Nick Clegg's Party broadcast

27.04.2010.

Election.2010.
Last night, The Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg( whose name is as chunky and dependable as the 'Clunk, Click, every trip' of the car-seat ad) walked through a field somewhere down South, then through London suburbs, while a snowstorm of A5 paper swirled around him like something out of American Beauty. The backing track, by Eno, echoed the Kevin Spacey film ambience. The music ran the gamut of human emotion.
I later found out that listening to music had made Nick Clegg cry, which, for me was the best thing I had so far heard on the campaign trail.
The swirling white paper of the Lib. Dem Party broadcast turned out to be 'broken promises'. Go-fers must have been employed to clear away all the dogshit and plastic packaging before strewing the paper trail. No doubt they would have to sweep up the paper afterwards for health and safety reasons.
Nick (it sounds cosier) advanced through the field of broken promises and continued along The Embankment (presumably at 5a.m. as only two joggers could be spotted in the broadcast)
Was this the Left bank or the Right, one wondered.
His earnest, first-time-mortgager face and carefully, carelessly thatched hair led us, Pied Piper- like through fields of err, hope. The mentions of 'change' and 'hope'gathered pace towards the end of the broadcast and the concepts were now so retrodden as to have become meaningless so that instead of injecting the necessary excitement they induced somnolence.
The parting shot was a stroke of genius, or foolhardiness. It was a back view of Clegg trundling on through the broken promises (with hope in his heart?)
　

Historian praises himself.

27.04.2010.
Historian Orlando Figes left favourable comments underneath reviews of his own books and unfavourable comments under those of his rivals. He was found out because he used the rather obvious pseudonym Orlando-Birkbeck.

Orlandish Figes' fibs
make him First Class Birk, speaking
Historically.

Smack on the NHS

27.04.2010.
Heroin should be prescribed on the N.H.S., according to Peter Carter, General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing.
He told a congress in Bournemouth yesterday that he was in favour of 'drug consumption rooms' to enable addicts to 'take drugs safely under medical supervision.'

Get Carter! Chief Nurse
would fix heroin problem
with scripts, not smacking.

Library cuts 31.12.07.-25.04.10

31st December. 2007-April 25th, 2010.
A report in the Independent at the time discussed the worying decline in the number of libraries in Britain. 40 were closed in 2006. Others have faced staff cuts and book shortages since then. Many have responded by providing DVD and CD loans and internet facilities.
In 2009, the magnificent Birkenhead Central Library( opened by King George IV with the Mersey Tunnel) and eleven others were threatened with closure by Wirral Borough Council. There was a temporary last-minute reprieve.

Reading at reading
will cease if library cuts
prove final chapter.

Stiff cuts, staff cuts as
libraries are brought to book,
lines drawn under them.

The writing's on the
wall; death sentence is prepared
for our libraries.