It was snowing. I entered the Haggerty School on Cushing Street in Cambridge just before noon. There were no directional signs to the gym as there ordinarily are on an election day. And there was no one pushing his or her candidate’s wares.

I checked in by address, went to the curtained little polling booth, filled in the box next to my candidate’s name, checked out by address, and put my ballot in what seemed to me to be one of those organ grinder’s contraptions. It had a moving number count which told me that I was the 504th voter of the day.

South Africa, to be precise, where I had been previously on four occasions. I promised in my last posting upon my arrival eleven days ago to write when I could. I assured you that I had wi-fi and that the places at which I was staying had wi-fi also. Well, they didn't ... quite. So I piled up my impressions and waited till I returned. Which I have now done. From the warm climes of a South African winter to the torrential rains of a cold east coast summer.

Let me own up to the proximate reasons for my visit to South Africa. They were two. The first was wine tasting. I considered myself a wine connoisseur. Alas, my palette is not refined enough to register the subtle distinctions in taste that my friends had no trouble discerning and appreciating. And my tolerance is not as large as theirs, not at all. Eight or nine trips to the decanter in one session gets me just a bit inebriated which is actually pleasant. But it is not informative. So I will have to rely on my fellow travelers (no, not that kind of fellow traveler) to recall the wines and the vintages I seemed to enjoy the most.

The second reason for my trip was to go on safari with a group of close friends. I had never thought of myself as an animal person. The last of our dogs that I really liked was our first, a Great Dane, imaginatively named Hamlet. He died young from a respiratory ailment identified for me by my late friend John Kenneth Galbraith (6'7" and very slender) as endemic to humans and animals whose breathing mechanism has to service a huge and extended system. I also like horses. I had one, a Morgan, for about a dozen years, whom I named "Prince Myshkin" in tribute to his essential sensitive soul.

In the tumultuous history of postwar American conservatism, defeats have often contained the seeds of future victory. In 1954, the movement's first national tribune, Senator Joseph McCarthy, was checkmated by the Eisenhower administration and then "condemned" by his Senate colleagues. But the episode, and the passions it aroused, led to the founding of National Review, the movement's first serious political journal. Ten years later, the right's next leader, Barry Goldwater, suffered one of the most lopsided losses in election history.