The spectacular Politics Home Index website has alerted me to yet more gems today, in the shape of a couple of articles defending MPs and taking a swipe at the screeching media who are enjoying lambasting them with even more gusto than normal at the moment.

The first half of this article, and the whole of this one provided readers of The Times and The Independent with an opportunity for a more balanced opinion of the current debate raging about the merits of MPs, and the dubious rationale for their wages and expenses.

I’ve said on here before that I have more sympathy for the MPs than I do for the screaming hacks attacking them. Obviously there are the money-grabbers and the expense-fiddlers, and they should be rooted out. But find any group of 650 people and there are bound to be one or two bad apples. I believe that the vast majority of MPs are decent, hard-working people who do their very best for tens of thousand of constituents many hundreds of miles from home. They need second homes, they need things to put in them, and they need to be paid good salaries.

I read crazy things every day - that MPs should be paid the minimum wage, that they should receive nothing but the state pension, that they should pay for a second home from their salary. These two articles redress the balance somewhat, and provide some sane analysis of what might happen if these things came to pass.

MPs don’t make it easy on themselves. They do look foolish when they aren’t as transparent as they might be. And the few naughty ones being plastered on page 1 of the News of the World makes them all look bad. But these are the people elected by us to make our country better. We shouldn’t begrudge them a good salary and some reasonable extras for doing that.

Rick 

Like a lot of people, I stave of suicide-by-boredom by spending Saturday afternoons strolling around bleak city centre shopping arcades, occasionally spending money on stuff I don’t need. Yesterday, in a fit of artistic over-reaching, I spent £25 on acrylic paint and brushes, in the laughable belief that I would use them to create something worthy of hanging over the fireplace. The moment has passed now, but sadly the receipt is in the bin.

Most weekends I end up in Waterstone’s at some point. And yesterday I was thumbing through the the varied contents of one of their door-side piles when a middle aged couple in sandles and beige clothes approached me. The man picked up a book and said “Mmm… Murakami is everywhere at the moment, isn’t he? Have you read Norweigan Wood…?” His companion nodded sagely and said “Yes, but I hear this one explores much broader themes.”

Such exchanges disturb me, mainly because I am incapable of having them. I have no idea who is “everywhere,” or why. I know there’s a book called “Norweigan Wood,” only because I picked it up once wondering how anyone could’ve spun a yarn that thick about the Beatles song. I put it down again when I found out that they hadn’t, and I have genuinely no idea what it’s about. I don’t know who Murakami is either. Put on the spot I’d have guessed he was a chef.

I hope that by “everywhere,” the woman meant “in the snippets of the Guradian culture pull-outs that I’ve read in the hope that I’ll appear impressive.” But there is this nagging doubt that actually she does mean everywhere. In every learned conversation. Around every sophisticated dinner party table. On the lips of every member of the congoscenti and in the minds of every person in Britain with a brain in their heads. Except me. Oh, how they laugh at me, these people and their novels.

Going into Waterstone’s is always a humbling affair. There are people in there, strolling around the literary criticism section with their hemp shopping bags and flowery skirts, who know more about books than I would do even if I lived in the shop doing nothing but reading for twenty years. Where do they get the time? It takes me weeks to read a novel, even if I devour one page after another, simply because after I get though about five of them it’s time to go to a meeting or go to bed. Are these booky people devoid of all other things in their lives? Do they go home to their charming Victorian semis in Chorlton and find nothing within but a pile of books? Do they not work? Or sleep?

I am insanely envious of these people. Their conversations about novels make them sound interesting and cultured, whereas my conversations about the Bury mayoral referendum make me sound geekish and nerdy. They know about authors and themes and narrative arcs. I know about local government performance trends, road maintenance budgets and the Prestwich Plan. They have a favourite passage from Ulysses, I have a favourite political website. They can talk about the new McEwan (and they’d probably scoff at it too…), and pretty young students fall at their feet. I can name the Shadow Home Secretary, and pretty young students run away. Literally, they run from me. 

Maybe it’s because books are sexy and councils are not. I need to find a better way of turning that equation round than quoting recycling statistics.

Even the fun stuff that I know about, like the Premier League and The West Wing, just make me seem a bit over keen. There is a casual effortlessness about literary discussion which seems to go hand in hand with sophistication. And now I’m thinking about how I know nothing about wine either… Was there a week in school where all this was taught? Was I off sick? How do some people know all this stuff, and I don’t? I hope to God they’re faking.

It’s not that I don’t read. I think it’s that I read the wrong stuff. I bet if I asked that couple in Waterstone’s what they were reading, they’d have named a novel so obscure yet so influential that I would’ve been swallowed up in a vortex of panic at my own ignorance. I though am currently reading six things. I am reading The Economist, the Lib Dem News, Private Eye, LGA First Magazine, a novel by Mark Haddon so lightweight that it needs lead weights to stop it floating away, and Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, which I picked up after his birthday concert the other week, thinking that I probably should.

Maybe that’s the problem. If I had six novels on the go at once, before too long I’d be able to at least hold a conversation about them all, so long as it didn’t venture towards comparing their endings. Maybe these bookworms never read anything but novels, and so whilst they can chat relentlessly about Doris Lessing, they don’t have a clue about Robert Mugabe.

Anyway, it’s an issue, this Waterstone’s thing. I go in there and come out full of remorse that I haven’t dedicated my life to reading the great novels, and full of the knowledge that even if I started now I’d still never finish. Every week I’d read a couple of books, only for twenty more to be published that make the critics gush with praise. I need to find a way to reconcile myself to the fact that I probably won’t ever read the wonderful works of classic literature. I will probably never have time to appreciate the power of the written word to convey humanity’s strongest and deepest emotions. Which is sad but, I fear, a necessary sacrifice for now if I’m going to fully understand this quarter’s housing maintenance statistics.

And, whilst the book people can moan about congestion charging and post office closures round their dinner table, making no difference to anything, I can… Well, at least I get my picture in The Advertiser from time to time.

Rick 

I don’t know whether heavy rain brings out maniacs, but in the showers last night I was a victim of road rage, and it made me sad that people can be aggressive for absolutely no reason at all.

I was returning from the fish and chip shop (Dockers, the new one on Bury New Road near Lidl – and very nice it is too) when I made the major strategic error of turning onto Kings Road. I had momentarily forgotten the vital lesson that one should never go anywhere near there in a car because whereas the area was designed principally as a thoroughfare, it is in fact a car park. This was clearly demonstrated last night when about thirteen cars were trying to turn about four different ways, simultaneously navigating between parked cars strewn across the place and abandoned by all and sundry. It was like the aftermath of a stock car rally.

And of course it was raining very heavily, so people were wet, and hot air was blowing to keep windscreens clear, so they were hot too. And wet, hot people don’t like being stuck in traffic jams. As anyone who’s seen “Falling Down” will confirm.

Amidst much hooting and tooting and not moving anywhere, there emerged from the back seat of a Toyota Corolla someone who could best be described as an urban orang-utan, swinging his arms and grunting in my general direction. I wound down my window and began to decipher the string of obscenities with which he put forward his opinion that without several cars reversing, he would be stuck there all night. Whilst I couldn’t fault the animal-man’s logic, his pointing, shouting, swearing and generally menacing behaviour was absolutely unnecessary.

What makes people get so cross, so quickly? If anyone in any of the cars he’d been screaming at had been equally angry, they’d have got out and belted him. It was only sheer cowardice, rather than respect for the law, which stopped me getting out myself. His entirely unreasonable behaviour made me fill up with rage. How dare he come pointing his angry fingers at me? How dare he launch into a string of language barely fit for the mess deck of a Navy frigate, in the middle of a street with families everywhere? What gave him the right to fill the air with his noxious anger, just because someone had held him up for thirty seconds on a Thursday evening?

I am firmly of the view that he is exactly what he mouthed at me when he drove past. But I won’t type the word out on here.

Was it always like this? If there was traffic fifty years ago, did drivers get out of their Austin Sevens, remove their hats and monocles, and launch into a fearsome tirade against the occupant of the stationery Vauxhall Victor? Or do we live in a time now where this type of behaviour has come to be within the boundaries of acceptability? I don’t know if any of the other drivers victim to this abuse were as shocked as I was. I hope they were.

I think my feelings of rage were more down to frustration than anything else. Not frustration that I was stuck in a jam because of an atrociously parked Volvo estate, but because this grunting, screaming madman could get away with his flood of swearing without any form of retribution whatsoever. And because if anyone had calmly told him to keep it down, they’d probably have been rewarded with a beating.

The only consolation would have been that his getaway would’ve been blocked by the traffic.

I wish we could reclaim some of the respect that went before. Politicians talk about this all the time, and real solutions are obviously hard to find. But I wish we’d all have got out and politely told this guy where to go last night. That we didn’t was to be expected, but he couldn’t have beaten us all up and he’d have learned that there are better ways to get out of traffic jams than shouting at drivers til they drive away scared.

This guy had kids in his car. That’s the most depressing thing. They’ll learn that shouting is the way to get things done. That patience and mutual understanding aren’t worth bothering with if you’re big and strong enough to frighten other people. I don’t know how to fix this, but I enjoy thinking about it, and I know other people do too. And hopefully we can find a way soon. Because going out for fish and chips shouldn’t be this hard.

Rick

Today has been hugely dull. Great gusts of tedium have blown themselves around me as I trudged from meeting to meeting at work. And because I am left handed and was at one point using a flip-chart marker, an untoward smudging incident occurred and now I have ink on my fingers and I look like an errant schoolboy.

One of the necessary evils of my job as a Councillor is to chase up Council Officers who haven’t responded to my emails. I don’t know if it is a pathological thing with some of them, or whether the world wide web doesn’t function in the small quadrant of land between the Town Hall and my house, but whatever the reason I am frequently ignored. If this is how they treat me, God only knows how they treat people without the luxury of a public mandate.

Today’s chasings-up include a month-old request for a reply to a letter regarding Phillips Park. Some local people want help planting out some flowers there, but the response so far from the Council has been nil. You’d think they’d welcome the help, but I don’t know what they think because they haven’t bothered to reply to me.

There is also the matter of a “Keep Clear” box, desperately needed for residents of The Radius who can’t get in or out of their car park because of jams outside. This was requested in April, promised three weeks ago, and still hasn’t been painted. I don’t know how long it took to paint the roof of the Sistene Chapel, but this appears to be a job on a similar scale.

The third issue relates to the green ooze on Woodward Road, which I have written on here about before and which still shows no signs of being removed. Apparently it may have something to do with a collapsed drain, which is a relief because I thought at one point it marked the start of an alien invasion. But regardless of the exact cause, it isn’t pleasant and it’s still there. So, two months on, and five emails down the line, I have asked again today, in a tone probably most reminiscent of a school master dealing with someone who hasn’t done their homework.

And finally there is a vulnerable old man who asked me to have the kerb outside his flats dropped if possible, to allow him to enter and exit his own home without jolting him out of his wheelchair or requiring a detour to the end of the street. Obviously my pavement-lowering skills aren’t top-notch, but I know a man who can (The Clerk of Works, Bury MBC). Unfortunately he too ignores me, and so I have asked again for his help today. It’s OK though, I am sure this poor old man bouncing along the road in his wheelchair doesn’t mind that the man paid to serve him is too rude to do his job.

The shoddy response times to requests for service from the Council are nothing short of maddening. The Council has a customer service charter which states that emails must be answered within 24 hours, and responded to fully within 10 working days. I have kept an informal record for the past couple of months, and this standard is not met well over half the time. And I am a Councillor, so am probably treated better than most. And there’s not much I can do about it either. I have raised it in Council, I have spoken to people and emailed them time and time again. And nothing changes. We are still having phone calls, emails and even face to face chats ignored. We may be opposition back benchers but we are still elected members with people counting on us to get things answered.

The poor people who come to me for help must wonder why I can’t act quicker, and honestly so do I. I am not asking for the impossible. I don’t want a bypass built past somebody’s back garden in a fortnight. I want simple things, or quite often just any kind of response at all so that the resident doesn’t feel like he’s being ignored. Often a reasoned “no” is quite sufficient. But I am not even getting that.

It’s frustrating. Almost as frustrating, in fact, as trying to scrub permanent marker off my fingers. And let me tell you from bitter experience in the toilet at work today - that is VERY frustrating. 

Rick

I spent the weekend working on a motion for Council which I will be proposing on Wednesday, to do with the Post Office closure programme. We oppose the programme, which sees 2,500 more Post Offices close across the country, including another five in Bury I was typing away with one hand (my left one, as us left-handers tend to do…) whilst holding a gigantic Post Office publication in the other, which lists in staggering detail every fact and fancy about the closing Post Offices. So I will be speaking in support of the motion to stop the closures on Wednesday night, and if the mood takes me I shall read from the giant book.

This speech presents me with a problem because I have a cough, and as a result I can’t string more than two sentences together without collapsing into a heavy-breathing, spluttering wreck. This is doubly unfortunate because I absolutely love the sound of my own voice, and the thought of giving up an opportunity to hear it for eight or nine minutes depresses me greatly.

However, I will soldier on hoping that Mother Nature is a Liberal Democrat, and will cure what ails me. Her and Vick’s Vaporub, which I heard from a world renowned medical expert (my Dad) yesterday can be used as a cough-repellent if placed on the tongue and swallowed.

Also this week I will get to talk to a real life Australian person, when my oldest friend returns from his new home in Melbourne with his Antipodean girlfriend in tow. By “oldest friend” I mean longest standing friend. His age is, like mine, 27. Anyway, quite what the girlfriend will make of Bury town centre as opposed to the palm trees and tanned bodies of Oz is beyond me. But we do have the World Famous Market, whereas all they have is the set of Neighbours and a beach.

The weekend just gone saw a bit of leafleting in Besses in the rain, which was deeply unpleasant. It’s not a ward I am overly familiar with, and whereas in my home patch I can trudge, head-down, in the downpours, on unfamiliar ground I have to keep looking up to make sure I don’t walk into some street furniture. So I got a bit damp.

Us Lib Dems also had some festive frolics on Saturday night, when my Mum (who is our campaigner and candidate in Besses ward) had a birthday party cum housewarming. I shan’t reveal her age, but at least she now has a suitably warmed house. And more leftover food than I ever thought possible.

So anyway, that’s my immediate past and immediate future. And remember, the Council meeting on Wednesday night is open to the public, so just come along. You can even ask a question to the Leader and Cabinet, although this is probably the last time you’ll be allowed to do that. Of which more tomorrow…

Rick

So David Cameron is going to sue the Lib Dems about a leaflet we’re putting out in Henley? Well, I haven’t seen the leaflet, and I don’t know whether what it says is true or not. I certainly don’t know if it’s actionable, but I suspect there are lots of Tories who think it is, and lots of us who think it’s not. Chances are it’s neither absolutely true or absolutely false, which is why a judge somewhere might get to decide. Whatever it is, there are so many borderline lies that inhabit election leaflets from every party, and they’re the types of thing that drives me mad and makes me wonder why I’m doing this kind of thing at all.

It’s no surprise that temperatures are running a little high down there. This is a by-election on top of another by-election, right after the local elections. There are some people who’ve barely slept in three months, and I’m surprised they still remember the candidate’s name let alone write only lovely things about his opponent.

But it’s pretty rare for any leaflet to be greeted with cries of “See you in court!”

Maybe the threat of legal action might reign in some of the more outlandish leaflet claims from all sides, and maybe it will cascade down to the lowly likes of us campaigning in local elections. Because even here our leaflets can sometimes go way over the top. And screeching half-truths about opponents makes us all look like bickering idiots with nothing positive to say.

Political leaflets are odd. It seems as if we consider it unacceptable to think the same as our opponents on any issue, even though we do think the same thing on many especially at a local level.

If there’s a hospital to be closed, we’re against the closure and we strain every sinew of our being to find even the most tenuous reason why our opponent might not be. “The government of his party wants to shut hospitals” is reasonable, if there’s evidence to back it up. But is it fair to say “The Council run by his party 150 miles away shut hospitals”? Or “25 years ago his party shut another hospital”? I don’t think that it is. But if there was the chance to write it then I can bet my bottom dollar that somebody would.

And we do it all the time – all the parties do it all the time. I don’t even care if it works to win votes, because if it does it also works to convince voters that we’re all drones incapable of doing anything but degrading our opponents who are, on the whole, perfectly decent people who wouldn’t want to shut hospitals in an ideal world.

Even at my most local of levels, at the last election we screamed at Labour and they screamed at us on things that, really, we weren’t miles apart on. Rainsough for instance. So much was made of the failure to renovate the shops. We blamed Labour and Labour blamed us, when the truth is that it’s neither of our faults. It’s a symptom of neglect caused by people who’ve long since retired or died and who could’ve been wearing any colour of rosette under the sun back in 1981 or whenever the hell it was. Luckily for us it was a red one so we could blame them. But I don’t think it was fair to, because they’re not standing now and the guy who is seems a perfectly nice chap with a brain in his head and some good ideas.

Of course, there are times when we genuinely disagree. When there’s clear space between us. And we should let every voter know where both sides stand on these issues. But even here there’s surely a better way of doing things than we manage in our elections. We paint ourselves as haloed saviours, and the opposition as salivating attack-dogs ready to rip communities to shreds simply because they’re too stupid to see the obvious solution we’ve seen.

Neither of these two personas is right, yet why do we treat the voters as too ill-informed to recongnise that issues are nuanced and that there rarely is a black and white solution? Surely we can’t believe what we’re saying?

Is it any wonder that people are disengaged, when what we give them to be engaged with is a cartoon version of the issues which they probably already know isn’t very well connected to reality? In a by-election, whoever wins will have been called a bumbling buffoon by his opponent in at least half a dozen leaflets on every doorstep in the constituency. This hardly does much to help with a respectful society, does it?

I know that there’s an end game to campaigning. I know that the more Councillors we elect, by fair means or foul, and the more MPs we get by tipping the swing our way through no-holds-barred campaigns, the more likely it is that one day, one day, we’ll have the chance to put our policies into practice and make a real difference. But do those ends justify the means that we sometimes use? And would it only be a pyrrhic victory if we obtain power and influence by shouting down our opponents with smears and out-of-context quotes? How can we strive to be leaders when our journey to leadership is marked with such questionable moral judgement?

We should all try and do something different, I think. And it’d have to be all of us at once, because if we alone became the party of nice leaflets I suspect we’d get truly panned.

I doubt it will ever happen. Campaigning is so targeted and sophisticated now that before too long the likes of Mosaic and hacking into the Tesco Clubcard database will mean we can just leaflet half a dozen swing voters until they collapse under the strain of it all, and then fill in a proxy vote for them at their hospital bedside.

But I just wish we would all take a breath, lose the tunnel vision and remember why we’re in it in the first place. It’s not to hire lawyers and fight over leaflets full of mis-quotations in the High Court. It’s to spread our good ideas and change things for the better.

Rick

Last night I went to the Liverpool Sound concert at Anfield, headlined by Sir Paul McCartney, a man so dazzlingly wealthy and with a musical back-catalogue so ludicrously accomplished, that even a brief contemplation of the scope of his life makes my brain hurt.

Here’s a guy who’s more famous than The Queen, and has been since my parents were in short trousers (or, in my mum’s case, whatever young girls wore in the early 60s). Until I was about 16 I thought that “Yesterday” was a centuries-old folk song, and scientists have now proven that the tunes to “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be” are automatically woven into the genes of foetuses in the womb, along with the ability to see and cry.

I wonder, what does he do with his days? When you and I get up and go into the office, what does he do? And how can he do it, given that his appearance anywhere is fairly likely to cause hysteria? What is he doing right now, I wonder? And how does it feel to churn out a new album every couple of years for the entire duration of my life to date, only for everyone in every audience you ever play to to actually want to hear things from decades before?

I also wonder how he manages to be even anywhere on the “normal” spectrum after this much adulation for this long. I get light-headed and ego-maniacal for weeks after the odd occasion I get stopped in Tesco and asked about a planning application. Macca gets kings and presidents falling at his feet every day for 50 years, and other than his over-use of the thumbs-up and peace gestures, he appears at least as sane as most of the people I bump into daily.

Ah well, I comfort myself with the fact that I don’t need to think particularly long and hard about him. He seems capable of taking care of himself, and I have more pressing needs to attend to, such as the new version of the Prestwich Plan, which I have been working on over the weekend in front of an audience of 36,000 screaming fans.

This plan will hopefully become the document which drives forward the work of the Local Area Partnership for the next three years. The priorities within it have come from discussions with partners such as the Police, Fire and NHS, as well as being the priorities of the community as represented by the local Councillors who they elect.

Achieving the targets in the plan will also be the agenda for the two sub-groups of the Local Area Partnership. I chair one of them, the Developing Communities Group, and we meet for the first time this year on Wednesday. I suggested Wembley Stadium, but apparently the likely crowd demand has meant us booking Prestwich Methodist Chirch Hall instead. I spent time on the phone to the Local Area Partnership manager this morning, finalising the agenda for the meeting.

Also this weekend I chased up some very outstanding casework to do with Woodward Road. I wrote on here about some mysterious green sludge which had appeared there six weeks or so ago, and I had asked the Council to clear it up. Despite numerous promises to the contrary, the Council still haven’t sorted it out, and so today I asked them yet again to take a look. This is another issue to be brought up at the next Local Area Partnership meeting where Council officers will be there in person to answer residents’ queries.

Which just goes to show that whilst Beatle-mania and the adulation of millions would be nice, all I really want is for someone to replace the paving slabs on Woodward Road. Maybe that’s what Macca’s up to on his days off…

Rick

I have spent this breezy weekend leafleting in various parts of the ward, and not doing much else. That my life crumbles to nothingness the moment Tamsin leaves me is as much a testament to her qualities as it is to my inability to make friends. She is in France and so, leaflets aside, my companions at the moment are this computer and the television downstairs, with its litany of pointless channels. Yesterday there were humans involved as well, and there probably will be tomorrow too. But today, oddly, they were all doing other things, and I pottered about here like a lonely old man.

And now I feel guilty for not doing something worthwhile with my time today, like reading a book. Weighty tomes loom down on me from the bookcase, whispering “great men read serious works” whilst I thumb through the pictures in the Tommy Cooper biography, try not to notice that Barack Obama’s book is there just waiting to be started, and not even bother with either in the end. ”Gladstone didn’t spend his spare time watching Sky Sports News” they intone. And they’re right.

I received a call today from a resident, who asked me to do something which I am not entirely comfortable doing.

He lives on a quiet road which also serves as the route for an hourly bus. And he wants me to ask if I can divert it so that it goes down the next street instead. Apparently it shakes the ornaments in his living room as it goes past, and he’s not happy. I know where he lives, because we’ve spoken on his doorstep. I know that the view from the back garden of his house is so spectacular, perched overlooking the Irwell Valley for miles as it is, that if I lived there I wouldn’t care about buses. But he is obviously used to the view, and does care. And so now I have to too.

Now, I have no objection to asking the bus people to consider moving the bus route. The way the streets pan out in this particular location means that there is a perfectly acceptable alternative route 50 yards away which will make no difference to the journey, and all the difference in the world to this man. But obviously it will make precisely the opposite difference to the people on the next street who are suddenly lumbered with a bone-shaking introduction to bus travel every hour. Is this fair on them, I wonder? And will one of them ring me up and ask me to move the bus back where it came from? What should I do then?

Issues like this arise from time to time. Residents ask for things which I think are a bit odd or impractical, or which I know will annoy as many people as they please. I pass on these requests, because I was elected to be an advocate for people, and advocate their wishes I shall. But I was also elected as a community leader - as someone to cut through the issues to find the solutions. And there are few solutions that please everybody. So what should I do? Do I carry on passing on the requests, or do I turn round and say that, since I am just as much the Councillor for the bus-haters as I am for the people living quite peacefully free of buses, that my man should fight this war on his own?

After all, for every resident delighted that the bus is re-routed, there’s another one after my blood for cursing them with a bus. For every householder singing my praises for getting parking restrictions imposed, there’s another one sticking pins on things with my face on them for stopping their right to park. And for everyone pleased about this week’s bollard (myself included), there is an angry man who’s crashed into that bollard and now wants to uproot it and throw it through my window.

These issues are tough calls. And they’re so local that they’re pifflingly small-fry compared to exactly the same types of issues facing the national politicians every day of their lives. And at least when I tinker with a local bus route I don’t have the Daily Mail calling me a butcher whilst the Guardian calls me a saint.

So, the leader/advocate thing is a dilemma. At the moment I am advocating. And if it turns out that I have to advocate for both sides of the same argument, then I suppose I will have to leave logic behind for the good of the ward, and carry on regardless. I think it might be different on the bigger issues. I think maybe when it comes to taxes and housing and Europe and the NHS, maybe politicians should stop saying “yes” to everyone and act more like leaders than advocates. But for me and my bus route, I don’t think picking an argument is the best way forward.

And besides, I comfort myself with the fact that no matter how many people I annoy whilst trying to do the right thing, it doesn’t really matter because there’s a 70% chance they won’t be voting anyway.

Which, of course, is a whole different depressing ball game.

Rick

At my party on Saturday, a friend of mine who I’ve known since three minutes after I started university, and who has recently married, announced that she was now pregnant. I was overjoyed at the news, cooing around the place like a demented owl and generally doubting my own gender by getting the types of broody feelings I’m not sure men are biologically supposed to get. It was the best news I’d heard all year.

But now, two days and one clean-up later, I find myself asking how on earth this managed to happen. Obviously I have moved on from the biological now. My parents taught me about the dangers of baths that are too hot, and of cabbage patches years ago, and I tell Tam never to take such baths or eat such vegetables because I know we’re just not ready for children yet. No, I don’t mean how she managed to get pregnant in the first place, but how in the name of all that’s rational I came to be old enough not only to have friends who are married, but friends who are now carrying children of their own.

Does this sudden dismay happen to other people? Do others ever just stop for a moment and think about how many decades their inner-selves are from their outer-selves? Is there a cure?

Yesterday, and I mean, literally, yesterday, I was six years old. I lived in a house with my parents and sister, I went to primary school, and I played with a plastic football and Lego bricks. There is no way, NO WAY, that anyone in my peer group is now old enough to have a baby, without them being the talk of the town and rightly whisked off to a country house supervised by sadistic Irish nuns. And yet, it turns out that they are all old enough. How did this happen?

There was someone else at the party, a friend of Tam’s, who has gone through the whole pregnancy thing already, and emerged out the other end with a real child. A “Francesca” that breathes and cries and will soon walk and talk. How could she have done such a thing and survived? Here she is, with a baby, still managing to do normal things like engage in conversation and drive a car, and here I am struggling to come up with the necessary commitment to bung a pizza in the oven for 15 minutes. If I had an actual baby, I really don’t understand how I would be able to do anything other than act like a jibbering wreck.

I can pin-point the exact moment when we suddenly stopped being the young generation and started being the middle one. It was 19:50 on October 31st 2006, when the last of my grandparents died, and there was absolutely nothing and nobody standing between my parents and The Great Hereafter. The shield that separated my cosy little childhood from nasty things like time’s irritating ticking disappeared. But I didn’t have to do anything about it then. I could just pretend to still reside in kid-hood, because there was no-one beneath me coming up on the rails. Now that’s changed too, and there is no place in the play-pen left for me. I’m going to be shoved out of it by a gurgling newcomer who is the product of someone who was, last week, LAST WEEK I tell you, the 18 year old fresher at university tumbling about the place without a care in the world. And now she has travel-cots and stuff that pumps things. It’s unpleasant for any number of reasons.

I have a responsible job. I am elected to public office for God’s sake. People ask me to do things for them, and they get done. I debate issues that matter and people ask me for advice. And yet, in my head, I just can’t contemplate that it is even conceivable that a peer of mine is doing something this grown up. An actual baby, that will be here after we’re gone and will have babies of its own.  

I probably grossly undercooked a sausage or two at my party. I thought quite often about the mountain of debt it is necessary to tunnel into to afford the mortgage on the house. And I let two dozen people drink red wine near my cream sofas. But the one truly frightening thing about Saturday night was the thought that in six months time there’ll be a little one amongst us and we really really won’t be those kids who met on the first day of university any more.

Which would be a sad thought, were I not still absolutely gob-smacked with delight about the whole thing.

Rick

The continuing warm spell meant that last night I took advantage and mowed the lawn. The occasion also saw the juddering debut of my new strimmer. Such is the exciting life a Councillor leads in the week after an election.

So now my lawn has stripes on it, which I must admit are wavey in parts due to the fact that my lawnmower has the turning circle of an oil tanker, rendered even worse by the fact that in turning it I regularly ended up inside a shrub.

I have scheduled a barbecue for Saturday night, so expect that sky to turn black and start pelting the earth with rain like God’s own rage at about Saturday teatime.

Tonight is the Liberal Democract Council Group Annual General Meeting, where we decide who does what and how the Group is going to work for the coming year. It will be nice to see my colleagues’ brows looking less furrowed than when I saw them all last on election day (although they became visibly less creased as the results became clear).

And in the meantime, I must get back to work. Sadly not under a tree, but here in my office, which is so hot that I’m fairly certain there is liquid magma flowing through the radiators.

Rick