Monthly Archives: April 2010

My election article in Nottingham Evening Post

I’ve been asked to write a few pieces for the Nottingham Evening Post as a political kinda person who isn’t actually standing for election this time.  The brief was to try and be wryly amusing and illuminate some of the more arcane bits of political life for the wider readership.

My first is in today’s Post and, erm, well, doesn’t manage the wryly amusing bit terribly well, and clearly I went over the word count, as they’ve cut two bits, including the one that  makes the headline they chose make sense.

Here’s what the article looked like before the subs deleted lines and words they hadn’t heard before!

On the Campaign trail: Lib Dem army of ‘old ladies’

So the election has been called. Will that make a difference to party workers up and down the county?

Probably not. It’s not like the news of the election will come as a surprise to the party wonks workers who are planning elections.

We’ve been working hard trying to communicate our various messages for some months. I know the Lib Dems in the city have been knocking on doors and delivering leaflets at full capacity for some time – and my covert surveillance of the internet reveals that Tory and Labour activists have been boasting about their teams and the numbers of people doing likewise for both other parties.

In some cases, the Lib Dems have less money and fewer people to go around than other parties, so then, we have to concentrate our efforts on parts of constituencies, and on spending more time to knock on as many doors as possible.

There are some constituencies near Nottingham – including Ashfield where Geoff Hoon decided to stand down before he was defeated – where there is a real chance of the next MP being a Liberal Democrat.

And the scale of work they have to get through to convince enough people to vote yellow next time is terrifying. They will be people working full time, day in, day out to do all that is necessary. They need to recruit a team of people able to deliver 40,000 leafets in a week. They will be writing thousands of letters and making thousands of phone calls. There will be a small army of little old ladies sitting in a room somewhere stuffing letters into envelopes.

This is work that began long before Gordon finally went to see Her Maj, and will continue long after polling day. The campaign to get a whole constituency to vote Liberal Democrat is an enormous undertaking that takes years and years. General elections are just a little blip in the middle.

I’m very worried about the prospect of writing publicly about the election either in the paper or here on the blog after an incident in the last local elections where me shooting my mouth off ended up being quoted in Labour target letters as reasons not to vote Liberal Democrat. I’d recommend everyone votes Liberal Democrat!

Tweets on 2010-04-07

  • Phew, dodged a bullet there. By the time I returned BBC World Service's call, @alexwilcock had volunteered his services. #
  • @tom_geraghty Easy but tight deadline. Phone 0115 9154938 – they'll complete form with you over phone and post it out for signature in reply to tom_geraghty #
  • Live in Nottingham City and want a postal vote? Phone 0115 915 4938 and city council elections staff will arrange it for you. #
  • Mark Pack explains about the wash-up and the #debill http://ldv.org.uk/18721 (@lilianedwards, @owenblacker) #
  • @tom_geraghty Not Notts, just City of Nottingham. Elsewhere in county, people have to get in touch with their own district council. in reply to tom_geraghty #
  • @owenblacker if we lose all our seats, we're not going to be in any position to do anything about farcical process… #
  • Hmmm, my internets seem to have stopped working. And they haven't even passed #debill yet! #
  • Lord, has Huw Edwards been outside 10 Downing Street solidly for the last 12 hours? #
  • Did @lordbonkers contribute to the questions on University Challenge? "Which 3 letter north Shropshire town…" #

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Tweets on 2010-04-06

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Daily View 2×2: 6 April 2010 – they’re off!

Good morning and welcome to Daily View on this, the first day of the General Election.

As if we hadn’t all been at war footing for weeks anyway.

In history on April 6th, in 1869 celluloid was first patented, paving the way for commercial photography and cinematography. Every Youtube video you watch during the campaign will be thanks to the technology and techniques first pioneered on celluloid over 100 years ago.

On this day in 1895, Oscar Wilde was arrested for attempting to book into Chris Grayling’s B&B; in 1896, the first modern Olympic Games is held. It’s the day in 1917 when the United States declared war on Germany and the day in 1930 when Ghandi began the Salt Satyagraha which ultimately led to independence for India.

Today Rory Bremner turns 49 and Mylene Klaas turns 32 – my age.

2 Big Stories

Gordon Brown triggers general election

Most helpfully, the fact that Gordon Brown was planning to head off to see her Maj today to dissolve Parliament and trigger a general election was leaked to all the papers far enough in advance that they could run stories today, and not have to play catchup tomorrow.

Here’s the Guardian, who have also been leaked enough snippets of manifesto to get their clothespeg ready:

A draft of the manifesto seen by the Guardian pledges that an unprecedented fourth-term Labour government would be “bolder about the role of state intervention in markets” and deliver sweeping constitutional change. Failing police forces could be taken over by their neighbours under one radical proposal.

You’d have thought they wouldn’t want to mention the fact that there are any failing police forces after 13 years of glorious Labour rule. Or that any further constitutional change was necessary.

Rise of Lib Dems is worry for Cameron
For The Independent John Curtice reports:

The Liberal Democrats have edged up a point too since Vince Cable was widely thought to have emerged ahead in Channel 4′s Chancellors’ debate. The party is now at the 20 per cent mark for the first time since its party conference last September. Nick Clegg’s troops now look as though they will enter the election campaign in almost as strong a position as they started the 2005 contest.

Now all we have to do is spend the next four weeks making Cameron’s worry a reality.

2 Must-Read Blog Posts

What are other Liberal Democrat bloggers saying? Here are two posts that have caught the eye from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:

  • Neil Stockley reveals the Lib Dem campaign narrative

    • The Lib Dems are using the archetype of “stopping the rot at the top”, inviting voters to cast a plague on both their houses – “they’re just as bad as each other”. This is the same narrative that the Liberals used in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1979 general election campaign, for instance, David Steel framed Labour and the Tories as “two Conservative parties”, one a failed government, the other a reactionary alternative.

  • Campaign Digest

    • – From the creator of Lib Dem Voice comes this handy little website that pays attention to the general election e-campaign, so that the rest of us can concentrate on getting leaflets out.

Spotted any other great posts in the last day from blogs that aren’t on the aggregator? Do post up a comment sharing them with us all.

Sign-up for LDV’s Daily Email

Don’t have time to read all of Lib Dem Voice? Keep missing the Golden Dozen? Well now you can have Lib Dem Voice headlines with cickable links sent directly to your inbox. To sign up just enter your email address here, tick the list you wish to you join, and click on ‘Subscribe’.

Make TODAY the day you donate to LDV’s Election Appeal

Lib Dem Voice is running a special appeal to raise funds for five of the party’s very best general elections candidates – all of whom have a real chance of winning but need your help NOW to ensure they do win. Click here to make a donation TODAY to help the Lib Dems build a fairer Britain.

How Authoritarian is your MP? Find out TODAY

Lib Dem Voice has put together 10 key Parliamentary votes to let you see how liberal or authoritarian your MP is. Click here, and just enter your postcode or the name of an MP or constituency, to find out their score. Pleased or appalled by what you find out about your MP? Please use the Twitter and Facebook links on the page for each MP to let others know how liberal or authoritarian your MP is. Here’s the link again: http://rank.libdemvoice.org/

Alick Rowe

Jonathan Calder has been writing about William Mayne, who, in the words of his obituary was “an award-winning children’s writer whose career was ruined when he was jailed for sex attacks on children”

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

EDIT 4.i.11

Since I wrote this, I googled the name again, and a set of photos from his funeral showed up. As I write, pretty much everything in that flickr account seems to be about the funeral in Thailand, despite only two of the photos being in the official set.

Sourdough continues

So, this year, apart from odd days away at Conference or in Scotland, I’ve made almost all of our bread, keeping alive a sourdough starter made following S John Ross’s starter page and from various other sources since. My first steps are here.

Since the diet began, I’ve had to cut back on bread quite significantly. You know, it’s been one of my biggest learning points, just how many calories are in bread, pasta and rice. I’ve been pooh-poohing for years any dieters who talk about cutting back on carbs, assuming them to have been misunderstanding how Atkins and other high protein diets work. In fact, it seems you barely have to blink at a packet of rice to have 300 calories on your plate before you even start adding the nice stuff.

But I am still eating some bread, and so I am still making bread.

My parents, who have made all their own bread since time immemorial, use a Kenwood Chef to batch make 48 rolls, which are then baked and frozen and defrosted as necessary. I haven’t been doing this because a) my tiny freezer is full b) no Kenwood chef, and without it, that’s an awful lot of dough and c) I’d get bored of rolls!

What I have been doing is making a huge variety of loaves. With just a few bags of different flour, and a few store cupboard ingredients and a few interesting baking tins, you can have an almost infinite variety of different loaves and rolls.

The early version of the recipe made an awful lot of washing up, so I’ve made some simple changes, and changed my tools a bit.

I no longer wake the starter up by pouring it into a bowl. It’s plenty enough just to bring it back to room temperature in the jar it lives in, and top up the same jar.

When I’m ready, I pour 2 cups of starter/sponge, 3 cups of flour, some sugar, salt and EVOO into the breadmaker I pretty much forgot about when starting down the sourdough route. The breadmaker makes a dough and lets it rise for an hour, then beeps. Halfway through the initial knead you have to check the dough – if it looks like crumbs, it wasn’t wet enough, so you stop the machine, add more water, and start it again. When it’s ready, I give the dough another knead and shape it for the final loaf – in the banneton for a round loaf, knocked square and rolled for a ciabatta type loaf, or divided into two, stretched and rolled for baguettes, or divided into 12 for rolls. Allow to rise for as long as necessary – and this time has shortened as the sourdough mix has got stronger. Now it can fully raise a loaf overnight – even if you leave it in the fridge for a cool, retarded rise.

Bake for 30-40 minutes at 200 degrees. I think I get a better rise out of the mix when the fan in the fan oven is off, and when the oven has definitely properly preheated. I almost think a cooler oven is better.

In terms of variety – there are all the exciting different sorts of shapes, from challa to fougasse. Most supermarkets have a variety of flours, and we’ve had wholemeal, granary, malthouse flours, always mixed with strong white flour. Then there are different grains, like spelt and rye. Then there’s additives: spices, herbs, sundried tomatoes, other fruit and veg, yoghurt, tomato purée, butter and egg yolks for brioche, whole eggs and spices for hot cross buns. Then there’s coatings – eggwash, large grain salt, flour, oats, more herbs and spices.

Slightly misshapen sourdough batons that kinda rose sitting on the boiler. Today's bread is wholemeal sourdough rolls and the soup is hearty italian vegetable. Tomorrow's bread will be sourdough granary baguettes

As I said before, it is possible to make bread without shopping, but I have bought the following things to make breadmaking easier and more fun:

Some books

And some things I might be buying soon

Tweets on 2010-04-05

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Tweets on 2010-04-04

  • @Meryl_F they're def offering parties and recruiting hostesses on their website. Hard to buy direct. Expensive tho! in reply to Meryl_F #
  • Plenty of leaflethog done for Derby. Now back to the office to return the rubber bands. #
  • Ooh, they've destroyed the sonic screwdriver. Now they'll actually have to write better stories. #
  • Interesting that when the world goes wrong, they phone Jodrell Bank and Patrick Moore. #
  • Tsk, the Doctor's going to get points on his driving licence fog twocking a fire engine and driving whilst phoning. #
  • @adamrio You're talking about a different Matt Smith than all the Brits, right? in reply to adamrio #
  • Right. Pudding for tomorrow. Do I try something else or try to make another gallette des rois? #
  • Ah. Another missed opportunity for an early night. #

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Pudding Club: Galette des Rois

A number of us are going to visit our friends for an Easter weekend lunch, so a big pudding was called for.

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.

02042010708 Attempt yesterday to make a gallette des rois. Didn't rise and the filling leaked.

For my second attempt, I tried a different shape.

03042010713 03042010714 03042010715

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:

Tweets on 2010-04-03

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