I have found a couple of links or references to my little site from Tories. One is generating a few visits, and one could generate a lot more in the future.

The first is from Adam Brown. Sorry, I mean Adam G Brown – he seems very insistent on the G. Adam is a councillor in the neighbouring ward of Broadfield North: the one who won his seat by the drawing of lots earlier this year. Having met him a few times I have to say that he seems OK for a Tory, in fact I don’t really think he belongs in that party. Anyway, regardless of his politics he is attempting to include links on his site to any other sites relevent to his area and I guess I count.

My only real objection (apart from the pedantic one that he missed out an apostrophe in “Skudders”) is that he describes me as “Former Broadfield councillor Andrew Skudders blog”. Although it is factually correct I never really thought of myself like that. I don’t really define myself entirely in terms of something I used to do. When I was a councillor I always tried to think of it as something I did rather than something I was.

It is very easy to get sucked in by the whole thing though and maybe I had started to get sucked in a bit before the electorate saved me. Having had time to reflect on it, I think that is the start of a slippery slope, which leads to you feeling yourself somewhat apart from the people you are supposed to represent. Should I end up in being elected anywhere again, which is increasingly unlikely, I will make a conscious effort to try and remember that.

Still… my own feelings or opinions don’t come into it. I guess that ‘former councillor’ is how the few people with an active interest in local politics in Broadfield view me. (Does that sound harsh? Fewer than 20% vote at elections so I think it is accurate.)

The other link is not a link as such but a mention on Iain Dale’s list of the top 100 Labour bloggers at number 59. If you haven’t seen this list yet I will not spoil the surprise by saying who is at the top, I will just say that he probably deserves that accolade but… he is going to be insufferable now!

I can’t take the list too seriously, and especially not my position on it – probably artificially high because Iain is a fellow Hammer. I reckon the colour scheme picked me up a few design points – but I believe his blog is very well-known and well read so I will probably get a few extra curious visitors as a result.

I don’t know how he does it all though. He is also has lists of the top 100 Conservative, Lib-Dem and Other blogs. I imagine that to get a list of the top 100 you have to look at more than 100 blogs, so the implication is that he has gone through well over 400 sites to get these lists together.

Given that these top 100s were generated by giving each blog marks out of 10 for 10 different criteria there was obviously a lot of time spent on it. I hardly have time to keep up with the relatively few blogs I like to keep an eye on and still have time for my own and for those other little things like a job and a life. In fact I find it hard enough to keep up with Labour blogs without checking out the opposition much so I have only seen Iain’s once or twice. I really don’t know how he did it. He’s not stupid though, its all for his book on political blogging and he must be hoping to have created 400 buyers at a stroke.

Sorry if that sounds ungrateful or anything, its just a fact of life. As it happens there is a bit of a ‘cult of Iain Dale’ amongst Labour bloggers so that whenever he writes anything particularly interesting or significant I see it repeated elsewhere anyway.

Personally I don’t think this is a political blog anyway: just a blog with some politics in it. Anyone visiting here as a result of that list will get a bit of a shock when they find it full of photos of shopping trolleys and tanks, very parochial stuff about Crawley, and blatant plugs for any Spizzenergi concerts which are forthcoming.

If nothing else, at least Crawley is represented in those lists.