A pranged car, a missing letter and a jammed lock

Disasters come in 3s and over the weekend I have my admittedly very minor 3 events that should not have happened.

The first was on Saturday morning when I pranged the car on our front wall whilst pulling out of the drive. The actual cause of this was a badly parked truck someone had kindly parked opposite our drive. We will need a new bumper.

The second was a missing letter. I wanted to send a letter to all the constituents in my village who have been in touch with me recently about bus services. There were cuts to the services in September last year and more unhelpful changes are taking place this year. So my letters were emailed to Gateshead Civic Centre last week to update constituents on the current situation and to invite them to a meeting in my house on Sunday, yesterday, to discuss how we approach the bus company and get some improvement to services. The letters were then to be printed and posted out.

But on Saturday, I discovered that people who were supposed to have received the letters had received nothing. Fortunately, the meeting was able to go ahead because I had also emailed and phoned some constituents who therefore turned up. I will need to ask the Civic Centre what happened to my letters. I have an awful feeling people could receive a letter today for a meeting that happened yesterday.

The final minor disaster was the lock on the door to our constituency office. I went to the office on Sunday morning and printed 1800 village Focuses for part of my ward. I then took back a large pile to my house to hand out to some of the leafletters who I knew were coming to the buses meeting.

I then returned to the office to finish folding the rest of the leaflet only to find the lock on the door had jammed. So I still have my focuses for Sunniside on the other side of a door we cannot open until a locksmith calls out today.

So I went back home and did some work in the office in my house. This included starting the media and campaigns report for Gateshead Lib Dems. I often give an update on the number of email addresses we have of constituents. We now have over 1200, all of which get our monthly eFocus newsletter - many of whom pass it on to others. So we are comfortably past our target of 1000. Our new target is now 1500.

It's now Monday morning and I'm heading to London on the 7.18am train out of Newcastle. Wake me up when we get there.

One big different today from previous Mondays - when I get to Cowley St, the office in which I am based will be occupied by the rest of the Political Communications Unit. The Policy Unit has now been turfed out and sent over to Abbey Gardens, one of the Parliamentary buildings. And that means that George Crozier, Jake Holland and there 2 interns have now moved out of the Whips Office to join me and James, our 3rd intern, in Cowley Street. So at last our unit is under one roof.

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