Sunday, January 03, 2010

My top ten highlights of 2009

Happy New Year everyone, including all my avid Labour Party readers in Gateshead! I thought that I would bring you my personal highlights of 2009 whilst sitting at Crystal Palace station waiting for the train to arrive to take me to Westminster

So here are the top 10 positive highlights, in reverse order:

10)Reaching the milestone of 750,000 viewings on YouTube. I got there at the end of June. The even better news is that I am now approaching one million viewings. Give it 6 weeks or so and I reckon I'll be there.

9)The Government's defeat over the Gurkhas: I was there to witness it. Well sort of. I got a call in Cowley St when the vote went against the Government. "Get your butt over to Parliament and get some photos and video done!" Being in the crowd outside Parliament was quite something. And seeing the line up of snivelling hypocrite Labour MPs who had signed the EDM calling for the Gurkhas to stay only to vote the opposite way shortly afterwards was quite something as well.

8)Visiting Morocco: I was there for two weeks in November. Facebook friends have already had to endure my photos, as have visitors to my Flickr site. The videos will be coming soon!

7)Being the victim of attacks carried out by Cllr Mick Henry: this really was fun! And thanks to the Labour Leader on Gateshead Council, who spent a large part of the council meeting in October attacking me, and constantly interrupting me, my profile and standing in my group went up significantly. Keep up the good work Mick!

6)Whale watching in the North Atlantic: early July saw me in the North Atlantic armed with binoculars to spot whales, east of Iceland.

5)Building the greenhouse: we built it on the allotment in January and February and immediately saw it go into crop production. The video I made about building it has been an incredibly minor success on YouTube in the US, for some odd reason.

4)Fiona Hall's re-election: I attended the Gateshead count for the Euro elections and we were all nervous about whether or not Fiona would hold on as Lib Dem Euro MP for the North East. I drove home after the count and waited only a few minutes for the result to come through. The UKIP surge we had feared had not been enough. And happily, Gateshead saw a higher share for the Lib Dems than the average across both the region and the UK.

3)Stokkur geyser: a must visit when in Iceland so I visited it in July. Don't worry if you miss it going up when you first arrive. It goes off every five minutes. Quite an amazing natural feature.

Joint first)Leaving Cowley St/Crops from allotment: these two are actually closely linked. I loved my job at Cowley St but I also had a long list of other things I wanted to do. June was, I felt, the right time to leave. Now I am heading for self-sufficiency, though we have plenty still to do. We are looking for more progress in 2010. And leaving Cowley St also means that I am able to put much more time into battling Labour in Gateshead!

Coming up soon, my negative highlights!
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