LibDem Blogs - Archived!

I would like to thank Santa for this wonderful present this Christmas. I love you lots

Stephen Pollard is making a late bid for the Curmudgeon of the Year award: Can you really say that yesterday was a day you’d like to repeat? That if someone waved a magic wand, you would like to do it all over again today. And tomorrow. And the day after. And then the day after that.Christmas Day is something to be endured, not enjoyed. It is the single most boring day of the year. Well, I, for one, can say that yesterday was a day I would like to repeat - and I reckon there are ...

Am currently being fed & watered at the parentals for a few days. It makes for a really nice break from work, council and campaigning (although I have bought my laptop with me and made a few plans...)Also staying with us is Chen, a chinese student studying at Sheffield for a Masters. Parentals have gone all civic minded (apart from all the stuff they do in the local community), and joined the HOST scheme, run by the British Council. I missed out on this experience last year as I was off running around distant parts of Ukraine monitoring their election.Chen ...

Labour Cllr Bob Piper is short of some photos for his dartboard so I thought I would provide some of the photos of things I have been doing in December. (The ones with Amnesty International seem to have gone astray). This appears as an action photo, but is a photo of opening the improved swimming pool at Brays School. Brays do a very good job in improving the quality of life for kids who have

Robin is right - even as a first timer I can definitely say that New York is a fab place! We had a perfect Christmas Day yesterday. Anyone who knows me knows that sometimes I need to be made to stop and that is exactly what happened yesterday being miles away from home, with all the shops closed and in someone else's apartment. There were simply no chores I could do even if I wanted to! So it was great to have quality relaxation time with Robin. After our run (from the apartment to the coast) we enjoyed our Italian ...

Well its 7.30 in the morning here and I'm up. For those of you who know me well you will find this simply shocking. The reason being that my toothache has caused me to wake up early so I thought to distract myself from the pain I would post an entry. Last night we had dinner at the Algonquin here in New York. It was an interesting meal. We discussed as much as we could as to why there seem to be an unusually high number of Americans with intrusive and booming voices - sometimes they ...

There are two centralisations going on at the moment. The most worrying is that relating to the police. Gradually it will become less possible to influence the priorities of the police force locally and it will be essentially up to the Home Secretary. Wonder why he likes it? The Health one is just one of the normal chuck everything up in the air and see where it lands type of reorganisations. Not an efficient way to run anything, but it tends to happen every three years or so and gets back to where it was ...

Apparantly there was an interactive digital episode of Doctor Who following the Christmas Special. We pressed our red button when told to by David Tennant but the best that was on offer was Coldplay live. It appears that the episdoe was not available to those of us on NTL, Telewest or quite a lot of Freeview boxes. The only reliable way to get it seems to have been Sky Satelite which I for one refuse to subscribe to. The BBC trailed this episode widely and should have made it clear that access to it was so restricted. They ...

Well after sitting round waiting all day for it I thought David Tennant's debut as the Doctor was 'fantastic'. He appeared to pick up the role and run with it from the off. Billie Piper was as good as ever and I thought the storyline in this episode was good and fitted the one hour spcial well. There were just enough Christmassy elements to make it festive without getting in the way of the plot. And there was plenty of humour too - pulling out Tennant's Casanova costume in the wardrobe, the 'very Arthur Dent' comment and ...

I didn't want to mention this on Christmas Day on the grounds of taste and decency but it's: foreskins. What kind of intelligent designer would install them on a product in the first place, then as an afterthought put the removal instructions in the user manual? Eh? Eh? Or has excess packaging always been a problem?

I am very tempted to write about the hunting ban today and some of the outrageous comments in today's Western Mail. In particular the claim that "Hunting is humane and natural......It forms a vital part of many rural communities and their social lives. The Hunting Act threatens these communities and their relationship with the local police."If these people think that using dogs to rip apart another creature is humane then they obviously have a different set of values to most of the human race. There is nothing natural about a group of people dressing up in red and chasing around ...

The Birth Themes of Christmas interacted with new books to remind me that a new born baby weighs about 3kg. Using Einstein's e=mc2 formula that means the baby embodies the same amount of energy as Hurricane Katherine raging for an hour at full force. It would take a major electrical power station a year to generate that amount of energy and if the parents had to pay for this it would cost them up to a thousand million pounds give or take the odd million. And the rocks at the summit of Mount Everest are marine limestone, laid down below ...

Thanks to the encouragement of Martin , Tristan James and Ryan I am attempting to set up a Wordpress blog on 1 if (!file_exists('../wp-config.php')) die("There doesn't seem to be a wp-config.php file. So clearly I've not set up the wp-config-php file correctly, or it's not being found (I have uploaded it). Offers of help, and advice, greatly received.