Exhibit one: Dil Da Rog Muka Ja Mahi by Gaudi and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

Surely the most unlikely Kraftwerk cover this side of Senor Coconut.

Exhibit two: Panic Grass & Fever Few by Ian King

Is that really dub-tinged folk?  I think it must be.

Exhibit three: Extra Pleasure by Simian Mobile Disco

This was the limited edition second disc of their Temporary Pleasure album.

We were only really after a second cat to keep Chiquita company, and neither of us has had more than two cats before, let alone three kittens.  Part of me hopes the other one goes so we don’t have to make that decision – but part of me sort of hopes we get the pair.  It will be at least three weeks before we can have it/them anyway, but I think we will be popping down to the farm this week to say hello and will probably get hopelessly smitten with both.

If we do end up with three it does open up some possibilities…¹

1. only joking obviously.  I can’t juggle

Unfortunately I had quite a big to-do list and so have been frantically trying to catch up on emails and stuff tonight.

At least I haven’t had the distraction of Question Time.  I did turn the TV on a few minutes ago and then the sight of David Starkey losing his rag made me give and return to Spotify instead.  He appeared more mad than Voorderman did.  Very entertaining I am sure, but only in the way lunatic asylums were sources of public entertainment centuries ago.  Haven’t we grown out of that sort of thing yet?

My only involvement will be to vote for whichever candidate I think will make the best MP for Crawley.  They might be a local or they might apply from elsewhere, and it will be interesting to see who might apply.

A few local members have been mentioned in the press as possibilities: Brenda Smith, Ian Irvine and Chris Oxlade.  There are others in the local party who could be in the frame, but not many.   That is not to slight the majority of members, but just to state a simple fact that very few people have what it takes to do the job and to put up with the negative aspects – like the stress, the hours, the attention and so on.  Very few local parties of any flavour will have more than a handful of people up to the job: the local Tories have only a few who would make a decent MP (and Henry Smith is not one of them in my opinion).

A few personal thoughts on the potential local candidates:

Brenda Smith.  Well-liked and well-respected councillor.  Leader of the Labour groups on the borough and county councils. I hope for her sake she doesn’t go for it.  She will have enough on her hands with Jim, and we would have to have county and borough by elections. Also, having three Smiths on the ballot paper could be just a little confusing.

Chris Oxlade.  County councillor and radio presenter. Personally I think he would make an excellent candidate and an excellent MP.  He holds the right views, is not afraid of hard work and obviously is an accomplished speaker.  The only danger is that his local celebrity would have the local Tories encouraging the view that he is a ’stunt candidate’ chosen purely for his celebrity as they did with Eugene Sully.  That would patently not be true, and wasn’t true in Eugene’s case – he was a candidate before his fame/notoriety.

Can’t blame them for trying though.  I’m sure we did the same when they had Giles Brandreth as a candidate!

Ian Irvine. A good, solid local candidate and ex-bourough councillor.  What you see is what you get, and very committed to the party and the town but may prefer to continue his campaign to be the next Broadfield North councillor.

But what about the ones the local papers didn’t think about?

Colin Lloyd.  An erstwhile borough and county councillor, and very nice chap.  Also I suspect he may be just about the only person in the Crawley party who already has an NEC endorsement to be on the national panel.

Janet Sully. Highly-regarded in the party – how else would she have been top of our candidate list for the last Euro elections (after the sitting MEP obviously)?  Famous for her energy and determination as a county councillor.  Made lots of friends with her very active campaigning in the Euro elections.

Jasmine Samson.  If the party wanted to skip a generation then Jaz has worked for the party and worked for a couple of MPs so she knws what the job involves. An ex-chair of the constituency.

Jim McGough. Another ex-constituency chair and ex-councillor.  Certainly has the mental capacity to be an MP but probably enjoying his retirement too much to consider putting his name forward.

There is a good chance that none of them will even be interested, but there are are possibilities beyond those already mentioned in the papers and slightly further afield there could be members in nearby constituencies who could apply – Bob Fromant (another Euro candidate) for example, or members in Horsham who were too new to the area or too young to volunteer when they had their selection there.

Be interesting to see whether the party tries to parachute a preferred candidate or union official onto the shortlist because I can’t see the local members selecting them unless they happen to be particularly impressive in their own right. Maybe Hopi Sen will send his CV in? Or a colleague from Brighton?  It is all very exciting.

The real challenge will not be in selecting a candidate who would make a better MP than Henry Smith – any of those listed above would meet that criterion – but one who can make the general public see that.

It goes without saying that I will be giving whoever we select my full support and will be out on the doorsteps with them, and I suspect Laura will be there alongside us.

Not a happy bunny!

Chiquita had her long-awaited visit to the vets to get spayed yesterday and returned with a huge shaved patch and a buster collar to stop her ripping the stitches out.

She is not impressed with the collar.

Advice from the vets included a remark that the cat could be drowsy for a few days as a result of the anaesthetic.  If only!  She has been going berserk from the moment we got her home.

In this case, of course, I got the book with an obligation to review it, and here is what I wrote:Because the book does depend on things being disclosed at the right time, in the right order (it is a mystery after all) the review is necessarily circumspect about the story itself.

This book is well outside my comfort zone as I tend not to read mystery books much, but I found it to be extremely readable.

Reflecting afterwards I realise that the main characters were not particularly fleshed-out, but at the time of reading it that was not a problem because I really, really wanted to see what happened next. Once a book gets me wanting to do that I can be very forgiving of it.

As a mystery it is very low-key and domestic, not resorting to anything spectacular to attract attention. The focus of the story is a fifty-something retired teacher who fills her days with swimming and the badminton club which in itself is a little unusual and perhaps quite modern. In my own visualisation of it I pictured Helen Mirren playing Kate in the contemporary sections.

The most impressive aspect of the book for me is the structure of it. The chapters more or less alternate between the current day and an early 70’s summer and both strands run sequentially. Both strands have their own mysteries. In the current thread you want to know whether Kate’s almost-mother-in-law does know anything about her secret, and why she seems to have a hobby as a part-time stalker. In the 70’s story you more or less know what is going to happen, we are already told in chapter one that Danny dies and that Trudie was murdered, even before knowing who they are, but the mystery is about how, when and why these deaths occur.

In this respect the book really teases the reader by giving away the main plot point early on and letting you speculate on the exact circumstances, although even then it manages to spring a few little surprises. There are smaller teases too – when the book looks like it might slip into the supernatural or when Katy (as she called herself back in the 70’s) flicks through Trudie’s diary, reads one very significant entry and has the strength to resist the temptation to read any more. How could she do that? I found myself trying to urge Katy to read the later entries because I wanted to know what was in them.

In practical terms, the book is split into chapter that are mostly around ten pages long, making it very suitable for reading on the train or bus, or perhaps on the beach.

The title, cover, and blurb on the back all made me suspect I wouldn’t enjoy this book and made me put off starting it, but by the third chapter I was hooked.

Another reason why this book was outside my comfor zone, is one I didn’t want to mention on Amazon because it sounds a bit bad without some qualification: it is by a female author.  For some reason, and it is not a deliberate misogynistic policy of mine or anything, I realised a few years ago that out of the many hundreds of fiction books I have, only a handful were by women.

This probably just because I had read most widely in a few genres dominated by male authors and didn’t go near a couple of genres where women authors dominate and seem to concentrate, but it could just me chance.  Or maybe I am being subconsciously sexist?

The strange thing is that in the last couple of years I have probably read more books by female authors that in the thirty years before – but again there was no conscious decision to do that.  A lot of those female-written books have been via Vine.

To my shame, I have still not got round to reading any Austen or Bronte novels.  If I ever hanker for a period piece I still drift towards Dickens and Conan Doyle.

Imagine a song that really reached out and touched kids
and not in a Daily Mail way, innocence corrupted
but in a way where criticism remained constructive
and wasn’t too politicised, and children weren’t instructed
to behave in a way that was unrealistic
or made out the way they lived was somehow sick and twisted
that simply pointed out reasons to get it together
not shouting get a job but just saying ‘get better’

Today I went straight from work to visit politics students at Christ’s Hospital and bore the life out of them and on the way home I passed through Horsham and remembered that there was a planning meeting going on which my colleagues in Horsham Labour party were addressing so I stopped off for that.

More about that later. Probably.

Today’s events made me all nostalgic for several reasons.  First of all, the visit to Christ’s Hospital remined me of my own time at school.  Obviously my school was nowhere near as grand, but it was still a co-educational boarding school out in the country and I was wondering how life in such an establishment will be different now, and how it would be similar.

I remember my last year at school very fondly.  Video games were very much in the future, as were video recorders, let alone computers and the internet.  If we had Spotify at school would it have made life better or worse I wonder?  Certainly we would have been exposed to more tunes, but would have missed out on listening to the same few Yes and Genesis albums over and over again.

If I remember rightly, our last summer was a glorious one and having got exams out of the way, we spent a lot of time swimming, sunbathing outside the pool, and making use of the athletics facilities – not that you would believe it to see me now.  And punk was just starting to filter through to us as well.

Chatting to the students, I speculated that mobile phones must make everything different. At my school there was a single pay phone between 250 pupils so phone calls home were a rarity.  Now they can be texting friends and family all the time.  They pointed out that mobile phones are not allowed for the junior years.  In my mind I was just thinking that bottles of Captain Morgan rum were not allwed at my school but they were stashed away in the senior common room anyway

The Horsham council planning meeting made me nostalgic in a different way, for a different time.  Although the set-up was totally different to Crawley’s committee rooms, there were enough reminders of my time as Chair of Development Control – the inaudible sound system, the press scribbling away, the endless maps.

I have been to a few of the Crawley planning meetings since leaving the council but at those I felt that I knew exactly what was going on because the people and surroundings were so familiar.  In many cases I could guess what the councillors were going to say before they said it, because they were returning to familiar favourite topics.  In Horsham tonight I appreciate more what it must have been like as a first-time visitor.

A few of the councillors are now familiar to me, as is the chief executive, but it took me a while to work out who was in the chair and which people round the table were planning officers and other staff.  Not being able to hear anything much that was said did not help of course.  Nice to see that a fandamental failure to understand that microphones work best if they are spoken into was not just a peculiar trait of crawley councillors!

Having sat through that I feel I should retrospectively apologise to every member of the public who ever attended one of the planning meetings I chaired.  I did try to introduce all the dramatis personae at the beginning and make some explanation of procedure to the public, but I now realise that I probably did not go anywhere near far enough.

Anyway, I think we got a result, of sorts, in the planning decision, and I had a thoroughly good time at the school, on top of a reasonably productive day at work so all together I think it was a good day.

I will be glad when people stop asking me if I am going to transfer from Horsham to Crawley as a candidate though.  There are four very good reasons why I can’t/won’t – the fifth of which is that Horsham Labour party has already paid some money towards printing election leaflets with my name all over them.