Just a quick post, as internet access is expensive here. Or at least it feels expensive as you have to put coins in a slot. I’m in Kalambaka towards the north of Greece. The attraction here are the impressive Meteora, huge pillars of rock topped by 14th century monastries.

The Byzantine empire was collapsing, and as the surrounding lands became more dangerous the monks fled further upwards. They used retractable ladders and windlasses to climb to their retreats; now you can go by bus on a tarmac road, and climb steps hewn into the rock. I took the much more enjoyable route on foot, which involved scaling winding paths through the trees between the rocks, suddenly to emerge next to huge greek coach parties and stalls selling refreshing water and slightly dodgy spinach pies.

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I’m in Greece after going to Tim and Xenya’s wedding at the weekend. It was good fun, great to stay for a while with lots of my university friends. The service was at a tiny chapel on the coastline just north-east of Athens. The congregation could never have fitted in the chapel, which was just about big enough to contain the legal paperwork for signing. So the wedding was outdoors, which feels splendid. Bright summer sun, cool blue water, the stark white paint on the chapel building. The ceremony was held in ancient Greek, with chanting and singing. It was restful, both upbeat yet serious at the same time.

Photos courtesy of Ben, who spent the evening taking zillions of snaps. Thank you!

On Saturday I went to a curious and quasi-pagan event at Granchester. Some Trinity puntspeople had the desire to dispose of an old warn out punt. I got there quite early with some friends and spent a while drinking beer, walking up and down the river waiting for the punts to arrive, watching the sunset. There were couples lighting barbecues along the bank, and even someone camping. Eventually a small flotilla turned up, packed with people from the smaller punting companies and syndicates. And petrol.

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Hello! It’s time for an update on what I’ve been up to. I’m working on two projects at the moment.

The first one is the Public Whip, a website which analyses the voting record of MPs in the House of Commons. It was Julian’s idea to do it. There’s some nasty backend code which extracts information from the Hansard transcripts online and puts it into a database. We then run various statistical analyses off this, and present the results as a web page.

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In Tokyo in May, I went to visit people from two different development charities. They were both Christian charities because the contact that I found them through was Christian. However there isn’t a strong secular philanthropic tradition in Japan, as people are more inclined to let the government do everything.

Keep in mind that although these notes have come from Japanese people, they are quite Christian and American points of view. They may be unbalanced.

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I’m back in Cambridge now, and I’m likely to post less frequently here for a while.

For the first couple of days after I got back, I inevitably examined my country with a tourist’s eye. The diversity of people on the London underground was really striking and astonishing. In Japan nearly everyone is ethnically Japanese. In London you’ll see tall African men in fun hats, small Chinese ladies quietly reading. Even the white people are incredibly diverse, short and fat, tall and thin, faces of all different shapes and sizes.

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Last week I flew right across the largest landmass in the world, taking what those of us who spend too much time with maps and too little with globes would consider to be a surprising shortcut across Siberia. I’ve always had an affection for the next country that I’m visiting, although I admit to being somewhat confused by its name. Can’t they make up their mind whether it is called Britain, or the United Kingdom, or Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or England, or what? In most countries people refer to it with a local pronunciation of the word “England”, but I think in Ghana this confused people and it was called UK. Quite what the Welsh think about this, I don’t know.

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Living in Japan isn’t quite as futuristic as you might have hoped, perhaps Europe has been catching up the last few years as the Asian tiger economies have crumbled. However there are lots of interesting innovations to spot.

• Rotating seats on trains. At the terminal station the train pulls in, the doors on the other side open and everyone piles out. Just as you’re wondering if you’re on the wrong platform, the doors close, all the seats magically rotate to face the other way, and the doors on your side open to let you in. I was gobsmacked. OK, I’ve only seen this level of efficiency once - Japanese trains do vary in quality a fair bit. But a manual seat rotating lever is standard fair, so everyone can always sit facing forwards.
• Electric map on underground trains. A light shows where you are, which direction you’re going in, and which station is next. When you are about to pull into a station, a light flashes on the side of the carriage that will open up. I’ve also seen a more sophisticated system on an overground train - it had a full computer screen, with not only a map of the line, and text in English, Japanese (both Kanji and Hiragana), but also at each station a map of the platform telling you exactly where the escalators are relative to your carriage.
• Automatic taxi doors. Unfortunately not high tech ones that lift up Back to the Future style, but a cunning little metal arm that can open or close the rear, pavement-side door. It’s ferocious, and you always worry that you’ll get your foot caught in it.
• Infra-red soap dispensors. Even in England we’ve started to get used to automatic taps, those hygenic and water saving things that turn on when you put your hands under them. In Japan this is occasionally taken one step further, with a second infrared device that dispenses liquid soap when you put your hands under it. If only they could figure out a decent hand dryer, they all suck.
• Electric toilets. You’ve no doubt seen these on TV programmes about Japan. We may have invented the western style toilet, but only the Japanese decided that it has to have a heated seat in winter, and that the lack of a built in bidet would be atrociously unhygenic… When the bidet spray doesn’t miss these are simply the best toilets in the world, but I still think the Burmese/Thai nozzle hoses are a better compromise of complexity, cost and utility.
• Cameras in your phone. If it hasn’t caught on already, prepare yourself for this in Britain over the next year. Sometimes I felt almost embarrassed to have a merely ordinary digital camera, which couldn’t instantaneously beam pictures of tourist sites to my friends across the world. A school girl on a train admired my blue eyes (really they’re off-grey, but in a society where all eyes are brown and all hair is black, caucasian variety is loved), took a photo of me with her phone, and then I daren’t think who it was sent to…

This morning on my way out of the hotel I noticed it was raining. The Japanese love umbrellas, and wouldn’t be seen dead in a waterproof coat except when hiking in the mountains. For a 500 yen coin (between two and three quid) I bought an umbrella from the, yes!, umbrella dispensor in the lobby.

Earlier in the week I was outside an electronics store and spotted an amazing machine for creating digital photos. For 50 yen a piece, you could pop in any sort of digital media card, select the photos you want from the screen, and print them out within a minute.

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When I was a child there was only one thing considered more dangerous than taking sweets off strangers. It’s so ingrained in me by the ambient protection of society not to hitch hike that I have never even considered doing it. All sorts of unclarified bad things might happen. For example, people might have conversations with other people that they didn’t know already, or (gasp!) who belong to a different social class. Perhaps, like in China, people might learn to start paying each other for lifts, thus creating a more efficient and more capitalist transport economy, with the added side effect of being better for the environment. The consequences both for society, and in increasing everyones standard of living, could have no end of positive implications.

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