Brighton Children’s Parade

<<Hola>>

I’m not very good at this internet thing. It’s supposed to be instantaneous but I’ve only just got round to posting these shots from May 1st. It’s Brighton’s Children’s Parade, which opened the festival. Tabby was a cactus. Obviously.

Is this chicken pox?

Out, damned spot!

Tabby has become a medical mystery. There’s an outbreak of chicken pox at her nursery, and she’s covered in spots. The thing is, she’s had chicken pox twice already – a mild outbreak as a baby, and then a proper dose less than a year ago with all the flu and the scratching.

For the last three days half a dozen or so chicken pox-like spots have flared up on her face, but none have erupted in poxy blisters, like what the chicken pox do. And there’s only a few of them.

The question is, is this chicken pox? The doctor looked and said they’re definitely not bites (the cat was in a cattery a week ago while we were on holiday), but at the same time they don’t seem to be virulent enough to be chicken pox… Still, my inclination is that if it looks like pox and there’s pox around, then it’s probably pox. Even if some people argue that that’s medically impossible.

Whatever it is, it’s probably innocuous. The problem being that if it’s chicken pox she can’t go to nursery and has to stay home, in which case I can’t carry on cutting my way through the backlog of work from the holiday.

At least I haven’t succumbed to thoughts of “well, if it’s not chicken pox, maybe it’s… something… worse…” Yet.

It’s a rich man’s game

For what they’re worth, here’s my thoughts on the election and, specifically, the failure of ‘Cleggmania’ to materialise in the polls.
It wasn’t the Sun wot hung it, it was the fact the party was unprepared for the recognition it got through the leaders debates.

Plenty of effort was put into Clegg’s personal campaign – battlebuses and media rooms and so on – but the Liberals don’t seem to have the rank and file organisation (yet) to achieve their aims. I was going to write more, then I discovered that Dan from the Empty Shops Network in Worthing had said everything I felt three weeks ago. Prescient git. Here’s his thoughts:

Clegg and the Lib Dems, however, don’t seem to have figured for becoming popular. There’s no system in place to get posters to local supporters, let alone mobilise those people into a mass door-knocking campaign. The Lib Dem party can’t maintain at a grassroots level the momentum it has at the top.

Read it, it’s a very good piece. All I’d add is that it isn’t just about having the mometum, it’s about having the money too. I don’t have the figures for the campaign overall, but in the first week contributions to Labour and the Conservatives were in the hundreds of thousands, while the LibDems – at the peak of their popularity – raised £20K. Probably enough for a day on the battlebus, in other words.