I'll tell you what feels great today.
It's watching the peaceful, respectful, orderly transfer of power following a General Election.
I just watched the outgoing Prime Minister speaking warmly of the opponent who is now his successor. Then hop into a limousine, with his wife, and trundle off to perform the ritual of tendering his resignation to the King.
This is how I know I'm getting old.
Time was when I wanted it all torn down.
Obviously I wanted an end to the Monarchy but also it even annoyed me that someone sits on a sack of wool in Parliament because of some arcane thing from long ago.
At this point I would have been running on nervous energy, having stayed up until morning to watch the party I voted for actually win for a change, punching the air at every high-profile loss of a Tory 'big beast', fuelled by a visceral - and very enjoyable - hatred for them and everything they stand for.
Last night I waited up to see the exit poll, then went to bed. This morning I made a cup of tea before checking the headlines.
Breaking the usual rule here of never watching 'the news' (which I now think of as 'the noise') I spent part of the morning on Sky News's YouTube channel watching some highlights from last night's vote-counting and taking the temperature of the political commentary.
Various thoughts arose in connection with this, that and the other, which I considered sharing here before thinking better of it.
Being the change you want to see means not being one of those armchair experts who used to plague my Twitter feed with their middlebrow analyses of British political dynamics.
In case you do wonder, I cast my postal vote for a Labour candidate who won in the extremely conservative Welsh seat where I once lived. And I'm pleased to see the Conservative Party in disarray. That's about it. I do have thoughts on stuff the pundits are droning on about, but those thoughts have been overtaken by an appreciation for how damned civilised my native country is.
Don't get me wrong. I tend to agree with
that - in western liberal democracies at least - voting doesn't change very much and that we're really in thrall to 'The Machine', which he describes thus:"a giant, global, digitised web of commercial power and control, managed by transnational corporations and gatherings of elite powerbrokers, none of whom have very much interest in what ‘the people’ think. And even when they are interested, there is not very much they can do about it, because they are not really in charge"
So, gone are the days when I watched Tony Blair's rhetorical flourish of 1997: "A new dawn has broken, has it not" and was filled with relief and hope.
Today I'm satisfied with a heavily defeated Rishi Sunak saying of his successor:
"Whilst he has been my political opponent, Sir Keir Starmer will shortly become our Prime Minister. In this job his successes will be all our successes and I wish him and his family well. Whatever our disagreements in this campaign, he is a decent public-spirited man who I respect"
Contrast this with the clown show grinding on right now in the United States and the ongoing denial by many 'conservatives' there that January 6 was anything more than a harmless protest.
Yes, I'm getting old. I don't care whether Sunak means what he says about Starmer because what matters is the signal. We are British and this is how we roll.
It's funny that it takes a Tory of Asian descent to provide such an impeccable example when a number of Labour candidates needed police protection from their own jihadist affiliates.
For all that Labour probably won't even get a honeymoon period - let alone a short one - and that almost everyone on all sides will be disappointed with everything to come, it seems to me that gratitude is in order today.
It may be a small mercy that no one mounted a mass break-in at Downing Street, egged on by a former TV personality, so it will be overlooked. But I'm glad to see it.
Of course there are all sorts of things I'm vaguely hoping for, from the new government. People I love live in Britain and economic developments there are extremely likely to touch me too, here in France. So it's not that I don't think the politics matter.
It's more that being aware of the 'de-civilising' effects of certain kinds of political activism creates an ambient feeling of peril. That in the hyper-networked world of emotional contagion there is a constant swell of anger that you can almost taste. These days I have no hate or heroes in politics.
With politics at both poles now seeming more like fundamentalist religion, the stoic ritual of this transfer of power feels like a welcome momentary reassurance that the relentless portents of everything always being on the brink of falling apart are exaggerated.
The younger me would be aghast that this should be the older me's reaction to a Labour landslide. But the younger me still believed in revolutionary drives for Utopia. And older me also agrees with Ed West that the ground is still shifting.
So, today, a peaceful transfer of power feels like as big a win as getting rid of the most venal version of the Conservative Party I've known in my lifetime.
Right, I need to get these slippers off. There's some gardening to do.
I so agree about the relief this is still a decently-rolling country. But I also feel happy about politics for the first time in more than 20 years. The Labour Party, at least for now, are not sliming along the gutter and this feels huge to me!
Well said. Although I think the UK needs to move to proportional representation, it was good to see such a smooth and peaceful transfer of power. It will be interesting to see the response to todays result in France, after a lot of candidate withdrawals to stop the far right gaining power.