Farage beats Bin(face)

As widely expected, Nigel Farage won the Clacton by-election, securing over twice as many votes as his nearest rival.

The contest was interesting though, not only for marking Count Binface's best performance, but also for featuring a modern record 34 candidates. (This BBC page says 35, in the caption below the picture at the top, as well as 34, but I believe it's 34 that's right.) 

While this is a lot for the UK, it is far from a world record. The 2023 Toronto mayoral by-election featured over 100 candidates (see here and here). It's a good job that voters weren't required to rank all of the candidates! But I digress...

Since the 'main' parties decided not to stand in Clacton, most of the 34 are independents or fringe parties. Some are serial candidates and/or arguably part of a tradition of joke candidates. Interestingly, they include three candidates from the Monster Raving Loony Party - which makes sense only because voters vote for a candidate, rather than a party. 

Most of these were largely irrelevant. Besides Farage and Binface, none received the 5% of the vote needed to return their deposit. Indeed, none of the others received even 500 votes, with 3rd place on just 492 votes. I make it that 21 of them received fewer than 100 votes and three of them received fewer than ten votes (which is the number of signatures one needs in order to stand, as documented here).

Almost total eclipse (of the eclipse)...

Today was a busy day. We went to Felbrigg Hall in the morning and Cromer in the afternoon. We went out again in the evening, because there was a near-total (90% or so) solar eclipse, but we didn't see much of it - we were outside, but the sun dipped behind some buildings. We didn't have special viewing equipment anyway. We did see an impressive sunset over the beach though.

Felbrigg Hall

This morning, we visited Felbrigg Hall (near Holt). We didn't go in the hall itself, though we did go in the walled gardens.

The dove cote was empty, but there were some chickens roaming the grounds.

We also took a walk through the grounds to an old church. Only on the walk were we told about a recent death due to cattle-trampling, but (perhaps in consequence) we didn't see any cows...

Recommendation: Walnut Tree, Thwaite

Driving from Colchester to Sheringham today, we stopped for lunch at an all-vegetarian pub in Thwaite called the Walnut Tree. I've only been the once but, if you're in the area, I'd highly recommend it. The enchiladas were one of the best meals I've had in quite a while.

Full review over on TripAdvisor.

A visit to Clacton

The upcoming Clacton by-election contest, pitting Nigel Farage against Count Binface, has generated a lot of social media attention - including in both music and wargaming circles. With less than a week until polling day, I took advantage of a family holiday in Essex to visit on the ground.

To be honest, we didn't see a lot of the town, except from the car. We only had two hours in the car park and spent most of that walking along the beach looking for somewhere to eat (we ended up at Martello Lounge, reviewed here). Even just driving through though, I saw many posters supporting Farage.

Gary Neville on dictatorship

The World Cup delivers again, this time pundit Gary Neville describing the refusal to release VAR footage as like a dictatorship. I suspect dictators have done worse.

Infantino on democracy

I didn't expect a pre-World Cup press conference to contain reflections on the meaning of democracy, but that's what happened.

The whole press conference can be found in various places on Youtube, such as here, here, and here.

The crucial bit comes at 55:23 here or 55:37 here or 54:36 here.

I'm not sure which countries' medieval practices he refers to. I may have to look that up.

Lordsdale Butterfly

Today, we joined a ranger-guided walk from Shirley Pond along Lordsdale Greenway. I took quite a few wildlife photos, particularly of various insects.

I believe this is a Painted Lady. There were quite a few of them around.