I had picked up the book from the shelves at the top of the stairs. When I am too tired to read anything useful in bed, I go to old and familiar friends that I know I can re-read and enjoy as pure relaxation without having to concentrate or analyse. This one I hadn’t read for a good few years, but it caught my eye and attention as my son and I had been talking about a picture he had ‘acquired’ on a visit home long ago.

The painting had been on my wall, the oils barely dry. “I like that.” It reminded him, he said, of a book we had both enjoyed when he was in his teens and read every sci-fi and fantasy on my shelves… usually by the light of the street lamp outside his bedroom window. I knew the book without him having to name it…

Around 61.12 percent of 3.8 million eligible voters cast their ballots in Sunday 8 November general election in Croatia.
As I thought in one of my recent articles, neither of the two “big” political camps in Croatia (which divide Croatia into communist nostalgics/centre-left and independent Croatia loving cenre-right) won enough parliamentary seats to form a government outright- in the 151 seat parliament 76 are needed to form a majority government. In fact, the difference in results is almost insignificant leaving Croatia politically and ideologically divided (between centre-left and centre-right) to the point where economic progress and optimal politico-moral harmony are becoming more and more a feat impossible to achieve in one lifetime, at least.

Leader of Croatian Democratic Union/HDZ
Tomislav Karamarko
raises a glass to relative victory at
2015 general elections in Croatia
Victory not enough to form government
Photo: AFP

The conservative Croatian Democratic Union/HDZ led coalition won 56…