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.

Tuesday, sunny and warm.

Wednesday, tipping it down pretty much all day.

Thursday, sunny and warm.

Now, guess which days I’m in the office and, which days I’m out leafletting.

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.

Create your own Tory poster

In case you were wondering, an article on what tactical unwind is…

Create your own Tory poster

In case you were wondering, an article on what tactical unwind is…

Just random browsing, came across a lengthy and learned essay about Tom Lehrer, and one quote particularly struck me:

Another pervasive change in this country has been the decline of literacy. Admittedly, one always used to hear that a picture was worth a thousand words, but that was before they devalued the word.

Something else to go and look at, if you’ve a yen, and you missed it when it was on the mass media because you were busy with an ALMO meeting or Group AGM: the Lib Dem party election broadcast. Marvel at how familiar the vox pops look.

The group AGM has serious consequences for me: a change of committees, and a lot more responsibility next municipal year. Eeep.

P4100046
Originally uploaded by nilexuk.

High up on Sneinton Boulevard, there’s this reclaimed dragon sculpture. One of the things I photographed trying to get geographs on http://www.geograph.co.uk this afternoon.

Didn’t see it, didn’t hear much about it, but there were extracts from it on the 10pm news on Radio 4.

The Prince and the new Duchess have very good taste in hymns. Immortal, invisible (OK, not bad); Love Divine to tune Blaenwern (truly lovely, but avoid sacharine tune Love Divine, and as for the suggestion of singing it to Hyfrydol! — the less said about that the better. It’s a lovely tune, but not suitable for Love Divine); and Praise My Soul the King of Heaven (not great, but a bit high).

Me, I’d go for Lead us, heavenly father, lead us, and possibly The King of Love, My Shepherd Is.

If I only get one hymn at my funeral, however, I want ‘O Sacred head, sore wounded’ to the Passion Chorale with the twiddly Bach arrangement. I’ve been searching around the net to find a reasonable downloadable arrangement, and found this, which is quite good, attached, horrifyingly, to a hymn called ‘O God, that great Tsunami.’ The last time I sang it was with the Magdeburg university choir, with Christmas words, on a hospital ward.

Last week I posted about pictures, and a few days ago about GEOurl.

Now a site that combines the two: www.geograph.co.uk — a project to get a photograph for every map square in the country.

I’ve submitted a few.

Also: www.nearby.org.uk is also fascinating for listing things physically nearby you, including trig points, geological features, stuff like GPS beacons, caches from people who hide things. And best of all, an incredibly comprehensive co-ordinate converter.