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December 12, 2005

Hello sunshine, come into my life

" 'tis such fools as you that makes the world full of ill-favour'd children" - Rosalind, As You Like It, Act III, Scene V

Hello children, welcome once again.

As the sun finds ever-new and exciting things to hide behind, and politics continues along its merry way, trying to stave off the inherent boredom through the aged medium of vacuous platitudes, I find myself thrust back into a veritable maelstrom of political gallimaufry, sadly much more akin to big black clouds than to big spectacular valleys of tranquillity.

Yet back I am, and the relative Antarctic coldness of our beautiful capital has now had just about long enough to freeze the blood in my veins to a sufficient degree to be able to cope with this all once again. An unfortunate side-effect of this rapid relocation does however appear to be an attack of the cliché, for go away and a week in politics is as long as a Blairite dramatic pause.

Attempting to make sense of everything that has happened in my short (and ethereally blissful) absence is manifestly futile. So I'm not going to bother. Instead I will assume that the world had the sense to save anything too exciting from happening until I was paying attention again.

In the meantime, an edited version of a comment on our very own forum has made it to the fore of the Independent's letters' page.

Well done Mr Patterson.

However, I still have reservations over the ideas that a) there is such a clearly observable 'left of centre progressive consensus' (it's almost impossible to tell, the 'national reaction' to some of the bigger issues would suggest otherwise, the respective newspaper sales would scream otherwise and if the Lib Dems and the old Labour peeps were really that close in ideology to be crudely lumped together, they're sodding morons for not voting more tactically, and I'd rather not have a moronic consensus deciding anything*) and b) that switching to AV would be a good idea.

But, just as I held off from commenting too heavily before, I'm going to shirk it again. This is partly because I plan to treat it properly at some point, and partly because I have some MPs to provoke. It's also very cold.

*yes, I know.

Posted by pauldavies on December 12, 2005

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