So, a few weeks ago, I got a couple of text messages from friends, fiancés and colleagues who had gone through Canning Circus on a bus and noticed a bedsheet with writing on it hung over a baclony.

So I went to take a picture myself.

It’s a little tricky to read, so here’s a closeup:

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I think the banner was there in response to a house over the way that had gone a little bit mad with Tory correx boards that dotted all over their house and wall.

Anyway, I thought it would be nice to leave a proper Lib Dem correx board in our usual dayglo orange, so I tried to get in. They’re in a really nice converted cigar factory, and the blank plate of doorbells didn’t give you much of a clue which flat was where in the building.

So, I’m afraid, I rang bells at random. I hate doing that. I don’t like trying to get into flats even to deliver leaflets – because frankly, if you ring people’s bells at random and say, “Hi, I’m here to deliver leaflets” – and someone lets you in – why bother having buzzers and locks at all?

So I spoke to about 6 people before finally getting the flat who said they were the ones with the terrace and the banner, and they buzzed me in. When I walked closer to their inside front door, if you see what I mean, I was met in the corridor by a man who explained that it was not his terrace, but his neighbours, and he pointed out the right door, and then closed his own door.

I knocked the right door, but no response. Which left me standing in a locked corridor with a Lib Dem board but no pen and paper. I couldn’t go back to the car to get something to write with because the door would close behind me, and I didn’t want to try my luck at getting through the buzzer maze twice.

So I just left the board balanced against the front door, hoping whoever’s door it was wouldn’t find it too freaky the board had just turned up.

When I got home, I could cross reference the full address with the electoral register, and write to the people who really lived there, so I popped a letter in the post thanking them for their banner, urging them to use the stakeboard to augment it, and asking them to let us have it back when the election is done. (I’m a skinflint. But those boards are £15 each, and can only be bought in packs of 10. Nottingham Lib Dems only own 2, which the central party kindly gave us as part of the Green Tax Switch campaign)

Imagine my delight, when, a few days later, I get tagged in the same letter on Facebook. I was half expecting it – by and large the people who live in flats like that are definitely part of the digital revolution. What I wasn’t quite expecting was that the people who lived in the flat were friends of a new member in a completely different part of town who we recruited a few weeks ago. Small world.

If you’re my friend on facebook, you might be able to see it at this link. Not very sure how privacy settings work.

Once I’d been tagged in the photo, I commented on it, letting my social networking mugshot show up on the facebook page.

But if that wasn’t cool enough, the next stage in the story is that I was out canvassing this week, and someone who’d read the letter on Facebook recognised me on the doorstep. Small world indeed!

I had to do a double take driving up the Mansfield Road the other day – the City Council has dug up huge swathes of Woodthorpe Park leaving massive tracts of ploughed ground all around the football pitches on the bit nearest the road. What on earth are they doing, I wondered?

Then I remembered discussions with City Council Parks staff about plans for King George V Park in my own ward, and I’m pretty sure I know what they are doing.

They’re planting wildflower meadows.

This is not a new thing – they did it to my primary school when I was there in 1988. They weedkill a spot of grass, rotivate it to turn the earth up, and then sow wild flower seeds into the space.

They also did it to a roundabout in Chesterfield while I worked up there, and what I learned is that during the early phases, communication with local people is absolutely vital. It looks dreadful for the first few weeks. Then it looks untidy and overgrown, and everyone who sees it has real concerns about what the heck is going on.

Then, however, the flowers start to come out, and suddenly it all makes sense. The flowers look fantastic, and should be in bloom by the summer.

Come the autumn, all the Council has to do is essentially harvest the seeds, leaving enough onsite for the plants to come up again.

So, it looks scary now, but it really is a Good Thing. The wildflower meadows look lovely – particularly by the second summer. They allow for informal play. They’re excellent for biodiversity, wildlife and insects – in particular our troubled bee population that needs all the help it can get. And – whisper it – they’re cheap to maintain – they don’t even need mowing like the huge expanses of grass they replace.

So far I’ve seen the council preparing the ground in Woodthorpe Park and a little triangle of land in the Basford ward, near St Leo’s church, on the ring road. But more are planned across the city.

The scary thing is that the parks staff have told residents in my ward that the KGV Park will get one of the largest patches of meadow anywhere in the city. What they’ve done on Woodthorpe is already huge – so what they are planning for KGV must be enormous!

It’s my foot. It’s OK, as feet go – you’re not getting the worst of it in a photo, as it’s real downside is the smell, not what it looks like. It has a tough, tough toenail on my big toe that is increasingly difficult to cut through, even using my father’s cast-off, heavy-duty chiropody shears. They are not quite as blistered as perhaps they ought to be at this stage in a campaign in which I am foot-soldier. There’s something funky going on underneath my toes that leads to dead skin sloughing off periodically, and, as I said, they smell bad.

And you didn’t need to see them on my blog, and you didn’t need to read the description either.

Any more than you needed to read in the Daily Mail about the Prime Minister’s wife’s feet. I’m not linking the story because I don’t want to encourage them. The story is a disgrace – Sarah Brown went to a beautiful Hindu temple which required her to remove her shoes. The Daily Mail took a photo of her feet, then blew it up to enormous size and criticised the location of her little toe. Which no-one would have taken the slightest notice of if they hadn’t printed it in a big close up.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, they then speculated on whether the Prime Minister’s missus’s toe problem is enough to give the Leader of the Opposition’s wife the edge.

[S]he unveiled a rather unsightly problem on her left foot – her little toe and fourth toe crossed over one another.

She has been placed in direct competition with David Cameron’s wife Samantha, and this will do little to boost her credential’s against ‘SamCam’.

In fact, it’s the kind of sight that will immediately put the Prime Minister’s wife into second place behind the Tory leader’s wife.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?? What the hell do these people think general elections are about? This story is an absolute disgrace!

There are any number of reasons why the Prime Minister’s wife has a food that looks like that. She could have been born with it. She could have spent her life cramming her feet into the kind of stupid shoe that the Daily Mail thinks is what women ought to wear. She might have had some hideous foot accident that left her lucky to have what she has or she could have spent her childhood in painful surgery to get as far as having nothing worse than a slight overlapping toe issue.

In any case, IT’S NONE OF OUR BUSINESS.

IT’S NOT REMOTELY RELEVANT. TO ANYTHING.

NO-ONE WITH HALF A BRAIN SHOULD CARE.

IT HAS NO BEARING ON POLITICS, THE ELECTION, CURRENT AFFAIRS, WHO RUNS THE COUNTRY OR ANYTHING – ANYTHING -ANYTHING OTHER THAN WHAT SARAH BROWN CHOOSES TO PUT ON HER FEET.

AAAAARGH!

EDIT – Cllr Foster has had a slight aneurysm and has been removed to a place where he is not a danger to himself or others. He will be allowed back at the blog once the frothing at the mouth subsides.

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!

Interesting post by @Cllr Tim highlighting the frustration that public service workers often have when trying to run a council service that isn’t the most popular.

“I pay your wages, mate” is one of the things you hear. One of the things I get in casework letters is the demand that someone should be sacked for something – either in a case that has gone wrong (and councillors often get that because we can be the last line of recourse) or sometimes even when council staff have in fact been following policy but it has still lead to an outcome the correspondent doesn’t want. “I didn’t get what I want, therefore you are wasting my taxpayer money, therefore someone should be fired.” “We all pay business rates so we deserve something in return.”

Why I’m writing this though is the key difference between public and private enterprise, and that’s when public money is wasted or spent unwisely, it’s always publicised. So the next thing you always get when trying to explain that some demanded scheme is unaffordable right now is the litany of whatever’s been in the Evening Post recently as an example of wasteful spending. Half the time they’re right. It has been a waste to lose money to Iceland (although it may eventually come back); it was wasteful to pay off 3 successive Chief Execs with huge golden goodbyes; and was it really the best use of the public purse to import granite from China to pave Market Square?

Another one I’ve had recently was that money spent on cycle lanes was a complete waste, because “no one ever cycles round here.” Trying to explain I’d just spent an afternoon at a meeting with Pedals, the local cycling pressure group, and the PCT, who think it would be great if more people cycled – fell on deaf ears. “Would you cycle here?” Well, you have me banged to rights there, as I still can’t manage the whole two wheel thing.

You can betcha bottom dollar that there’s waste going on in the private sector too, they’re just less closely examined, and have less of a responsibility to tell us about it when things go wrong.

Today was budget day – there are 101 stories I could write, including how every Labour councillor voted to close Beechdale Library, but the one bit I had a bit of fun with today was Labour’s intention to introduce a charge for replacement wheelie bins.

If you are unfortunate enough to lose your wheelie bin in the next financial year, there will be a charge for a new one. At the moment, the first one you lose is free, but the council charge you if you lose any more than that. But as we all know, there are 50 ways to lose your wheelie bin. And we know a song about that, don’t we, boys and girls?

I had asked on twitter if anyone could help me out filling in the rest of the song. My example of a way to lose a wheelie bin was… arson attack, Jack.

My friends on Twitter came up with the following:

• Ripped off the lid, Sid,
• Flood swept it away, Fay
• Rolled down the street, Pete

And tossing the idea around in group we also tried

• It’s just knackered, Saghir Akhtar

… which doesn’t really work but got the biggest laugh.

That’s all a bit of fun, but the main idea here – that Labour will charge for replacement bins – is still a bad idea.  There are many ways you can lose you bin, including theft and arson, so many of the people who will end up paying the charge will themselves be the victims of crime who are penalised again by the Council.

One of the things that irks me most is that one of the standard dances in the budget speech is that the Tories propose a charge for the collection of bulky waste, and the Labour group knock it down saying that if you charge for what is currently free, you will force innocent householders to become fly-tippers overnight. In fact, the City Council currently has some interesting pilots to see if there are even better ways of dealing with bulky waste than the free collections – for example there’s a pilot in Aspley where there’s a weekly bulky collection instead of an on-demand service.

Labour didn’t seem to see that the same argument with bulky waste will probably apply to wheelie bins: if you charge, there will be more fly-tipping.

They’re also looking at some unhelpful ideas like not charging benefit claimants, or maybe not charging people with crime numbers.  That will have some unhelpful consequences: recorded crime would rise in the second instance, in the first, the Council might even create a black market scheme where people in work steal the bins of benefit claimants, because they can get a free one when the workers can’t.

All in all, a crazy scheme that should just be, erm, binned.

It’s now public knowledge that Barry Horne will be joining Sally Anne Johnson as both shake the dust of Nottingham City Council off their shoes.

I have been a city councillor only six years and a bit, and in my time on the Council, we have had a small army of senior management leave the authority, not least three chief executives and one deputy CX.

Now that these two senior managers have joined the club of ex-managers, only one corporate director remains in broadly the same post he was in when I started.

Perhaps more curious: in all this time, we’ve had just one council leader.

Oh, three things make me wince about this doctoring of a billboard from m’friend Milliennum Dome, Elephant.

Two issues for the Tories, and one for us.

The first for the Tories – well obviously this terrible billboard has spawned all manner of imitations, with the help of mydavidcameron.com. Just too easy to parody. And perhaps it’s just me, but the willingness of people to subvert the message says a little something about the mood of the country, no? Very few people actually want a Conservative government, even if countless thousands are now thoroughly fed up with a Labour one.

The second for the Tories. A white background? Are you mad? Did you learn nothing from the 2005 campaign?

It’s just far too easy to graffiti!

All that white space, right next to a controversial statement, is pretty much an incitement to cause criminal damage, don’t you think?

At least the last time we did billboards, ours had black backgrounds. Anyone wanting to graffiti them had at least to go home to fetch a pot of white paint first.

Must remember to ask m’friend Duncan whether that was an intention of design when they were created.

Anyway, finally, the wincing point for the Lib Dems:

Our funky new colour – chosen apparently because campaign staff responsible for designing our leaflets wanted a wider range of colours to choose from without creating the sort of leaflet that has occasionally been branded “an explosion in a paint factory” – our new colour is EXACTLY the same as one that appears on all the Tory posters. Stick to the hues of gold, eh chaps?

The writer of this story in The Mirror has clearly never heard of my ancestral home Leominster, represented by Bill Wiggin MP:

A heartless Tory was branded a disgrace yesterday for calling thousands of Cadbury’s workers fighting for their jobs “whingers”.

Mp Bill Wiggin, who went to Eton with David Cameron, said staff should stop moaning about the Kraft takeover which could lead to huge redundancies.

The ex-banker, who has a Cadbury’s factory in his constituency, said they should just knuckle down and get on with it if they wanted to stay employed.

The Leamington MP said he had heard workers complaining about the US firm’s takeover. He said: “I worry that by sending out such negative signals it puts people’s jobs more at risk.

It later refers to Warwickshire, so is presumably also confusing Cadbury factories. Cadbury do have a plant in the Leominster constituency, at Hope under Dinmore on the A49.

EDIT – have added in the link. And “Let them eat Flake” *is* a pretty good headline, so I’ll give them that.