The writer should appreciate that anybody can make a mistake: these are new staff learning a whole new range of foods.  It is not like they are a professional writer who uses “bought” when they mean to say “brought” or anything like that…

Wabi is the kind of place you’d go for a treat. Today, there’s a special Father’s Day lunch, so I have bought my 16-year-old daughter, Maya.

The substantive criticism is that you pay over the odds for what you are getting, but in a way that is a sort of selling point for the more up-market places in Horsham so probably won’t do them any harm.  Wabi will fit right in and probably thrive.

Fortunately the book turned out to be so much better than the DVD I watched at the weekend and I thoroughly approve of it.  I have a fair collection of Sherlock Holmes-related books, and will happily admit to enjoying all of them, even when I know they are not good, so I was likely to enjoy this anyway, but I didn’t expect it to be good as well.

Holmes fans are difficult to satisfy completely: they will always pick up on the slightest little thing that contradicts the official canon – even though the official canon itself has some inconsistancies, like the exact location of Watson’s wound form the Jezail bullet – but this succeeds in not setting off any huge alarm bells.

Of course I may be biased because, according to this book the Holmes family home is in Horsham!

Here is what I wrote about it:

Andrew Lane has a taken on a massive challenge with this book, which is to be the first in a series, because he has set out to write adventure stories for teenagers about the young Sherlock Holmes in such a way that they fit in with the established ‘facts’ about Holmes and so will be of interest to fans of the original stories without taking too many liberties.

I’m a long way from being a teenager myself, but I think I would have enjoyed this book if I had read it when I was, and more importantly I think I would have enjoyed it if I had read it before reading Conan Doyle’s books.  As a straightforward boys’ own adventure story, albeit one with quite modern levels of violence in parts, I reckon it works well enough, but does it satisfy the Holmes fan or just annoy them?

I probably qualify as a bit of a fan myself.  As well as all the original books in several formats I have a decent collection of Holmes pastiches, homages, sequels, and rip-offs. This book is more of anhomage in prequel form.

The book has obviously been written by somebody with a good knowledge of, and affection for, the original stories and a familiarity with the accepted theories about Holmes.  It includes plenty of passing references to things that Conan Doyle mentioned like the mysterious Paradol Chamber and Holmes’ French lineage on his mother’s side.  The uncle’s name in this book is Sherrinford Homes, which was actually one of Conan Doyle’s original names for the character.

What this book cannot do is have the feel of the ‘proper’ books, because they are (nearly) all written from the perspective of Dr. Watson and are very much in his voice. It would be too clumsy and implausible for the teenage Holmes to have his own equivalent and so this is just written as a normal third-person novel. Apart from in the prologue, the narrator only follows Sherlock Holmes.

Although sticking to known ‘facts’ as far as possible the author has had to introduce some of his own, necessarily.  It is fine for Conan Doyle to be vague about Holmes’ origins, but if you are writing a book about his early years they have to be set somewhere and in this case it is established that the family home is in Horsham, and Holmes is at school in Deepdene, near Dorking. But although some new biographical details are introduced I am pleased to say there is nothing that contradicts the Conan Doyle originals.

Other attempts to portray young Sherlock Holmes have had him being friends with the young Dr. Watson and the young Lestrade, which is not only ludicrous but is completely at odds with A Study in Scarlet by Conan Doyle, where Holmes meets Watson for the first time in 1881. There are no such gimmicks in this book and the historical details appear to be well researched too.

Admittedly the pace of this book is faster than the canonical stories, to suit the teenage tastes perhaps, and young Sherlock seems to have an un-natural ability to pick up things like horse riding or boxing just by watching somebody else do it, but I still found it absorbing and I am looking forward to more of the same even if only to find out whether there really is more to the sinister Mrs. Eglantine than meets the eye.

There is also a good chance that younger readers of this book will be tempted to read the originals and create a new generation of Holmes fans, and that can only be a good thing.

Obviously there are things I would have done differently if I had my time again, but that is to be expected.  If you can’t learn from experience there is little point in having it.  Lesson #1 has to be don’t bother turning up at the count before 2am.  It was 6:20 before I got away from Christ’s Hospital.

In terms of votes the outcome was disappointing but not surprising.  With the general anti-government feeling and the understandable temptation to vote tactically in Horsham we were braced for fewer votes and a lower share than before, but suceeded in some of our other ambitions.

We made some good contacts, and had some membership enquiries.  Finishing the campaign with more members than we started was a target, and getting more attention for our campaigns on affordable housing and council play schemes was another, and I hope we can now get more progress on those two issues.  I know Horsham’s Chair will not let those go.

And now perhaps I should think about having a look at what happened elsewhere – or maybe I should get a few hours sleep before attempting that.  I do know about the result in Crawley and I’m really sorry for Chris Oxlade and his dedicated team.  They will be feeling terrible right now, but I’m sure they will bounce back.

The Oxmobile. So much better than the Skudmobile.

It is going to be a long day today.  I was round at my agent’s house at 7am, having already met my first voter of the day.  It was an old lady sitting on the wall outside the place that used to be the polling station at 6:45.

Our first port of call was, ironically, in the Arundel and South Downs constituency.  David had agreed to do a proxy vote for a member, but although they are in Horsham district they are not in the Horsham constituency.

After that we did a bit of a tour of polling stations in the constituency – not all of them: there are 50 in total which is a lot of polling stations.  Some of them have as few as 400-500 voters on their register, but we did get to quite a few villages where I suspect they have not seen a Labour rosette for a long time.

My favourite was the one in Roffey by the shops, because after visiting it we popped into the Roffey Griddle for a small breakfast.  Well maybe not so small for me, but it is going to be a long day and I need to keep my energy up.

I think David’s favourite was the one at Pease Pottage, because it is set up in the Black Swan pub (my local!) although we didn’t stop for a drink.

After all that we stopped off at my place for a cup of tea and found Chris Oxlade’s vehicle parked outside.  Very impressed, and more than a little jealous.  I just have our old Mondeo estate with a Labour car sticker and a couple of posters in the back.

Anyway, I’m now changed, caught up with the news, Twitter and email, and ready to go out again for the harder part of the day – all the knocking on doors.

The day started badly though.  A burst water main meant no water in Broadfield when I got up.  There was just enough in the kettle to have a cup of tea before going down to Worthing for a candidates’ briefing with the chief executive of West Sussex NHS.  That was interesting.  Although all candidates in West Sussex were invited, only a few turned up – me, Emily Benn, Simon Holland, Godfrey Newman and a nother couple of Lib Dems.  Peter Bottomly sent an extremely posh young girl from his office, but otherwise there were no Tories there.

Came back home and put my suits in for dry cleaning¹ and tried to catch up on events on the laptop since the proper PC was inaccessible due to decorating.   Paint was everywhere…  even the kitten has a bit more white than she had yesterday and there was almost as much paint on the floor as on the walls.  A few splashes on my monitor but Jayne says it will come off and it doesn;t mean I can go out and buy an even bigger one.

The only lasting casualty is my bass guitar, which has a broken bridge.

When the paint was dry I went down to put the shelves back up and finished that just in time for a candidates’ teleconference with Douglas Alexander, before going off to the launch in Horsham.

The day ended on a high when I got home at about 11pm and found my newly-cleaned suits hanging up in the hall – just in time for dress-down Friday at work.

1. See – I *am* taking it seriously!

These ladies want you to make Horsham greener

I was out in Horsham town centre this morning doing some anti-BNP campaigning and met these lovely people from Greening Horsham. Their objective is to get as many residents of Horsham to make commitments to make small changes in their behaviour, and display a card in their window to show that they are doing it.

The actions they are suggesting are small in themselves, but would make an impact if enough people took them – why not have a look?As for my own activities…  there were three parliamentary candidates there: me, Francis Maude and Jim Duggan.  Godfrey Newman would probably have joined us, but unfortunately he was out of town for the weekend.   The aim was to persuade people who might otherwise stay at home to get out and vote to register their opposition to the BNP.

I’m sure I will be bumping into Francis & Jim several times in the next month or so at hustings and similar events and I’m sure we will disagree vigorously with each other, but this first encounter was very much on friendly terms as disgust at the BNP and a desire to see a higher turnout are two of the few things we will agree on.  And Greening Horsham is probably a third.

The results are here is anybody is interested.  I can particularly recommend the page telling you how to donate to my campaign

Very impressed by the ability to choose layout options and resize columns.  It is a lot easier to resize columns than in Wordpress, and there is a preview of what you are doing visible all the time.  It takes a bit of the challenge out of it all, but it puts all sorts of things within the reach of people who don’t do HTML and CSS.

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.

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