On Saturday afternoon the party’s Federal Executive is meeting to discuss how the party should handle the Parliamentary situation. There’s no pre-set, universally supported answer to this so the FE’s discussion is going to be meaningful and important – which means that if you want to influence what the party does, now is the time to let the FE know.

Because many members of the Federal Executive are scattered around the country – sleeping, travelling back from election counts, making their way to London and so on – the FE members may be hard to get hold of and many will not necessarily be checking their emails frequently.

Therefore, in order to ensure that people have a chance to send in a view that will be read before the meeting, we’ve agreed with the Party President Ros Scott a special email address – balancedparliament@libdemvoice.org which can be used to email in your views. A member of staff will collate all the messages and make sure that they are drawn to the attention of Ross and also reported to the members of the FE in time for their discussion.

A few tips when emailing this address:
- Given the pressures of time, short and concise messages are likely to be more effective than 12 pages essays
- As with letter writing or lobbying more generally, saying in full who you are and where you’re from is likely to add to the impact of the message
- Please send your message as soon as possible

Listen in if you’d like to know what we’ll all be getting up to next week.

And don’t forget I’ll be on BBC Radio Nottingham from 1201am on Friday, 8th May for their results programme.

This means that when my friends sit on their phones, or put them in their handbags unlocked or leave them where their toddlers can get hold of them, it’s me that receives the call or text message.

I can’t tell you how many blank texts and silent calls I’ve had as a result. Strange long messages where all you can hear is muffled chat. Phone calls on Christmas morning from Lib Dem campaigners talking to their mothers. Pre-verbalisations from very small people who’ve learned how to use phones before they’ve learned to talk. To bowdlerise a phrase from the King, text messages straight from your arse.

So here’s my top tip. Please put a fake number in your phone book ahead of the top named person there. A short number that won’t terminate in a call or a text message if it’s dialled by accident.

And all the Alexes, Anns and Abigails you know will thank you.

I thought they were a top secret scary organisation of highly sceptical people, and that I’d need an invite or something before getting involved, so I was a bit nervous about approaching them with material. Turns out their lead guy is really nice and welcoming and was really happy to have stuff sent to him. So if you’ve been pondering contributing, go for it!

The other thing to record, I suppose, was that I tried to do that speaking from notes thing – plan roughly what you say, then sketch the notes out, then speak. I’m not very good at that. I prefer to write things out in full then do an almost cold-read of that. I have found – from Librivox – I’m reasonably good at putting meaning into a text on a cold read. One day, I’d love to have a go at an autocue. Mind you even if I could do that, I’d still have a face for radio!

Hopefully there’ll be another piece from me on Pod Delusion before the general election concludes on the ins and outs of how Polling Day works.

For example, the smoking ban means that the drains need cleaning more often. The reason? Much of the smoking now happens outside. More cigarette butts are dropped into the gulleys than were before, and those butts fill the drains faster than you’d think. And, also, apparently, don’t rot down as fast as you’d think either.

A recent episode of QI talked about how the Chinese civilisation developed porcelain and fine china very early on meant that they didn’t need to develop glass to hold hot or dangerous liquids and consequently didn’t discover lenses, which meant their scholars all had to stop reading in their 30s and 40s, which had a repercussion to their entire society. Fascinating.

So I’m intrigued to find out all the various ramifications of the ash cloud from an Iceland volcano that’s stopped all commercial air travel into the UK and most of Northern Europe.

There’s the very obvious. No travel. My brother probably didn’t get to a wedding in Dublin. Thousands of returning package holiday makers are stranded in accommodation that isn’t being needed by thousands of holiday makers who can’t depart. And Whitney Housten, who was in Nottingham yesterday, is having to make her way to Ireland by ferry.

Then there’s some slightly stretchier but still obvious ones: the Channel Islands have run out of blood for medical reasons, so the the RNLI are helping out. Lots of our fruit and veg is air freighted, so we might have few weeks when bananas and oranges are unobtainable or expensive. Apparently, a lot of our cut flowers come from Africa, and the bottom has fallen out of that market. And there’s been a massive saving in CO2 emissions.

There was also the reports of the delay to the Polish commemorations. One air disaster has devastated the top of Polish political society, and another air incident has delayed the state funerals because other world leaders cannot get their to pay their respects.

Once the airlines are allowed to fly again, there will be a huge adjustment to the schedules to try and get things back on track. It was complicated enough to do that after the various strikes, with a need for empty flights to get the planes back in the right places. This BBC story gives an indication of the complexity – I’d be intrigued to be a fly on the wall of offices full of people trying to sort out the mess of getting the crews and planes back in roughly the right place. It will be weeks before all the schedules are working properly again.

But these are all still fairly foreseeable consequences of the three day stoppage of air travel. There must be some really weird ones out there too – so what have you heard?

Oh, one last thing – this ash cloud is all but invisible from the ground and doesn’t appear to stop the sunlight getting through. I bet some people are having a hard time believing there’s actually anything up there at all. Has anyone seen any nice conspiracy theories about why the authorities REALLY want to ground all commercial planes?

- Taken at 8:24 PM on April 08, 2010 – uploaded by ShoZu

That infelicitous phrase and the issue of whether an author’s works can continue to stand as worthy in their own right when the author has become linked with the worst possible of crimes have just reminded me of my own brief entanglement with similarly career-ruined writer Alick Rowe.

Alick got in touch with my school when he was writing a young-adult novel, and a group of high achievers who could spare the time from English classes, me included, got to work with him on a regular basis. He would write a chapter, send it to us, and then meet us as a group to discuss what we thought, and what we thought would happen next. The theme of the story was bullying, which was pretty germane to my school career, although probably what happens in the story is worse than what happened to me at the second of my three secondary schools.

My recollection is that we didn’t much change what he was writing, and I’m not sure how useful the sessions would have been to him.

The timetable of his writing ended up taking us outside of the timetable of school, and the last few chapters ended up being ready in the holidays. And Alick invited the whole group of us from school, boys and girls, to read the last chapters in his flat on Aylestone Hill and then to go out to lunch at what was then, probably, Hereford’s only Italian restaurant, Ristorante Firenze, subsequently closed.

It was this invitation to this stranger’s home that deeply troubled my parents at the time – they had been slightly uncomfortable with us meeting this author at school, but to visit him in the holidays in his own house was a step too far. I was ultimately allowed to go just because of the safety in numbers thing – there were plenty of us invited.

Nothing untoward ever happened. I think in the end I missed my train, or somehow or another way got there late, because I spent hardly any time in his house, and then felt guilty for joining in the expense of the meal out. And when I got there, I ordered my first spaghetti carbonara and was completely fazed by how filling it was – so my abiding memory of the whole thing is my own embarrassment at ordering something I wasn’t able to finish.

The book was finished and published, and is now out of print, but old copies that presumably have been doing the rounds for some time are still available on Amazon. It was called The Panic Wall.

In the time we were in conversations, we covered an awful lot of ground. We learned about his writing career. We spoke about his other books, and I went out to the library and borrowed Boy at the Commercial, his own autobiography. He was also a prolific screenwriter and dramatist and radio playwright – which lead to his retelling of the old anecdote about the amazing possibilities of radio drama over TV: with five cheap sound effects and some story telling, you can describe an enormous lake, fill it with custard, and helicopter in a cherry to drop on top. Doing that on telly would be pretty expensive. While we were meeting, a TV drama that he had written was actually on TV, and it involved some sort of military campaign, because he told us the importance of keeping the MOD onside whilst writing. If you were nice to the Army, apparently, they would help you find character names for your fiction that hadn’t ever been real soldiers who might be offended by what you had written. This was probably Friday on my Mind, for which he won a Welsh BAFTA.

Perhaps his most famous radio play – certainly the one that still gets a regular seasonal outing on BBC Radio 7, is the Sony award-winning “Crisp and Even Brightly” – a hilariously funny piece looking at the carol Good King Wenceslas from the perspective of the Good King’s Secret Service. An extract of that can be read at this website.

A few years after my involvement with Alick, my parents’ fears proved better founded than I thought at the time – and he was caught in flagrante with an underage choirboy. He had long been associated with Hereford Cathedral – as a choirboy himself in the 50s, and with the Cathedral School, and you’d often see him at choral evensong. He had paid for an endowment for the choir. He was arrested, convicted and imprisoned.

I wrote to him in prison, and even had a reply at one point, but I never met him again after 1994. Eventually, presumably after serving out his licence time in the UK, he moved to Thailand. Which. Erm. Seems to be a thing people in his situation do.

He died there on October 30th last year, and had an obituary written about him in the Hereford Times almost a month later.

Further reading

• Wikipedia page – needs quite a bit of work
• A list of his radio plays, plus an obit
• His IMDB page – mostly TV credits, including episodes of Peak Practice and Tripods
• An extract from Crisp and Even Brightly

This Eric Lanlard recipe is fairly simple and should look a little spectacular. Basically shop bought puff pastry with a frangipan and rum filling. It’s a traditional French recipe which is eaten around Epiphany. So only a little late for us.

I had two goes at making it.

For the first, it was ever so slightly burnt, had a disappointing rise, and the filling leaked out.

For my second attempt, I tried a different shape.

I still had a bit of leakage, but hopefully, most of the frangipane is still inside the giant pillow of puff pastry. It came out of the oven enormous, but sadly sank quite quickly. Just how we’re going to transport that to Long Eaton tomorrow is another question!

Frangipane: 125gr each of caster sugar, butter and ground almonds, creamed and with three eggs beaten in, along with a dash of dark rum. Roll the pastry into two squares the same size. Place a ring on the first and pour the frangipane in. Egg wash around the frangipane and remove the ring. Put the second piece of pastry on top and seal tightly around the filling. Score a pattern on the top – sunrise or scallop or leaves.

Previously on Pudding Club:

- Taken at 9:56 PM on April 02, 2010 – uploaded by ShoZu