Forgive me for a moment: for the first time I can think of in this blog I’m going to be political. I’ll try to be brief.

It’s not especially a secret that I’m a leftie.  I’ve not talked about it much here, but I suspect you could decode it from my posts, and especially via Twitter.  So it won’t come as much of a surprise that in the upcoming general election I’m backing Labour.

As the election looms it’s looking increasingly likely from the opinion polls that the UK will get a hung parliament on Thursday.  Accordingly the Queen would invite Gordon Brown, as the incumbent Prime Minister, to form the next government. It’s likely that Mr Brown would then approach the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg in an attempt to form some kind of anti-Tory coalition government.  For a moment I’m going to assume this happens — that the Liberal Democrats would rather form a coalition with the Labour Party than the Conservative party.

It struck me the other day while listening to Andrew Pierce and Kevin Maguire talking about the Labour leadership on the radi0, that there’s still a way the Labour Party can come out of this election (for a definition of “this” see below) with a strong mandate to run the country for another 5 years.  Let me explain. Read more…

I’m currently on a train heading towards Leeds.  We just left Retford.  I’m going to stay with my parents for a couple of weeks, for a number of reasons.  Firstly next weekend sees the first Grim North’s productions for this year, ‘Stranded’, and I hear on the grapevine that there will be more than one this year, possibly some kind of pantomime around Christmas.  Secondly this weekend sees Calderdale Theatre School’s production of Coram Boy and as an ex-member of the school as well as being their webmaster, I said I’d go and see it.

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The following weekend saw the annual Chinese New Year celebrations in London and another day out with my camera.  This one proved to be much more successful and significantly less painful.

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I was trying to sneak this in before the end of February so as to have posted something in February, but I failed.  I’ll have to make do with having started it last month, even if I only managed to finish it this month.  I was going to blame my lack of updates on a quiet month, but in actual fact there have been a few things I’ve mean to post about and just never got around to. In fact I’m still a blog post missing from Christmas: I had started writing something about Chrismas in Windows Live Writer — the offline editor I sometimes use when writing on the train — but that seems to have gone missing so I’ll have to start again.  I think I’ll make an effort to write a load of stuff this week. But enough of excuses, let’s write something worthwhile!

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It’s that time of year again when I can look back at what I said at the start of last year, see how I faired with the resolutions I made way back then, and have a think about what I’m going to try to do this year.  Last year’s post is here.  I know I was supposed to come up with more than the one resolution last year, but never ended up putting anything down. So that’s the only one I can look at. Read more…