My last weekend before he calls the election?

The last 2 days may have been the last weekend before the election starts. This did not affect things campaignwise in my own area as we were already in the middle of producing and delivering focuses - frankly a job that never ceases. Still, it did give an added sense of urgency to matters.

So Sunday morning saw me down in our Whickham office printing focus leaflets I had written on Saturday evening. Sunday morning also arrived with an early morning phone call. The chairman of the editorial board of Parliamentary Campaigner was calling to make last minute changes to the urgent edition going to candidates later that day. I had to crawl out of bed and go to the office in my house and make some changes to the document (most of which were corrections to typos).

I suppose I had myself to blame however. The idea of bringing forward the final edition of 2007 of Parliamentary Campaigner by 2 months was mine. This time last week, as I sat on the train to London, I spent the time emailing the editorial board and campaigns dept suggesting this as a course of action and proposing the contents. Having got agreement, all I had to do was write the thing! All the usual pages were scrapped. Parliamentary Campaigner instead became the guide all candidates need to get them started on the general election!

There were some domestic jobs that could not be delayed which involve our food supply. I had a mountain of pears and crab apples I picked last weekend which had to be cooked or put into the compost bin. The freezer was also crammed full of recently picked blackberries but we needed the room for other things. The useful thing about jam making is that I can write focuses, deal with correspondence, catch up with the news headlines, have my dinner and, okay I admit it, watched a bit of The Terminator on one of the Sky Movie Channels whilst the jam pan is boiling away. A case of multi-tasking! It was also the last weekend I could gather in a good crop of hazel. Leave them any longer and the nuts become windfall of get eaten by the squirrels! I gathered in about 5kg. Had I had more time, I would have picked about 3 or 4 times the quantity.

So will he call it this week? I suspect Thursday could be a busy day. Sham Cam gives his speech and at the end of it suddenly there is no coverage. Instead the big story is the election being called. And if that scenario is what happens, the trip to London I am making now is going to be a bit longer that I had planned!

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