The installation of a new US president is always an interesting time. With Obama, I feel rather torn. Having a black president is not an achievement as such, rather (a sign of) the ending of lack of achievement (for the country, of course; for Obama it's a huge achievement). My general cynicism about politics makes me ask the question, who is he going to bomb then?

On the flip side, I don't feel the enormous sense of disquiet that I did on hearing that George W. Bush had got elected for the first time. Nor the sense of resigned depression on the second election. We don't know how Obama is going to turn out, whether his fine words will turn into fine actions. But, at least, we are not where we were with Bush; where his stumbling words would only turn into fine actions if it happened by chance.

Did I just say "things can only get better"?

Yesterday was my first day back at work, after the Christmas break. It also turned out to be the teaching away day, where they callously blocked internet connections (aarrgh!). Today, I am on the train to Oxford for an Ontogenesis meeting. So. I've decided to read my email on the train.

1647 personal messages (not including mailing list) of these about, say, 1 in 10 were real the rest spam. Perhaps the most surprising, was an email from Barry Smith with subject "Be my partner". Me and Barry have been discussing for a while his flawed ideas about the building of ontologies; some of the emails got quite heating and the threads very long. I'd had no inkling that, during the course of these discussions, Barry had developed such feelings for me. Sadly, the email turned out to be asking for help transferring 6 million US into the country, which is perhaps less plausible.

We're now well past Durham and I'm almost at the end of the weeding out the spam. Reading begins soon.

Update

Just finished reading my email. Just about to pull into Oxford. Not too bad all things considered.

So, for the second year running, I've spent new year in Italy. This time, I've been in the North. A very different kettle of fish from the south and Tuscany. The drivers are much better, although I've still seen three road accidents, one of them quite serious, at least for the car; drive slow when there is ice seems the lesson.

I've been staying in Gavardo; this is a small town which is about 200m above Lake Garda. It sitting on a glacial moraine, in a classic U shaped valley, with magnificent mountains in the background. It's got upper-course river and a canal which seems to have been constructed mostly for the purpose of energy and irrigation rather than transport. There's still hydroelectric power coming from it, and a old mill building which would have had five wheels originally.

Lake Garda itself is beautiful, with the mountains coming right to the Lake. There are a large number of villages and towns around the edge; the ones on the lake are shopping and accommodation orientated.

One tradition I didn't know about, was the presipio. The Italians seem made for these; essentially these are nativity displays, but they put the hut with three figures that Worcester has to shame. Gavardo had at least three, complete miniature towns, with lighting effects moving through the day, sound, snow, rain and smoke (well steam I think) coming out of the chimneys. Most of them are static, but some of them are mechanised, with hundreds of moving figures. Perhaps to my surprise, I've also discovered that I am appear to be a few centrimetres taller than the average Italian; the presipio's are tunnels you walk through and I kept on scraping my head; just a scrape rather than a full headbutt, Japan-style.

I also went to the bath in Morano which is in the South Tyrol; it's a German-speaking part of Italy (or bilingual anyway). The terme there are magnificient; lots of pools, and a closed, adult-only sauna area, where I got to sit outside, in the buff at -2C, surrounded by snow-capped mountains, cooling down from sauna. Clearly, the Germany language isn't all that has remained here; I got told off three times for not obeying rules (sauna "au naturale", keep your feet on the towel and don't talk too loud. Eech.

Moreno was a day trip from Trento; I know some people from the University quite well, but I've never been there. It's a magnificient city. The architecture is constrained, but beautiful, but dwarfed by the mountains surrounding it.

It's been a good trip, but I'm looking forward to flying home tomorrow. Being surrounded by a foreign language can be tiring at any time; in Italy it's made slightly worse because Italians tend to talk loud (i.e. shout). So I'm suffering from a sensory overload, and there is a bit of hyperreality about everything.

Back to a school away day to start the year on Monday. Perhaps hyper-reality doesn't seem so bad after all.