been a long time…Christmas and all that, a giant extended period of liver damage and over-consumption of food. I think I excelled on all fronts – turning the the 12 days of Christmas into about 18, seeing the insides of far too many pubs, eating too much cheese – and am now happy to be safely inside the month of January, time of reflection, freezing cold and an estrangement from booze that I hope lasts until February.

no entry for a while due to Christmas and the continuing business of settling into the Netherlands. there’s been plenty to think about regarding the fallout from our US walk however, not least the problem/opportunity of how we are going to get our video footage into a presentable televisual format, and also the long march towards getting the plans laid for the writing of a book. there has been progress on both fronts but, as ever, life gets in the way. I had a meeting with some friends in London in December about getting some of our 40 hours of footaged edited down into a sellable ‘teaser’ format – all that we need to do now is get the tapes/footage across the Atlantic Ocean into the hands of someone who can carry out this task. dawdlers that we are, Dave and I have been trying to get this done since last summer but to be fair we know little about how video formats on one side of the pond differ to the other and the whole thing has been a steep learning curve. with no end to it in sight.

still, must remain confident and all that. we’ve made some progress this weekend. bookwise there’s still plenty of planning on my part going on, but truth be told reviewing the entire journal on the website (now running to well over a 100 pages of text) is a time-consuming business and I’ve only scratched the surface of what I need to do. and I haven’t even begun to compile my handwritten journal yet. still, there’s plenty of time, isn’t there?

perhaps not. but at least I now know where I will be undertaking this task. I moved to The Hague here in the Netherlands almost as soon as I got back from the US and began a six month temporary contract with my old employers, the International Federation of Library Associations (they’re hot!). yesterday I was offered a three year position here and it looks very much like this is where I will be undertaking all WTS work in the new future. this is both a relief – God knows I need somewhere to live and be settled after most of the past 18 months in a tent, or on people’s floors – and a challenge, in that I know that writing a book with a full-time job is likely to be a horrendous task that is going to present some nightmare obstacles. in the end I came down on the side of a firm base: at least I can set up some sort of writing HQ and hope everything will flow from there. better than writing from a park bench.

in other news…well, US readers (are there any of you still out there? Connie, apologies for not keeping this up) and pretty much anyone else with an eye on world affairs/future of mankind etc. can’t have failed to notice that the US Presidential Election began in earnest this week with the Iowa Caucuses. we were in the US for the Mid-terms in November 2006 and I have to say that, while Dave and I would not claim to be reliable in any of our claims for US politics, the change that we felt people longing for back then certainly came through in the Iowa results.

first: Barak Obama. we’ve been in the same room as him, the day we met Muhammad Ali (see Journal entry for 15th October 2006). his appearance was quite electrifying, to be honest – the whole room kinda exploded. or got hotter. one of the two. anyway, I was particularly interested in the way people viewed Obama’s presidential bid as we went across, and I thought that people were generally positive. I guess what I was really interested in was whether white rural folks would consider voting for him and the feedback that we got, where we got it, was that it would be entirely possible. to give just one example, we met a white fella in the backwoods of southern Illinois, a real good old boy type I guess you could say, and he was able to be racist one minute about his co-workers at the car plant and the in next minute state that he could be convinced to vote for Obama. I think Obama was seen as being genuine, a nice plus for any political candidate…

saying that, by the time we left at the end of November my general impression was really that Hilary was almost a shoe-in for the Democratic nomination. shows how on the money I am – well, at least in terms of the Iowa results it does. Hilary had the recognition (she was always ‘Hilary’) and the advantage of Bill Clinton still being extremely popular amongst Democrats (I should point out that Bill was generally hated by the serious Republicans we met). people knew (or thought they knew) what she stood for from the east coast to the west, something that never came across in relation to Obama, or John Edwards. her poor showing in Iowa was therefore a little surprising to me, but then again perhaps I was just as blinded by the media’s reporting of her nomination being ‘unstoppable’ and ‘inevitable’ as anyone else. still, the whole thing isn’t over yet, not by a long chalk.

so on to Mike Huckabee. well, he wasn’t even on our radar for nearly the entire crossing of the US. our Republican conversations mostly revolved around Giuliani, Romney and, at one point, the inevitabilty of Thompson (who would have thought that Thompson, with all his media profile and potential momentum, would turn out to be such a sloth?!) as the Republican nominee due to his favour amongst the Evangelicals. well, in terms of Iowa we were right about the power of mobilising those religious folks – Huckabee certainly worked that well. quite how it will play in New Hampshire is another matter though – I would suggest that he’s not going to do quite so well there. nevertheless, his rise is fascinating for the entire Presidential contest – put his win alongisde Obama’s and it is possible to speculate that the American people really do want change this time, and that a real break with the past could occur. whether that break will take the form of a Republican nominee who believes in creationism over evolution is another matter (although it would be fascinating to see how the actual election of such a fellow would be received in Europe (nb. George Bush might well believe in creationism, so we might already have a President who thinks that way, but as we all know, George keeps his cue cards close to his chest)).

so, an extremely interesting week. I need a subject to keep me blogging on here so I guess next up it’s New Hampshire. that’s on Tuesday I think, so I’ll try to check back in around that time and write something else. all I can think of concluding at this point is, in relation to what we saw during our crossing, it might just be that some of the discontent we felt amongst voters on both sides could really translate into something of great benefit to America and the rest of us who do our thing in their big, funky shadow.

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