Category: Uncategorized

See you next week.

I was bought up in Worthing on the Sussex coast so I was thrilled to read about the exploits of Worthing boys Jake Scrace and Lewis Crathern who used yesterday’s stormy weather to jump over Worthing Pier on kite surfers. Stupid but magnificent. When I was their age I was doing coastal rowing based at Splash Point just east of the pier. Not quite so glamorous but equally wet and cold.

See the BBC’s video here.

Sorry about the lack of blogging again. We are travelling in North America – we had a wedding on Saturday and we need to show the baby off to her great grandmother in Virginia. I missed the budget although it sounds atrocious. Over here all the talk is of Obama’s first 100 days and swine flu.

It seems like Kalvis Jansons’ petition on the Number 10 website asking Gordon Brown to resign might become the big online story this week. By 16:50 today when I signed it it had already got 15,989 signatures.

Apologies for having taken a week long vacation from my blog. I hadn’t meant to but with entertaining over Easter and getting out into the garden on the nice days I have been neglecting the blog. I have even managed to do a little exercise over the last week or so, not to mention some actual, paying business.

I have been stunned by the way the Damian McBride story has run for the last five days so I have been more of a blog consumer than producer lately. My ideas will be bucking up soon.

I am staying with my in-laws who come from Marietta, Georgia, some 20 miles north west of Atlanta. This morning we met up with my brother-in-law and enjoyed a typical American diner breakfast experience complete with endless refills of bad coffee.

We were within sight of Marietta’s most important local landmark, the Big Chicken. The beak goes up and down and the eyes roll around about every five seconds. There is even a gift shop. KFC have tried to get them to modify the logo, they are ashamed of the word “Fried” in their old brand name. Unfortunately for them fried is a food group to Southerners and the locals just would stand for having their landmark tampered with. In the south they cook their Thanksgiving turkeys by deep frying them.

We are on our holidays for a week in Atlanta with the in-laws.

Once or twice a year I get an e-mail from someone trying to get in touch with the darts player Phil “The Power” Taylor. Such an e-mail arrived from a 17 year old yesterday.

i am a greatest fan of u and i have u as a poster on my wall. i like to play darts i have scord 180 6 times this year. your just amazing at your darts getting 9 darters and 180’s and your avarage is alway above 100. you mostly beat people in a match. you pratice very hard.

i practic 1 to 2 hours a day. my highest check out was 124 and my lowest check out was 42. in the future i would like to be u on the tv and winning losts of money in the tornaments that u win. i watch your show (phi taylors new kids on the oche) and i was wonding where is that played. cause i am interestd in playing with other people my age.

I read this and wonder how well we are equipping our kids for work and whether our education system really is good enough. I don’t think so if this young man’s writing skills are anything to go by. So much for “Education, education, education”.

I know that many people hate Pound shops and see them as being pretty much the fifth horseman of the apocalypse but they do have their place.

On Saturday I bought a gift for a child at Early Learning Centre in the Ealing Broadway Centre. Being in a hurry I wanted one of those gift bag thingies to present it in. Being a simple man of a certain age I thought stationary – WH Smiths! In I went and found a rather attractive gift bag that would certainly have appealed to the mother of the tot although it might have been a bit sophisticated for the child herself. I went to queue up and found about ten people waiting on one till.

As I was in a hurry I flung my prospective purchase towards a display and marched out in a huff. What now? What about the Pound shop two doors down? Five minutes later I had found a perfectly pleasant gift bag (one which passed muster with my wife I might add), paid for it and got out of the shop again. Pound shop 1, WH Smith 0.

Pound shops, and their close relative the Asian-owned cheap hardware store, have an important role to play. They keep the large multiples honest with their merchandising and packaging. We all bemoan the march of supermarkets and large multiples and laud independent traders when they are bijou boutique shops but we forget that these Pound shops and hardware stores too are often independents working on small margins. Some people might call their wares cheap tat but do you really want an expensive basket to put your wet washing in or something you picked up for very little from your friendly local cheap hardware store? Often these people are providing items from which the multiples could not make sufficient profit. How else would you get hold of this stuff?

After a long week of work I am in Birmingham tonight for the Tory conference. I am afraid my time management skills didn’t allow me to get here in time for the opening sessions so all I have managed so far is to check into my hotel and get a curry and a beer. Birmingham has a real bustle to it. Tonight it was full of sleek, suited young people. It is not hard to work out the direction of travel. I have never been to a Tory conference before but I don’t suppose this one will be very typical.

On my way back to my hotel one of West Midlands Police’s finest was complaining as I passed about the building site type fencing around the conference centre.

The security was very apparent. Some £2 million worth according to the BBC.

I am afraid that the blog has been a bit lacklustre recently. A combination of a busy patch at work combined with a busy patch at the council. October sees the start of the star chamber process in which all areas of the council submit their business plans and budgets for scrutiny by the leader and chief executive. This week saw two of my areas of responsibility going through the process.

Hopefully I will manage some posts over the next three days.