Being Police Commissioner versus Working in Jewsons

I had thought long and hard about voting in the Police Commissioner elections on Thursday. Like most people, it seems, I knew very little about the elections. I’d seen nothing about them and hadn’t a clue who was standing in them. The night before, I searched on-line and found a little tiny weeny bit about the two candidates standing in my region.

Their manifestos claimed aims of reducing crime (I wish someone had thought of that one years ago) and making better uses of budgets – like cutting 3 Bobbies on the Beat and sticking a Commissioner in in their place. I think the website had mixed up their manifestos with some that some Year 7 students had knocked up in a Society lesson.

I recognised the two names and so decided to sleep on it as to whom I would vote for and find a little bit more out the next day.

It came to me in the middle of the night that I had possibly spoken twice to the bloke’s brother* many years before and he had been quite nice, so that was positive. Then someone reminded me the next morning about the other candidate – “She’s the one who wouldn’t eat burgers…” and so my mind was made up for me.

I did vote and at 9.20 a.m. was only the second person in.

I decided to ask around and see what other people thought of the elections. “Nah – not heard anything about them,” seemed a common theme. Two people had spoiled their papers in protest (until I told them in my capacity of a former Poll Clerk, there was no point in doing this: their spoiled papers would not be counted as anything, and therefore their protest was a pointless exercise).

My favourite comment regarding the elections was from the woman who wished she had stood herself. “I’ve got quite a big family and I used to work in Jewsons, so I reckon I’d have won,” she said, miffed that she’d missed an opportunity of raking in £100K a year. And after seeing the majority of the winning candidate, I think she could have been right…

               

*I’ve since found out that he doesn’t have any brothers, so it must have been someone else’s brother.

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Communal living and eating other people's Alpen

Having just spent a few days at a family reunion, it dawned on me how much easier it can be to be in a small group with each person doing their fair share and the work just flying off the desk.  My siblings and I had all taken a day each to cook the main meal and had brought the breakfasts that we would choose to eat, but we also shared and shared alike in a way that we would never have dreamed possible when we were brawling children, fighting to exhaustion because one of the others had won the larger “half” of the cheese sandwich. By the end of the holiday, I was nigh a communist, thinking that I should take my rabble and go and join a commune somewhere and grow cabbages.

So on the way home, I was mulling over the merits – would it really be more productive to be in a commune? Would we all really work hard and fairly towards the common good – or was four days all that could really be managed before it would start to breakdown?

But as I drove along, I began to see the cracks – I had dined out on delicious Alpen and chocolate croissants, but had only brought Co-op-own rice crispies. I drank freely of my sister’s fine coffee, but had banked on my children just drinking water and so technically had no moral need to have brought squash or juice, despite them having slugged pints of the stuff.

          
It reminded me of a trip to Machynlleth’s Centre for Alternative Technology in the days when I was an ideological pup, full of nonsense and never really seated in reality. A dreamer of a friend and I wondered around the communal beds of luscious veg, admiring things we would find far too stringy in our own Sunday roasts. We wee’d in buckets and plotted how we could recreate the place in her garden full of dogshit and my back yard. As we sat on a roughly hewn bench and scoffed flapjacks, we decided this was the way to go.

But then we heard two women at the table next to us talking: they were obviously living and working at the centre, and they were bitching about another woman who wasn’t pulling her weight and had been found eating crisps the other day.

My friend and I returned home; I filled her kettle with too much water, drank her tea, ate her biscuits and then went back to my solitary pad having left my cup the floor and my plate on a shelf.

The conclusion about communal living has now been reached: it’s people like me that wreck communes. Me and people who eat bags of crisps.

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