’s stress for everyone. Long weekends are great, but a series of random interruptions can disrupt the daily routine enough that reestablishing it afterwards is a problem.

This is, of course, all God’s fault – the movable holidays in May are defined relative to Easter. Given that relatively few people actually want the day off on Ascension in order to go to church, that seems like the one to move to a part of the year when there aren’t any holidays. Some time in October, maybe? Zürich currently has no public holidays between August 1st and Christmas, and God has plenty of holidays already.

Margaret Thatcher was reportedly in favour of moving the UK’s holidays around to even things out a bit. Her idea, however, was to scrap the notably (and to her, unacceptably) left-wing May 1st holiday and replace it with a “Trafalgar Day” on October 21st.

Contractual Obligation Post

Posted on May 5, 2013 by Mike Knell

Nothing happened today that I can summarise in a couple of minutes (I could summarise my opinion of the British government’s utter craven cowardliness in giving in to the tobacco lobby’s “Jobs!” blackmail over plain packaging, but I need more time than I have to summarise my views of the utter amorality that is the tobacco industry and its bought lobbyists, an operation which upon much reflection I have decided actually manages to be more evil than the arms trade, and that’s really saying something). That’s what weekends are like with a lively 2-year-old, especially one who’s actually been rather grumpy and changeable for the last couple of days.

I guess I could post a picture, though – here’s one from my evening walk, straight from the camera other than to convert it to black and white.

And also from my evening walk, a view from a pond next to an office building:

This one, though, comes with sound effects. Here’s some audio recorded from next to the pond (complete with cowbells in the background). Upon looking a little closer, there were frogs everywhere, all with only one thing on their minds:

Other than that, well, nothing really happened today.

The SOLA Stafette

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Mike Knell

There is an annual relay race in Zürich that’s organised by the local universities sports club – the SOLA Stafette (SOLA Relay). Teams of 14 people (who officially should all have some kind of connection with academia, although nobody really asks and “has been near a university at some point” seems to be enough) set out to complete a total of 116km divided into 14 legs, 2 of which are reserved exclusively for women. The course describes a wide arc around the hills surrounding the city of Zürich, and a lot of it is on trails – the city itself is troubled very little.

As you can probably guess, this year’s race was today, and I volunteered to run leg 2 for a team from work.

The actual distance of this leg was a little unclear as some literature said 13.5km, others said 14.1km, but in the end my GPS claimed 13.8km so it all sort of evened out in the end. As my team was starting with the “faster” group which left half an hour after the “slower” group I at least got an extra half hour in bed before heading to ETH Hönggerberg for my leg’s start. It was raining when I left and raining more when I got there. Hanging around the changeover area in vest and shorts getting gradually soaked reminded me a lot of PE lessons at school – although I was doing this voluntarily, something which my 12-year-old self would never have believed possible (like my whole family I was rubbish at sports at school).

The course profile I’d taken a glance at had a very prominent downhill section lasting a couple of kilometres as the race dropped off the hills north of the city and down to the Limmat valley, so that was the main tactical point as far as I was concerned. Do what I could in the first few undulating km, then use the fact that I can go down hills reasonably swiftly to overtake a bunch of people, then hang on until the end. At 08:22 I took the wristband with the timing chip from our incoming runner from the first leg and off I went.

As it turns out, those tactics weren’t bad – I hung on over the ups and downs in the first few km, then zipped off down the big hill. The heavy rain over the last few days had left most of the off-road stretches fairly wet and muddy, so everyone got their legs and backs covered in mud spatters pretty quickly. At the bottom of the hill I passed through the 10km mark in 42 minutes exactly, which is good going for me, and thought that with only 3.5km to go I’d be done by 58 minutes or so. No worries. The pace was fast (for me) but I could hold it.

Except that.. about a half-km later we turned left off a road and I looked around and.. up. There was quite a stiff hill to climb. As it turned out, there were in fact two reasonably stiff hills to climb between here and the finish. They weren’t particularly long, but they were off-road and muddy and pretty steep. I hadn’t really budgeted for this when considering my pacing, with the result that I smacked into those hills hard and found myself crawling up them. And swearing. Medium-distance races like this are generally quite simple to plan tactically – make a good start but don’t overcook it to soon, cruise a little once your legs have warmed up, then save something for the end. Unfortunately, I was getting into the bit I’d saved for the end by the time I hit the hills.

The moral of the story here is that when you look at the gradient profile of a course like this:

.. you shouldn’t neglect the two little bumps at the end, because this being Switzerland the vertical axis is fairly compressed and each of those little squares on the plan means 100m of ascent. I can’t really complain, as the guy I handed over to at Buchlern had a leg consisting of a relentless 6km of climbing, 420m of ascent straight up to the summit of the Uetliberg.

So not quite the glorious success I’d anticipated with 3k to go, but not bad nonetheless considering I hadn’t run for ages before January and was really, well, getting on for fat not very long ago. In the end I managed 1:00:22 for the distance, which is a 4:23/km pace, so there’s nothing there really to be ashamed of. Next Thursday there’s a very different race on the calendar, the Flughafenlauf (it’s a lap of the airport, essentially) that’s pan flat but longer at 17km. It’ll be interesting to see how that one goes.

I have to say that overall it was great fun, and possibly the best organised race I’ve ever taken part in (this is Switzerland, after all, and they’ve been doing this since 1974 so they have practice). The changeovers were well run, and there was baggage transport for every leg, even the short ones – just drop your bag onto the truck, and at the other end it was waiting in a neat row of bags sorted by race number. Every runner got issued with a booklet describing their particular leg of the race along with their race number. The organisation had thought of everything possible that it could do to make the race simply an enjoyable experience to run, which makes a big difference when you’re participating in such a complex event.

If you happen to be in Zürich at the beginning of May next year, I strongly recommend giving it a go.

More on the Mail

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Mike Knell

A while ago I asked

So, who can make me a poster in that 1950s US anti-communism style declaring that “When you follow a link to the Mail, you’re financing BIGOTRY”? Anyone?

Well, it turns out that Phil Bradley has done just that:

I’ve seen more people recently discussing that clicks-to-revenue link and how important it is for the finances and profits of what are essentially linkbait sites such as Mail Online, and that makes me happy. I’m less happy that so many popular sites on the Internet now exist solely as aggregators of and linking destinations for semi-anonymous “content” rather than quality material you actually want to read, but I guess you can’t have it all.

Anyway, the poster’s brilliant, and Phil’s given permission to use it freely. I propose that you should take him at his word and do just that.

One week in and oh wait WHAT?

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Mike Knell

It’s now sort of a weekish since my social media blackout kicked in, although I still take a peek once a day to check for anything directly aimed at me. I justify this as being like checking my email to see if anything interesting’s there.

Up until today I didn’t really think I was missing much and that it was making much of a difference to not be permanently plugged into the world. This evening, though, I thought “Hey, I haven’t seen the news at all today”, and fired up the BBC’s home page to find OH GOD WHAT HOW MANY PEOPLE VOTED FOR UKIP?

Yeah, I’d somehow completely missed the local elections in England (and Anglesey) yesterday, which is pretty surprising as I’m something of a politics wonk who will happily sit up all night watching swingometers if there’s electing afoot. That really surprised me, that without even thinking about it I’d remained oblivious of the results of yesterday’s elections until the evening after the polls closed. It is at least a little refreshing that this happened, although I’m not sure I wouldn’t have actually liked to know about all this a bit earlier. It certainly does prove that the world carries on without my constantly watching it through Twitter – and one big advantage in my mind is that it lets me consider a major event such as this all at the same time, with the outcome known, rather than joining in the wild hypothesising, spin and raw emotion which spills out all over the place on an election night.

Oh right – the result? Well, a dire turnout (20-35% in some areas) and the fact that elections were only held in England (and Anglesey) leads me to believe that all the breathless talk about a UKIP breakout is about as accurate as all the breathless talk about the BNP’s modest gains made a couple of elections ago. A good showing on a low turnout means a protest vote. Nobody in their right mind would consider UKIP as a relevant party for local government – they basically don’t really have any policies in the area. Although they do have some policies (mainly “we don’t like Europe” and “something something immigrants something”) they really have little in the areas of street sweeping and park amenities. It’s a party for people who resent the country being ruled (according to their perception) by “an unelected elite”, but who are presumably fine with the party leader’s view (a Thatcher-worshipping former City trader, lest we forget) that the economy should instead be controlled by an unelected elite in the City. Because um yeah, we saw how well that worked out for everyone. For all the rhetoric UKIP is still all about the elite, even if clothed in the kind of ultra-populist party logo that would in a parallel universe be displayed in back-illuminated brightly coloured plastic outside a branch of Poundland.

I’d also observe that in my home country of Warwickshire the results did not exactly reflect a UKIP breakout. In fact, Warwickshire still has 0 UKIP councillors, but the Tories’ electoral disaster there has instead been converted into major gains for Labour – Tories -13, Labour +12. The Liberal democrats “only” lost 3 of their 12 seats, which probably reflects the party’s strong record in local government in the area. The council has been left with no overall control, and a political composition which is more likely to see Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors forming alliances than the Tories and the Lib Dems.

Anyway, enough UKIP-dissing. As I said, it’s a classic low-turnout protest vote and I don’t think it’s going to change much in the long term. What is sad, though, is that when national party nose-tweaking spills over into local government the result is almost invariably bad for local government. Local elections are considered “less important” than general elections, and due to low turnouts are often the scene of hard campaigning by fringe parties because any significant share of the vote will get them massive amounts of publicity. What happens when the fringe parties pick up the protest vote is that good local councillors get kicked out of office for no reason other than that they have the same colour rosette as a bunch of people at national level who they have little to do with.

Local government is not exactly a gravy train, but it’s one area where it’s possible for one person to make big differences, and replacing an experienced, valued councillor with a disposable candidate from the single-issue protest party du jour is a waste. Of course, it’s possible that they themselves may become strong elected representatives as well, but neither UKIP’s record in the European Parliament nor the BNP’s record in local government has exactly been stellar. The reason is simple – once they get elected they don’t have any more cards to play, as their job in the view of their national party has been to get elected and get in the news, no more. As the BNP found that Burnley council does not actually set national immigration policy, so will UKIP find that Lincolnshire County Council has little to do with the UK’s membership of the European Union or with, oh yeah, national immigration policy. I sometimes wish national politics would butt out of local government entirely. More independent councillors would definitely be a good thing.

After all, how is it even possible to be an impartial servant of your constituents and win their trust as an elected representative if a cornerstone of your party’s political credo is that a reasonably-sized fraction of your constituents shouldn’t be there in the first place and don’t deserve to be treated the same as people who happen to have been born there?

A day of little consequence

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Mike Knell

I said I was going to post here every day, so here I am. Hi! Unfortunately, today wasn’t really interesting and I don’t have any massively epic topics in mind to cover, particularly as it’s sort of my bedtime already and I don’t think I can put down anything really profound in a few minutes.

Instead, in a homage to the social media I’m taking a holiday from, here’s my lunch.

Yep, half a litre of Hefe-Weizen, a schnitzel the size of Brazil and a side salad (carefully ordered in a laughable attempt to keep the calories down at least a bit) means I must have been in Germany. I took the day off and went by train to Konstanz to wander around a bit and stock up further on Ritter Sport, and while I was there had lunch. The schnitzel portrayed is size L – they also had M available and for the truly ambitious XXL. I am pleased to say it was very tasty. As was the beer. There really are some lessons the Swiss could learn from the Germans, but good heavens don’t quote me on that until my residence permit is safely renewed in November.

I could tell I was back in Switzerland later on because there were cows grazing by the road next to the car park for the Messe:

and because oh look, everyone’s favourite right wing political party is at it again, although at least this time it’s without black sheep or crows representing foreigners or cartoons of brown hands grasping at a pile of Swiss passports, so that’s something:

(Summary – They’re very. very sad because they don’t have more members on the 7-person Swiss Federal Council, which performs most of the functions the executive branch performs elsewhere. They hope that by socially engineering a referendum to make the council directly elected rather than elected by Parliament they can better serve the cause of Swiss democracy, and this has nothing at all to do with an attempt at a populist power grab.)

and look, the area around the Glattpark has had an attack of twitchers:

They were apparently there due to the arrival a couple of days ago of an Aquatic Warbler, a small brown bird which has clearly got lost and ended up in Switzerland by mistake because it’s been years since one was sighted here.

And then I went for a run and got very wet as a full-on thunderstorm moved in half way round. That’s okay, though – running in the rain is just fine so long as you didn’t bring anything that wasn’t waterproof and it’s a reasonably warm day, and running in a thunderstorm is like something out of a movie, although you’re best off avoiding standing up really straight on hills and thus presenting an appealingly low-resistance path to ground.

So there you go. Nothing happened today.

Indecisively Decisive

It's been years and I still don't know what to call this.