I see that Ron Johnston has received an OBE in the latest honours list – for ‘services to scholarship’. I have a bit of a soft spot for the sort of electoral geography that Ron and his colleagues do, which provides a really incisive style of political analysis that demonstrates just why ‘geography matters’, as they used to say. Ron’s Geography and Geographers, probably the first or second edition, was the very first academic geography book I ever read, in the summer of 1986 before going to University – it was the only book on the list of recommended things to read before ‘going up’ that the public library in East Grinstead actually had. And besides, he’s from Swindon, and went to school in the next road over from where we now live – one of my little joys about going along to vote since we have moved here is the idea of getting to vote in the school where Ron was a pupil. Such are the small wonders of life in Swindon.