One thing that I sort of knew but didn’t really mentally prepare myself for when putting myself forward as a candidate was the amount of mail that would arrive both through the letterbox and through the email inbox.  It is especially difficult when you don’t have an office to deal with that sort of thing and have a day job to worry about.There are questionnarires and surveys from different organisations, charities, companies, pressure groups and the media, individual emails from voters, information packs from organisations, and invitations to all sorts of interesting things.

The information packs are great because not only do they provide information but they don’t require any action, which is just as well because I now have a bit of a backlog of things that do demand some sort of response.

By the way, I’m not saying all this to complain but because there might be people out there genuinely interested in the practical aspects of standing for election.  With the way that the internet makes it easier to organise campaigns, easier for candidates to put their information up in a public space and easier for individual voters to interact it is possible that even standing for a council seat could involve this level of correspondence before long!

One thing I did this week was to visit trashcan radio in Broadbridge Heath, which was fascinating.  It is a local internet radio station with not many listeners, so I went in knowing there would be hardly any bpractical benefit for the campaign, but I am quite interested in radio and computers so the chance of spending an evening in a shed full of them was too good to turn down!

I loved it. Didn’t talk about politics much though – I would have done if pressed to but I still feel a bit uncomfortable forcing my views on people.  I do like the idea of people setting up their own stations for niche audiences though.  After the election is over I may well get in touch to ask if I can go along again some time.

One thing I didn;t do this week was go to the Rory Bremner Battlebus 2010 tour when it fetched up in Horsham yesterday.  On his tour the first half is stand-up and the second half is a Question Time-style Q&A debate with three guests on the panel.  People like Tony Benn, the mayor of Doncaster, and various local candidates have been involved so far.   The production team emailed and asked if I would be interested in taking part and I did say that I would.

They said they still had to finalise the line-up and would get back to me.  I took that to mean ‘we will get back to you if we can’t find somebody we have heard of instead’ which is fair enough – they are in the entertainment business after all.  I have no problem with that, though I was a little disappointed not to have the chance to get on stage again.

I don’t know who they did eventually decide to get instead, except that one of them was Telegraph writer Mary Riddell because she wrote about it, but she was didn’t see fit to mention who was there with her.

In the end it was just as well since a few late nights had caught up with me and I ended up falling asleep some time well before 8pm and sleeping right though apart from waking up around 1am and checking my emails before going to bed.  I think it did me some good.  Earlier on this week I had been a bit nauseous and hadn’t really recovered from that so maybe it was as well to totally re-charge rather than make myself properly unwell.

Anyway, enough blathering – must go and deal with all those emails.