Thursday, September 11, 2008

Smuggling eggs into conference

One of the photo ops I am putting on at conference on Sunday is about the rise in the cost of living. Candidates and campaigners will be pictured with Vince Cable and as props there will be 2 supermarket baskets, each containing the same food items but one with last year's prices, and the other with this year's. I spent a bit of time yesterday going through the government's RPI figures to see which items have gone up the most.

There were no great surprises though the 46% rise in the cost of 4 coissants was a bit of an eyebrow raiser. Anyway, I have worked out what needs to go into the baskets and my plan was to buy them in Bournemouth and after the photo op, we would suitably dispose of them by such means as having an impromptu picnic in the office. This does mean that generally, the items to be purchased have to be both common foods that people regularly buy as part of their shopping, and can be eaten without having to worry too much about cooking them. This was easier to sort out than I expected, until of course, I came up against the egg problem. Short of giving raw eggs to the landlady of my hotel, getting rid of them will not be easy. Unless of course, I have bought and used them in advance and we simply use the empty boxes as part of the prop.

So, when I left Cowley St a short while ago, I paid a visit to Sainsburys and bought two boxes of eggs. When I get to the flat, we will be eating omlettes. It will at least get us into practice for when we get our chickens. But it has in all likelihood saved me from an embarrassing problem. Like everyone else, I need to get through the security checks on the door at conference. Trying to get 12 eggs into the Bournemouth International Centre would have been rather difficult! I could just imaging trying to explain to the guards that the eggs were not intended as free range missiles to lob at the leadership!

Trying to smuggle in the eggs could have led to some interesting media headlines: "Eggcitement at Lib Dem conference", "Eggtreme measures introduced by the Lib Dems", "Lib Dem eggample of security" etc!

So the empty egg boxes will go instead. Not such fun but safer.

Oh, by the way, eggs have gone up in price 33%. That's a large rise, though I don't want to eggagerate......

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