.. Discuss.

As you may have noticed, this is a personal blog which rarely - if ever - talks about the substance of my day job. That’s for a very good reason, one that has been highlighted today by this article from Welsh Bloggers.

I wouldn’t compare myself to Daran other than, potentially, in the height stakes, but we do both spend a lot of time in Cardiff Bay, in and around the Assembly, its Members and staff. Unlike Daran, I was already blogging before I stepped into the role I now have (or rather shaped, to answer a devolved system which had been undervalued to that time by those for whom I work) and have been incredibly conscious of mixing business and pleasure. Whilst Daran’s work involves giving views on policy and politics to different organisations and the media, mine is very much to deliver a prescribed message. As such, the danger of alienation of someone who next week could be the new spokesperson on something rather important would be significantly career limiting.

I also enjoy the company of many of the people I work with - mostly in the pub to which the article refers. This leaves me able to pick up the tittle-tattle of the Bay as I think I’m perceived as either a safe pair of hands in not passing information to other politicians or so unimportant that any form of candour is not necessary. I very often know about a story the day before it breaks - or invariably doesn’t - in the media, but would not dream of coming home and blogging about it.

I could, of course, have established a separate, political blog, breaking the stories and hiding behind a shield of anonymity. However, that’s not me. I may never put my full name, rank and serial number across IARIW, but it doesn’t take a genius to work out who I am - if a person wants to. I know that there are people who I know in both my personal and professional lives who read this. However, they tend to be the ones who know me quite well already. This blog is never going to be happened upon by someone who I would rather not know about my life, who then puts two and two together and comes knocking on my office door.

However, in a week like we’ve just had, it is almost impossible to say anything on a blog that doesn’t refer to the political scene. It was the same for me when the Iraq War began. I couldn’t countenance not talking about it here. To do anything but voice my opposition would have been denying the person I am. I may not have had any influence - the fact that, as a country, we are still talking about Iraq and the horrors of life there - says that the “shock and awe” tactics I blogged about in the early days had little effect either in that country or, in a positive way, on the countries who took part. Anyway, I’ve become sidelined, as I so often do (right now, I should be writing invitations to the young mans 5th birthday - call this an avoidance blog, if you will) so will get back to the point.

Last summer, news broke of scandals within the Welsh Assembly over expenses. Many were admonished for “outlandish” spending on their second homes in the Bay and particular how they had been furnished. This has, however, now paled into insignificance against the major fraudulent activities that have been seen in Westminster, with all its flipping disgraces. I’m sure there is more to come, after all the European Parliament is another can of worms that I am amazed hasn’t had more focus with the elections so close.

However, What worries me most about the events over the last week or so is not the acts themselves, it is the effect it’s had on the British public. To lose faith in democracy because of those who seek and win election is a crime against ourselves. A wiser person than I once pondered that those who put themselves forward for political office should be immediately barred from holding it. There is some merit in this. Today, politics is seen as a career that a person can enter almost straight from college - probably via a job within a political party or politicians office. There is no real life experience and for some, perhaps more importantly, no campaign experience either within student politics or civic society. It’s about keeping your nose clean - unless it’s brown from the position taken behind those in power.

Politicians need to be vocal and have views that they believe in so forcefully that they are willing to stand apart from their party and protest loudly. Preferably these should reflect the will of their electorate - or be so much part of themselves that this electorate knew what they were taking on when they cast their vote. I will always applaud those, from whichever party, who are brave enough in todays political culture to move away from towing the party line. There are few in Wales and, it would appear, even fewer in Westminster. What I think will now be interesting is how many politicians decide, with the lines of funding seriously curtailed, that another career becomes more welcoming. How many will not seek re-election when the time comes - either in Wales or at Westminster?

There is the possiblity for this crisis of confidence in our political system to result in a new way of delivering real results for the population at large and, if it is not grasped, we could see a culture of low voter turn-out and scandal-ridden politics that I - and many others - will find increasingly difficult to defend. I spend many evenings persuading friends that voting in the latest election - or becoming involved in some campaign or other - is an important activity to squeeze into their often already over-burdened lives. “Why bother?” is something I hear often - and over the last few days I have been contacted by a few people for my thoughts or to remonstrate that this is why politics is such a low priority for them. I’ve managed, to date, to maintain an arguement, but unless real change is forthcoming, I don’t know for how much longer I can do this.

I am a cynic at heart but with an over-riding belief that a person is good - and it is only their experiences that change this. This episode is a wake up call for the good in us all, and politicians in particular. We all need to take responsibility for our actions - and if we are not able to defend them to ourselves, realise that we need to take stock and change. The Fees Office should never have passed out information, or paid on expenses, that were clearly bending the rules. However, they were asked the questions and given the receipts from people who should have stopped, thought and realised that they are representing people - real people - who have to pay their own way in life and manage their out-goings to match their incomes.

I live in hope of a better political future for us all. For an anorak wearing political geek like myself, the last week has given me plenty to Twitter about. However, I’d really rather be using my time to benefit society at large - through arguing for better policy and greater awareness - than wasting it on this.

Hopefully, next week, I can go back to moaning about the ironing and the lack of good TV. After all, politics has no place on this blog…

PS - With apologies to Saint Billy of Bragg for the bastardisation of his song titles…

Well, it’s been a while again. Good news is the financial side of my life is now looking much more settled - and I got a good judge, who was extremely fair and not asleep. My faith is somewhat restored!

It’s been quiet otherwise. The build up to - and come down from - my “day in court” was exhausting. My sleep pattern is all over the place, which is not so great when you have a full-time job and a small child, who doesn’t yet understand the importance of lie-ins (how I long for those teenage years when, with any luck, he’ll seldom leave his bed). Friends have kept me entertained, but it’s all been fairly low-key.

The realisation hit me quite recently that basically all of my socialising now takes place around my work. Over the last couple of months, for instance, I’ve spent four weekends at party conferences. Of course, I’ve had a certain level of fun, but it’s not the same as playing Spoof, like a load of teenage binge drinkers (instead of middle-aged ones) down the local on a Saturday night. Why the purchaser didn’t realise that adding a Cinzano to a Baileys would cause curdling is still beyond me - and why the youngster with us drank it is still somewhat of a mystery, on partly explained by his student status!

I enjoy being out with work colleagues, in the main. There is always stimulating conversation - mostly political in nature - and the latest Bay gossip to catch up with. However, not having a real social life, with real friends has certainly taken its toll. I blame this completely for last Saturdays antics and the fact I didn’t role into bed until after 4am!

I get some incredible perks with my job. Not only travel around the UK, which I really enjoy, but the added pleasure of entertainment from some real class acts. A couple of weeks ago I got to hear Dara O’Brien give his take on evidence-based medicine. Now, to the passer-by that would mean very little, but trust me, to this audience it was hilarious! In fact, he was probably the best comic I’ve seen in a very long time. Mixed with meeting Bruce Grobelaar on the same evening, I went to bed with a rather wide smile on my face, only slightly cracked by the £17.49 I was charged for a vodka and diet coke and Baileys. Thank goodness I was on expenses!

The next couple of weeks are quiet for me. That’s not to say that I will have hours to waste surfing the web, as so many “office workers” seem to if the woman being interviewed on Radio 5 was to be believed this evening (did you even know it was “Office Workers Week”?). There is plenty to do, but it’s not as frantic as the last couple of months. Of course, I have a fifth birthday party to organise, so my evenings will be consumed with invitations - and gathering responses - before the long day of balloon blowing, sandwich making and the all too difficult job of settling a 5-year old hyper on too many chocolate biscuits and new Wii games.

August has potential to be a busy month already. A holiday booked, that has taught me never to mentally switch off whilst my parents are talking, three tickets to see Walking with Dinosaurs, which the 5-year old has no idea about, but which my friend in her 40’s is already bouncing in her seat with excitement every time it’s mentioned, a break in lovely West Wales with the most wonderful women, capped by U2 at the Millennium Stadium. I may even have a party - but that will be early September, in celebration of my birthday and, hopefully, a decree absolute.

Between now and then, who knows. Some good times, some bad, I’m sure, but that’s life and I’ve just got to learn to get on and live it.

Back soon..

I do have a review of The Smiffs gig on Saturday night, but I also have a huge pile of ironing. Needless to say, despite the shortened set (hope you’re better Paul), it was a great night.

For tonight only, the ironing wins…

When you write a story, you usually begin at the beginning and move forward. Where there is a beginning, you also believe there has to be an end. A resolution to what has come before and, therefore, a reason to start then keep going. The last few years of this life haven’t moved in straight lines, rather twisted and turned in the wind, the direction of which has been in someone elses gift.

It all fell apart on Thursday, 24th May 2007. Things weren’t great before that, but there was movement forward, with only the occasional detour. On that fateful Thursday, arriving home from work early to prepare for a formal dinner that evening, the post was collected from the mat and opened. Contained within was a form for a loan against the house. At first you assume it to be one of those random things you get sent, junk mail from desparate companies addressed to desperate people. But, there was too much information. The form was basically complete, with information that had to be given and couldn’t have been researched. It didn’t take long to work out why.

There had been a double life, one filled with prostitutes, affairs and lies. It all came out that night. That had to be it, because it couldn’t be worse. Some actions were, even to an untrained eye, illegal and had to be addressed.

The next week is a blur. It was The Boy’s third birthday the following Wednesday and what should have been a happy occasion saw us in hospital, with a social worker in tow, seeing the darling child being examined by a consultant. What couldn’t get any worse had. The surface was merely scratched. The betrayal was complete in ways you can’t believe possible of someone.

Fortunately, The Boy was superficially uninjured. Mental scars may follow, but physically no damage was done.

Despite being bailed at his first court hearing, two weeks later he was remanded in custody. The full horror of his activities began to come to light. The impossiblities of juggling social workers, the police, CEOP’s officers, a distraught child (whose father had disappeared overnight), work and family and friends who were so shocked some cried, others were physically sick, became the norm.

On the 22nd February 2008, he was convicted of 22 crimes and given an indeterminate life sentence. The shock waves reverberate around your world and the press begin hammering at the door, because the Judge believes its “in the public interest” to publish the address. You are as much a prisoner as he - afraid to leave the house and grappling to hold on to some form of reality as the world is splintered.

As time moves on, you try and get a life back together. You try to make plans. You try to celebrate lifes little victories. You do it not for yourself as much as for the people around you. The people who need to see progress being made. You do it for the small child, still bewildered at the loss of his father as well as coming to terms with the world around him, made so much harder by the disability he carries.

Then, you see a life-belt. A process that means that you can close one chapter and hopefully move onto the next. You grab hold of it and pin your hopes upon it. You have faith in a system and work within it, completing every step and mounting every hurdle. After completing reams of paper and opening your private life to others, there is a glimmer - a date where this starts to come to an end.

You don’t sleep for 10 days before. You live on a mixture of caffeine and nicotine. You work, you strive for normality for the child asleep in the small bed.

When finally the days comes, you stand outside an anonymous building, sick to your stomach. You prepare yourself to see the man you loved for the first time in nearly two-years, not knowing what to expect. You worry that you’ll break down in tears. You worry that, if you don’t, that will cause more damage than doing it. You worry about putting one foot in front of the other. And then..

And then nothing. You’ve adhered to the system. He hasn’t. The Judge makes an order that stretches the process an extra couple of months - nothing to him, a blink, a couple of rounds of golf and some evenings at the theatre - but a lifetime to you.

And so you sit, cigarette in hand, and begin to type. It isn’t the full story. It doesn’t have a real start and it certainly doesn’t have an end, but you carry on. The anger rises within for the first time and you smash your hand into the wall. It causes no-one pain but yourself, but it distracts you from the pain within. It’s not a solution, it’s probably not even a good idea. For today, though, it works.

Tomorrow you’ll smile again. You have to. If not, whats the point in it all? There will be an end, it will come and you have to keep that belief. The life-belt is still within reach and you stretch to grasp it before you sink.

And, like so much else, this remains to be continued.

My Saturday nights usually consist of watching crap television. With a child under five, this means Total Wipeout, which (in the BBC’s words, not mine) is a programme where “twenty contestants take on one of television’s largest and most extreme obstacle courses”. I spend the programme hiding behind the cushions on the sofa, imagining the horrific injuries being caused by the biggest balls on television (and that includes adult only channels), whilst The Boy rolls around laughing. I thought this was an under five thing, until my boss - a sensible man, despite his West Walian roots - recounted the latest episode, with tears of laughter forming in his eyes. It’s a bloke thing, obviously.

Anyway, this Saturday night will not concentrate on keeping The Boy awake long enough so that he’ll consider 6.30 Sunday morning as an inappropriate time to bounce on my bed. Instead it will be all about getting ready to enter the sweat-pit, also known as The Sub Club, and dance like a lunatic to the best music ever written.

The Smiths divide people. They are the Marmite of the music world. No-one “quite likes” The Smiths. There are fans and then there are the rest. People who can’t see the poetry of the lyrics. People who don’t see the uplifting quality of the music. People like My Dear Friend, who I’m sure will be adding his comments below at the first opportunity…

I remember listening to The Smiths on John Peel, with a transistor radio stuffed below my pillow in a pastel bedroom in the mid-1980’s. I was hooked instantly and like Peel himself, could see the humour in Morrisseys words. They weren’t depressing, as my friends then - and since - thought. To me, Coldplay are depressing (well, the early albums anyway). Radiohead had their moments too. But, The Smiths, they were a band that could see me through. Best of all - back then - my parents hated Morrissey’s voice with a passion and that was enough for me.

I tried to get The Boy into The Smiths whilst he was still embryonic, placing headphones on my bump and playing tracks to him. When he arrived early, I joked that he wanted to arrive in time to watch Morrissey at Glastonbury. He did. It was on the TV and he was more interested in being fed (and to be fair, basically unable to focus), but he was listening. I asked him the other day whether he liked Morrissey’s music. He asked if he was the one who did the advert music for Morrissons. I despaired. Then, last night in the car, Morrissey Threw “his” Arms Around Paris and The Boy, without prompting, pronounced that it was good. The clouds lifted, the rain cleared and we basked in the glow of a new morn. Well, not quite, but it was a moment to remember.

I have some original Smiths vinyl sitting in my loft. I also have a record player (remember them - the pure pleasure of putting on an album and placing the needle, carefully, and listening to the clicks and background noise as it moved towards the first track - ah!). However, of late, I have been listening to my music on computer and whilst I’ll happily re-order other albums in playlist, dropping tracks that I never quite “got”, The Smiths are still played in their original form. My brain rejects any new formations - and I’ve even had issues with some of the recent compilation albums, expecting track a, whilst track b appears.

Anyway, I digress. Saturday is about me, The Smiffs and rather more vodka than would be recommended by the Chief Medical Officer. It will come at the end of a week where I:

* briefed - and then re-briefed - politicians in Wales so new to their roles that they had trouble getting to grips with the basics of health policy.

* spent a day in London trying to persuade people that Wales was important - and its views as relevant as those of the rest of the UK.

* watched a debate that I had influenced and felt, despite the final vote, that I had got a few people to understand the points I was trying to make.

* tried to make sense of policy in Wales on research and development, which is different to the UK and not in a positive way.

* had to face my ex- for the first time in nearly two-years (well, that’s later today and he might not turn up, but it’s not the point and I haven’t slept properly for 10 days).

So, if the vodka flows, if the dancing is wild and if the singing is off-key, I think I deserve some latitude. It’s been a tough week already - and who knows how I’ll feel by tonight.

My ex- didn’t like The Smiths. Perhaps I should have realised back then, but what difference would it have made? None.

Don’t say you haven’t been warned….

New-ish line-up, but just as good (I’ve been told).  The wearing of shoes which don’t slip on beer puddles (and sweat) is probably advisable.

And, while we’re about it, the latest single is sounding fab.  He’s on form, which is never a bad thing…

Hoorah for Emily Dubberley (post dated 14th January 2009, but no linkage).

I worked with Emily some years ago now.  What she says in this post - in reaction to a somewhat stereotyped article from someone who should know better, surely - is spot on.

Comments welcome….

Long time, eh?  I made a pact with myself that I wouldn’t write until I either had something interesting to say or I was generally more cheerful.  We’re at the end of January now and neither has happened.  Not that I’m crying into my meal for one every evening or anything, and there have been some really good days, but nothing so mind blowing I thought about breaking my silence.  And then, you just get out of the habit of writing.  Or you are so knackered with all the writing you are doing elsewhere (work, in my case) you just can’t be arsed.

However, now I have a reason to write.  It’s work avoidance!  I have a day off and a list of things to do thats longer than my arm, but what am I doing?  Writing nothing on here…  Go figure, eh?

So, over the last few months, this is what I’ve learned:

• Gene Puddle at Christmas.  The best;
• Drunk texting never ends well;
• My family and other animals?  No shit.  We are a weird family;
• Young women in the Gene Puddle are all Amazonian;
• Goldschlager is dangerous, particularly if you have more than one;
• You can take the boy out of the social club, but you can’t take the social club out of the boy;
• Some people are just thick.  Unfortunately, they are the ones in power;
• I give a good cwtch.  It’s official;
• I’m not the only one who worries about my parenting skills.  It’s reassuring;
• Facebook means my friends and I no longer speak in full sentences.  Status updates are enough;
• No Killers tickets for next month.  Boo;
• I’ve still to see an episode of X-Factor.  I’m proud of that;
• I thought I sang in tune when drunk.  This is patently not true;
• The Wonderstuff, 20 years on, are as good as ever.  Even though Miles is follically challenged, he’s still gorgeous;
• Gloves and scarves are mandatory this winter.  For some of us, hats aren’t;
• When you look forward to something too much it always disappoints.  Dr Who.  Christmas Day.  Say no more;
• When you look forward to something just enough it’s always great.  Gavin and Stacey.  Christmas Eve.  Say no more;
• People in new relationships are far too cheery for us mere, single mortals;
• Mushroom sandwiches with mustard are the way forward;
• Board games aren’t as boring as they used to be.  I think it may be the addition of vodka;
• Watching friends play Wii Family Trainer “Mole Stomper” drunk is funny.  Really funny;
• Style on Trial has made me realise that I’ve never really been “in fashion”.  Ever;
• Dating sites are full of very scary men who think they are funny.  They aren’t;
• Men who don’t text back are all wankers;
• Obama’s inauguration nearly had me in tears.  Nearly, I said;
• I have seen only benefit from the credit crunch.  Mortgage is less.  Petrol is less.  Then again, I still have a job;
• New Morrissey is as good as old Morrissey.  No question;
• Wales is a country.  It is not a region.  When will people in London understand this?  Never, I’m thinking;
• Liverpool FC are like a good date who lets you pay the bill and then kisses you on the cheek.  Please God, not the Scum for the title.  I can’t take it;
• If you think you’ve had enough to drink, you probably have.  This has never stopped me having another one, but it probably should have;
• You can cook too many sprouts - post-Christmas sprout curry was, well, interesting.

So, what have you learnt?

Seen on the two hour journey back from a meeting this evening in traffic jams:

One woman removing facial hair with tweezers

A couple having a blazing row - two hands off the steering wheel and on head several times

One man reading a newspaper across the steering wheel and talking into a mobile lodged between shoulder and ear

More people using mobiles that weren’t hands free than I could keep up with

A lot of people smoking - which is something I can’t do when driving and am in awe of

One woman eating a banana

Two men in a builders van roaring with laughter - presumably at her nibbling (there was gesticulating)

A couple with the woman driving and him asleep in the passenger seat.  She didn’t look happy

and other assorted nonsense.

I was the woman - with MP3 on random play - singing along very loudly.  In other words, the one you thought was a nutter…