Blah Blah Flowers

Now, loathe as I am to do anything but wish a slow, lingering death on everyone in, or who supports, the UK Independence Party, but I am willing to give them a teeny weeny bit of credit. While Tony bLiar is playing coy about when he's going to call the May General Election that'll be in May, people in my area get the excitement of getting to vote for a replacement for a lying scumbag Labour councillor. It means very little but this lunchtime I had a knock on the door from the UKIP candidate. This is slightly impressive as I don't usually even get a complete crop of leaflets for the more important elections. At the last general election I lived in a flat above a shop, so obviously leaflet distributors are going to cut corners and not bother going into the road behind the shops for the doors to the flats above. But even so, since then I've lived in a perfectly average cul-de-sac and the leaflet rate has been about 50% and I've never had a candidate knock on my door before. Now yes, I live on my own and, yes, I am at work during the day, but aren't we repeatedly told how much our vote is worth? Don't politicians from the main parties agonise over voter apathy? So why do they only go out canvasing during the day? Why do they seem to be chasing only the votes of housewives, the elderly, the unemployed or the self-employed? It's like getting someone out to fix something in your house, the NTL engineers who only work Monday to Friday 9:00 to 5:00, why should I have to take a holiday to wait for someone? Why doesn't more of this society expect to operate outside of normal work hours, after all I do.

There are those that give their vote purely on the grounds that the candidate was the only one to knock on the door. But wouldn't it make more sense for more candidates to try canvassing between 5:00 pm and 8:00 or 9:00, or at weekends, when there's a danger they might actually meet the people whose vote they need?