Niles’s Blog

A very powerful article in the Guardian today by Francis Beckett

… anyone who voted Labour in 1992 is likely today to have far more in common with
Kennedy than with Blair.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1471845,00.html

DSCF1877
Originally uploaded by dr_nick.

My brother is back from his Everest trip and starting to post his photos to Flickr.

This one’s stunning, as are many of the others. Click the link for his pictures, his write-up of his trip is in my links at the side of the page.

Well. The thing that really strikes me about this general election mularkey is how long it’s going on. Our office is helping to run the campaign in about 12 constituencies, intensively in 5, and less hands-on in the rest. We’ve written, designed, printed, bundled and delivered hundreds of thousands of leaflets. Barely a day goes past without another huge delivery from the commercial printers as well as the mechanic getting fed up with how many calls he has to make to look at our long suffering in-house machines. The postal votes are being delivered this weekend, the first lots of election addresses have been with the Royal Mail for a week or more and in many cases are already appearing on the doorstep. Hundreds of posters have gone out, stakes are being put up in gardens.

And the handy little ticker on the website says there are still 13 days to go.

Bah.

I left my car in the bingo hall car park, and forgot that they lock it early on the first few days of the week. So I got locked in again, which gave me the choice of pulling an all-nighter in the office or going to kip on a mate’s floor.

I figured if I stayed in the office, I’d have a rare chance to get ahead with some printing. Target letters come out of the laser printer at a rate of about 1,000 an hour, and we have many tens of thousands to get through. 24 hours solid printing won’t hurt; I can kip for a few hours in my car, drive home and have tomorrow off.

In an idle moment, I went around to snap a few pictures of the office for Flickr’s General Election pool.

Last week, I had two days of environmental activity. Members of a scrutiny committee on the council went to visit Hockerton Housing Project just outside Southwell. Five families live on a 25-acre plot. Their houses are built into the earth. They grow most of their own food, including some livestock; they collect rainwater in a lake and reservoir and get electricity from PV cells and wind-turbines. It was an impressive real-life demonstration of sustainable living. The families involved seemed very happy, and the homes were really beautiful. Not many people can readily go the whole hog, but we can all take things away from developments like this and implement as much as we can.

The following day, Charles Kennedy was underling Lib Dem environment policy with a visit to a country park in Leicestershire, so I spent the day wandering around a field carrying a 4ft correx board boasting ‘The Real Alternative.’ See this picture? It’s me holding the board in the middle. It was very, very cold, but given how warm it had been the day before I had decided not to bother with a coat. Mistake. By midday, the sun had not broken through the low clouds. 12:10 and they were prizing the board out of my dead, cold hands.