Day Two begins not with a rosetted doorstepper, no polling call from ICM, no campaign leaflet (which makes a nice change) but with my neighbours trying to work out which wheelie bin needs to go out this week.
Now I don't really have an issue with wheelie bins other than the fact that they're hideously ugly and it's tough to hide them in a small Golden Triangle garden. Ours are never full and if you don't throw food away and offer a quick rinse to fishy packaging they don't smell but anyone who's been to Europe will have seen what the Spanish, French and Italians (and others?) manage to offer in the ways and means of waste disposal. There's generally a big bin for rubbish and recycling at the end of the road for everyone to use that gets emptied almost daily. Suppose that's too much to ask? And proper plastics recycling, and Tetrapacks - others manage, why can't we?
But back to the election - one thing that grates is when what we're promised locally doesn't translate nationally. Our LibDem chappy, Simon Wright, sent me an email yesterday. It laid out all his good works campaigning for the local community and tells me what he will do, and that he'll have more influence, if he's elected.
Now that's all well and good. I'm not keen on all this parochial 'local' gumph in a General Election - that's what councils are for, but it's great to know how much he values our green spaces, our right to safety and our local post offices. So why (and I have asked him this - no reply yet) when he campaigns to keep local post offices is his central office sending out literature using Onepost? Do any of these new boys in the field of postal delivery have any care whatsoever for small, local services? Or are they just in it for the bucks? Maybe it's not a problem for us in the big city but the loss of Royal Mail service would be a nightmare for, say, my Mum, living in the middle of Norfolk Nowhere...
On a sort of associated point how do these people get, and feel free to use, my email address? I've asked that too of the LibDems but had no answer. Funny really because "they value my support" enough to send me these e-blasts. I'd still like to know.
It's little things, little things that make you wonder because in a General Election the person I vote in isn't the person who will be running the country, or even running my locality (that'll be the council again). He's just a cog, an aye or a nay, a number, to make up the bigger numbers in a House of Commons moving ever away from the commoner.
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