There’s more canvassing and leafleting tonight, as the campaign continues. I can only hope that the warm reception we’ve been getting continues tonight. It’s been great so far, and I’d like to thank everyone we’ve met who has been so kind and supportive.

After canvassing tonight, I am attending the annual open evening of “Northern Air,” the hospital radio station of North Manchester General Hospital, of which I have been involved for the last ten years. I was an active member of Northern Air for about four years in total, over two spells, and have been in touch with the station and supportive of their efforts for the rest of the time too. Now I remain a member and attend special events, but sadly can’t help out much more very often because most of my time outside of work is taken up with being a Councillor.

I think hospital broadcasting is an excellent volunteering activity, providing enormous benefits both to the patients in hospital, and the volunteers themselves. When I used to visit the wards collecting record requests and talking to patients, it was wonderful to hear how they liked listening to our programmes. I know that for many volunteers this is the undoubted highlight of the whole experience. But others can learn very useful media skills in radio presentation and production, as well as making the types of contacts necessary for a career in the industry. I used to have great fun writing and presenting radio shows, and made lots of friends with whom I’m still in touch now. There are some lovely people involved in volunteering, and I would urge anyone who’s thought about giving their free time to do any sort of voluntary activity to give it a go. You’ve really got nothing to lose.

Hospital radio was the one for me. My dad did it years ago, and because I always fancied myself as a bit of a DJ, and thought that this would be a good way of learning the ropes as well as helping people out! It turned out that I wasn’t much cop at the radio lark, but I enjoyed getting involved in the community, and that’s obviously led to other things. That’s not to say that everyone taking to the airwaves on hospital stations is as rubbish as I was! Plenty of well known names in radio have started in hospitals, including Ken Bruce, Pete and Geoff and Nemone, (the latter two actually at Northern Air), as well as countless others both in front of the microphone and behind the scenes. Terry Wogan is in fact closely involved with the Hospital Broadcasting Association.

The Mayor of Bury, Councillor Dr Farook Chaudhry, will also be in attendance at the open evening tonight, as the guest of honour, and although I won’t be there in my role as Councillor, I hope to be able to welcome him and introduce him to some of the very dedicated volunteers who help run the station. The efforts that they put in, giving of their own free time to help sick people in hospital feel better, and to help young people develop new skills, really is extraordinary. It is great that the station opens its doors like this every year and is so warmly received by the community. 

If you would like to find out more about Northern Air and the hospital radio service that it provides, or perhaps are interested in becoming a volunteer, drop in tonight. The broadcasting studio is located next to the Trust HQ building at North Manchester General Hospital, on Delaunays Road in Crumpsall. And if you can’t make it tonight, you can call the station on 0161 740 7474. 

Rick

God’s continual mocking of me shows no sign of abating. We have an arrangement, Him and I, whereby I try my best to do good things, and He amuses Himself by plonking annoying but ultimately quite funny trials in my path, which in turn then never leave me short of things to write about on here.

I was woken last night at 01:00 by the sound of my wheely bin blowing over in gale force winds and driving rain. I wandered over to the window to take a look, and saw the contents of the bin strewn across the road and blowing around the neighbourhood.

Not a pleasant sight at that time in the morning.

Undaunted, I put on the first two items of clothing that came to hand (dressing gown and work shoes) and headed out into the street, to spend the next ten minutes battling against The Perfect Storm to retrieve a week’s worth of rotting food and general horror from my neighbour’s shrubs.

I respected bin men before, and now I do even more. Although last night’s work had more in common with body-exhumers than bin men, I’m sure. And I bet they don’t have to tackle our rubbish in the middle of the night dressed only in a towelling robe.

So I am tired today. But I will still find time later on to do some Councillor work – I am out leafleting this evening in the north of the ward, assuming that the weather doesn’t put on its angry face again and leave me looking mournfully out of my lounge window at a world sailing off in a storm somewhere.

Rick

Today I am back in work, after a busy weekend of furniture buying and general house planning. All very exciting. The delivery of the white good spassed with only moderate difficulties. Apparently we have plumbing “issues” which will mean the hiring of somebody who knows more about pipes than I do, to make the dishwasher work.

As well as the house, I dealt with ward issues over the weekend. First off there was a sewage leak down Clifton Road, which I was alerted to on Friday night. This is a United Utilities issue rather than a Council issue, but I chased it up over the weekend in conjunction with the resident concerned, and I am hopeful that the engineers will sort out the problem today.

Also, I heard from a resident of Sherbourne Court that she was having a problem with squirrels in her loft space. Apparently they are being very noisy (probably storing nuts…). I have been talking to Pest Control about the problem, and to Six Town Housing about whether or not it is up to the tenant or STH to pay the charge.

Lofts have also been on my personal agenda, since we’re having the new one boarded. I have got a guy to come and install a ladder, which will hopefully minimize the currently-quite-high possibility of me tumbling to my death whilst attempting to access the roof space.

Tonight it’s the Bury Holocaust Memorial Service in Radclifee, so I’ll be going to that. I will report back tomorrow on what I’m sure will be an excellent and moving ceremony in which all of our diverse community can take part.

Rick

Well, it has finally happened. After more to-ing and fro-ing between estate agents, solicitors and the most bitter recesses of my brain than I care to remember, I am finally a home-owner.

At midday, the solicitors rang to inform me that I now owe the Nationwide a staggering sum of money. And then a minute later the estate agents rang to offer me two sets of keys in return for my soul. It seemed a fair deal to me, and I’ll be picking them up at 4.

This evening Tamsin and I are going to sit on the floor of our empty house and eat fish and chips, whilst plotting what should go where. I have already come to the conclusion that she should go in the shed.

We won’t officially move in until Valentine’s Day. This is less to do with romance and more to do with the date we pay rent each month, but the coincidence is a happy one, and probably saves me a trip to the florists.

Between now and then we are buying, taking delivery of, and assembling various goods. Tomorrow, for instance, the fridge, freezer, dishwasher and washer/dryer arrive in the back of a Curry’s lorry. So apologies to my new neighbours for that. And then we have the very modern joy of buying virtually everything else in flat-pack form and spending the next fortnight turning allen keys until planks of plywood are transformed into beautiful side-boards.

But all this activity won’t stop work in the ward. The new St Mary’s Focus has been printed and folded, and is now ready for distribution across the ward. So expect one through your letterbox in the coming weeks, starting this weekend. And throughout the turmoils of rug-buying, finding an acceptable coffee table, and dealing with one too few screws for the bookcase, I will be available to offer any assistance you might need from a Councillor.
Rick

I have just fallen off the post-Christmas diet wagon in spectacular fashion. Using the excuse that “I need some change for a parking meter,” I went to a cash point and then to a cake shop, sandwich bar and sweet stall. And now the bag of fruit which was to be my lunch is sitting on my desk, leering at me. And I feel all salty and horrible after my needless bag of crisps.

I will try to make up for it with a run tonight, but not until I have done some leafleting in the Hilton Lane / Rainsough area. The amount of steps required to get up to some of the houses there will also double-up as some exercise, so with any luck I will have burnt off the excess calories by tea time, just in time to put them back on again. This diet and exercise lark is hard work.

Also tonight I unfurl the first of my boxes, ready to cram them full of the junk which currently clogs my little house and which will, from next week, clog my slightly larger house. I have come to the conclusion that I am a horder. I don’t really know how that makes me feel. Cluttered, I suppose.

Rick

They say that, with the exception of losing a close relative, moving house is the most stressful thing in the world. They obviously haven’t sat through a Prestwich LAP meeting when street cleaning is on the agenda, but other than that minor omission, I reckon they are more or less right.

We are in the process of moving at present. From Clifton Road to Butterstile Close. Last week we exchanged contracts, having been informed by our solicitor to get buildings insurance straight away because “now that you’ve exchanged, if the house blows up you still have to buy it.” With such a ringing endorsement of the joys of home-ownership in my ears, I hurriedly arranged cover, and am due to pick up the keys, explosions permitting, next Friday.

I am fairly lucky in that, because I rent, I don’t have a place to sell, and can gently move in over the course of a month. A knock on effect though of my fixed-abode-free existence up til now is that we haven’t really ever acquired any furniture. And so the plan for this weekend was for me to tip every penny I have ever saved out of my bank account, stroll into Comet, and buy most of their stock. Then do the same in DFS.

Unfortunately the sellers of my house-to-be have gone AWOL and have been incommunicado for the better part of a week (suspiciously, ever since exchanging). As a result we haven’t been able to measure anything, and so are dimension-less prior to our shopping spree. Which wouldn’t be so bad were the sales not about to come grinding to a halt. The TV screamed at me that SCS were having a double discount event this weekend. Not the type of thing I want to miss given my need for a sofa and their need to sell lots of them.

Tonight I peered into their darkened house, and deposited a pleading letter through their door asking if they’d be so kind as to allow me and my tape-measure inside to prevent me buying a sofa that is three inches too wide for the lounge. I have yet to receive a response. And of course the estate agents are about as useful as a mobile disco in a morgue. Quite what the purpose of estate agents is I have never quite fathomed. They are like the irritating middle-men between me and the sane world. When I asked them when it was OK to go around to measure the house, they confidently arranged a time with me, only to ring an hour before I was due to enter and casually drop into the conversation the fact that they’d made the whole thing up and hadn’t ever spoken to the seller at all.

My stresses will continue, I’m guessing, until well after I’ve moved. I started writing a list the other day of people I needed to ring to inform them of a change of address. It was thirty names long before I put it behind the clock on the mantel-piece in the hope that it would go away.

I imagine myself at some point relaxed on a new sofa watching new Sky on a new TV sipping a newly opened can of Dr Pepper in my new lounge and typing on my blog on my new wireless broadband on my new laptop, with my new white goods all whirring simultaneously in the kitchen. Until that point, which I fear may be several months, a bankruptcy and a nervous breakdown away, the stresses continue a-pace.

Rick

I spent the weekend in London, enjoying a three hour traffic-free motorway journey as far as the end of the M4, and then a two hour clogged-up apocalypse between Earl’s Court and my mate’s flat in Streatham. A flat which, rent-wise, sets her back as much as a genuine palace bedecked with jewels and minarets would do up here.

Why anyone lives in the traffic-soaked and unceasingly busy spiders-web of ramshackle flats that is London, is a mystery to me. And yet so many people I know do, which means I have to go there more often than I’d like. Unless you’re Frank Lampard on £120,000 a week, with your Bentley Continental gliding effortlessly between luxurious city abodes, living in London must be an unendurable nightmare of crowds, sky-high prices for everything, and take-away fried chicken restaurants.

Still, a number of likeable souls live there, and we all ended up watching a comedy evening in a pub in Balham (that’ll be sixteen pounds to get in, sir).

My trip down south meant a weekend off duty in Prestwich, although the week ahead is very busy indeed. Today I have already contacted the Council to once again chase up the planned improvements to the junction of St Ann’s Road and Bury New Road. The junction in its present form looks like the work of an evil scientist bent on causing mayhem and destruction, but keeping it peculiarly restricted to minor road accidents. The pedestrian crossing is not only a ludicrously short distance away from then main crossing, but is out of sync as well, meaning that cars and pedestrians get confused, nobody knows what’s going on half the time, and it’s pretty miraculous that nothing serious has happened. I received another report of a minor accident there today, so it’s about time the Council followed up on their promise to get it sorted by the end of the financial year. I will keep you posted.

This week it’s the Prestwich Local Area Partnership, which takes place tomorrow night at St Monica’s School (on Bury Old Road, near to the junction with Scholes Lane / Sheepfoot Lane). The meeting starts at 18.30 with LAP business and reporting back from sub-committees and the like. The public forum starts at 19.30, when you will have the chance to grill LAP members including all of your local Councillors. So if you have a burning issue you’d like to bring up about anything we might be able to help you with, please come on down and take the opportunity to raise it.

On Thursday it’s another  Rainsough TRA meeting, where we can update the residents on what’s been going on, and hear back from them on what they’ve been getting upto. Obviously the main issue at present is the Chapel Road shops and the potential conversion of one or more units into an outreach facility for the Children’s Centre. We have secured money from Bury Council, and despite my overtures to Labour-run Salford City Council for funding from them (the shops belong to them even though the residents / tenants pay council tax / rent to Bury) they have not come up with funding yet. I hope they come up with it soon, because if it isn’t spent by 31^st March then the grant we’ve got become worthless, and so much effort will have been wasted.

On top of my meetings this week I have an interview tonight with a local researcher about anti-Semitism. And I also have the City v West Ham replay on Wednesday. All of which means that poor Tamsin is left to measure up for furniture on our new house by herself, because I am out every night! We finally exchanged contracts on Friday, and will be moving in early February. People keep asking if I’m celebrating, but frankly the thought of having just signed my life away to a bank for twenty five years makes me want to do anything but! I will probably write (significantly) more about developments as they occur.

Rick

2007 rolls to a close with alarming speed. It cannot, cannot, CAN NOT be a year since the last new year’s eve. And yet calendars and most leading scientists agree that it is. A bit like global warming - depressingly real despite me not wanting it to be.

And 2008 is upon us. Two thousand and eight. Ludicrously futuristic. We should all be armed with laser guns and be travelling around hyper-cities in the sky in our flying cars by now.

But of course it’ll all be much the same, and in about nine months I’ll be used to 2008, only for it to change to 2009 and fill me once again with the dreadful sense of foreboding that time is marching unstoppably on towards a year when I genuinely am a grown up, and from which no amount of backwards time counting can help me escape.

I thought once that I was the only one who counts backwards to escape the hideous reality of stuff creeping up on me. I used to do it with school holidays, starting gleefully with the knowledge that I’d had three days and still had eleven days left, then getting increasingly reliant on calculations such as “I’ve had 80% but that still leaves 20% which is actually more time left than a normal weekend, hooray!” And then even on the last day, clinging to hours and counting them down. “Think how much I did between 2pm and 4pm. And I’ve got til 8pm til I need to go to bed! Plenty of time…”

Now I do the same with time off work as well. All this week, in the quieter moments, I’ve been doing mental arithmetic to time precisely how much enjoyment I’ve got left in comparison to how much has gone, trying desperately to convince myself that the sneering nastiness of my 7am alarm call on Wednesday is still a long way off. Now, I am realising, it just isn’t. One more sleep and it’ll be tomorrow. And no amount of backwards time counting will get me out of it.

I do it with my age as well. I was born in 1981, which is very handy because I can say to myself that I’ve only actually lived through one entire decade, and therefore simply cannot be a grown up. The whole 1980s can be written off as nothing more than a long run-up to the start of my life. How could I have been expected to achieve as much as my 1979 friends? They’ve had a whole decade more than me! They were there when the 80s started, so they should’ve made something of it! Me? I just had the 90’s, and look what I did! By the time they ended I was at university and everything! The 79ers? They weren’t even at secondary school after their first full decade!

I think it might just be the stupidest thing I’ve ever written, but being born in 1981 really does give me some comfort. I won’t hit thirty until 2011. Not only is this actually three years off, but it is in an entirely new decade and therefore seems even further off. 2011 is so far in the distance that it just can’t actually ever arrive. 2011? Ah, we’ll all be dead by then. It’s miles away. Tomorrow, my 1979 friends are going to be 30 next year. Next year.

And every time they approach a milestone, it will be there looming on their horizon for years in advance. There’s no new decade to cast the illusion that it’s far away. I don’t know what the marital problem was that caused a four year delay from my parents getting hitched to having me. But whatever it was, I am grateful. Unless it’s hereditary…

My album of the year (for I am quite the music critic…) was John Mayer’s “Continuum.” It has a song on it called “Stop this train” which contains these lyrics.

Stop this train
I wanna get off
And go home again
I can’t take the speed it’s moving in
I know I can
But honestly, won’t someone stop this train?

Don’t know how else to say it
Don’t want to see my parents go
So I play the numbers game
To find a way to say that life has just begun

I don’t like quoting song lyrics, because they make me cringe. I have done so here not because I think they’re life affirming, but because I just need to explain my relief that I’m not the only one who’d like to sit time down over a nice dinner and see what kind of arrangement we can come to about slowing things down a bit. I’d probably burn his vegetables just to illustrate my point.

The song carries on to explain that it is both impossible and unwise to get off the train. But I’m not too keen on that bit, since it doesn’t allow me to wallow in my own opinions.

But just to hear that someone else is as ludicrously self-absorbed as I am, who contemplates time itself coming to heel at his command, and yet still has enough gumption to make a record, is an enormous relief.

And it is surely no coincidence that John Mayer turned 30 this year…

Happy New Year all.

Rick

Despite being about to move house, the thought of venturing into town and joining the eighteen billion other people thronging Market Street in search of a deal still doesn’t appeal.

I should really be taking advantage. As well as purchasing the house itself, we need pretty much everything necessary to fill it, and now is probably the best time to snap up a bargain. I need just about every item of furniture for every room. We have relied on Tamsin’s parents hand-me-downs for about as long as we can stomach it. The sofas are so old that Joseph slept on the long one in that stable.

And yet I always find it a bit suspicious that I can walk into DFS and bag a sofa for £200 that cost £1,400 on Christmas Eve. That sounds less like a bargain and more like a misprint. Why would anyone ever buy a sofa at full price? And why do DFS go so mad so quickly? They are doing to sofas what Nick Clegg so stridently doesn’t want to do with nuclear disarmament - showing all our cards at once! Why not go down from £1,400 to, say, £1,000? Someone would buy it, even if they knew it’d come down some more. Anyone pathologically insane enough to be out shopping at 6am on Boxing Day will buy anything at all with a price crossed out with a big black marker. Anything. At. All. Stick a day-old donner kebab in front of them, cross out £2.50 and put £1.99 and they’d snap it up like a Faberge Egg for a fiver. I saw them on the news last night. Running into Primark at the crack of dawn. The sad fact is that I really do believe they’d sprint straight past a bus load of burning schoolchildren just to be the first to buy a knitted purple cardigan at 70% off.

My reluctance to dive into sales mayhem is only partly to do with fear of crowds and the people in them. It’s also because I am very risk averse when it comes to anything to do with the buying and selling of property, and of course anything I buy for the house is inextricably linked to me having to buy the house itself.

One of the main reasons I am not trundling around town like a retail lemming is because I’m still convinced that something will go wrong with this house purchase of our’s. Nationwide seem reluctant to issue us with a mortgage offer despite being in possession of our passports and wage-slips for enough time to fraudulently create six dozen versions of me. My solicitor has gone AWOL, and the sellers are twitchier than a bird-spotting convention tripping over a dodo nest.

I am convinced that if I buy a sofa, or a dining room table, or four wardrobes, I’ll have nowhere to put them when the whole thing falls through.

I have of course already accumulated a lifetime’s worth of needless guff over the past couple of days, under the guise of “Christmas presents.”

I don’t know whether to be happy or sad that, genuinely, I want for very little in this life. It is harder to suggest to loved ones what they should get me than it is to get stuff for them. I wish they’d leave me alone sometimes, I really do.

This, combined with a troublesome impatience which prevents me from waiting for anything and forces me to buy everything I want immediately, has made this Christmas even more difficult than normal for those buying me stuff. And as a result I have received some presents that were really lovely, and others that only social convention prevents me from throwing in the bin without even bothering to look at.

I received a great box set of biographies of every 20th century Prime Minister. That was fab, if a little odd that Bonar Law’s is thicker than Churchill’s. Tam and I got a lovely mirror for the new house (should it ever come). I’d say they were the two highlights. My mum got me everything Jeremy Clarkson has ever committed to paper in his life, which probably means that this blog is going to get even more inappropriate than it is now. And I got the Borat book, which was probably the most offensive thing ever published before I wrote the phrase “burning schoolchildren” above.

One of Tamsin’s gifts to me was a t-shirt with Animal from The Muppets on it, which prompted a friend of mine to comment “She is either calling you an animal, or a muppet.”

I also received a uniquely useless “Plug-in USB illuminated aquarium,” which I will be recycling as a birthday present come the spring. And I got a puzzle which I am utterly incapable of doing. I tried, I really did. But it fell apart in my hands and I just don’t have the necessary brain power to do it back up again.

I do have to go into town later, for the football. I may well venture towards the shops, if only to gawp at the bag-laden masses and try desperately not to become one of them. It’s going to be hard, I know it. I saw a Les Dawson DVD for a fiver on December 22nd in HMV. It’s probably on for a quid now, and it would be a crime not to get involved.

Whatever you’re doing today, I hope it’s fun!

Rick 

Let’s be honest - My Fair Lady is on later, so I’m probably not going to have time to blog.

So let me take this opportunity to wish everyone a very merry Christmas. I hope tomorrow is a happy day for you all.

I am spending the day partly with my family, and partly with some friends. I hope everyone has an enjoyable time.

Rick