Campaign Trail – Day 3

Like anyone with two or more jobs, most of my yesterday was spent doing those jobs.

Most of my time was spent doing my day job – evaluating applications to the grantmaking charity I work for and making my recommendations, via a monthly report to my trustees, to be sent to them in the first week of May. This report grows to well over 120 pages each nonth by the time I send it to trustees for discussion. There is no let-up to this day-to-day effort, because that’s my main job, and I’m committed to it. Because it does good things.

The context here is that all grantmaking charities are reporting a disproportionate increase in applications as a direct result of these times of austerity, an austerity which is not getting better, contrary to the government’s protestations that things are on the up, despite the fact that those hard-working people the Tories always refer to actually being those who are suffering most from cuts, income falling in real terms, healthcare and education faltering and failing.

The rest of my time yesterday, while it was still sunny, was spent answering my writer’s correspondence, mentoring a young would-be writer in the West Country, worrying over the fact that I wouldn’t be able to attend the Parish Council meeting in the evening as a member of the public because I’d already made a commitment to two of my daughters, a long time ago, to take them to see The Wombats at Brixton Academy (and bought the tickets on the very same day). More of my view on that meeting and the decision taken at it by the Parish Council to support the Grove Farm development in another post.

Time slides by when thus occupied, and it was with some surprise that I heard the front door open at 4 p.m. and the children come home from school. I had been at my desk since just after seven (except with my customary 20 minutes break at breakfast and lunch to indulge myself in reading a book – John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener and Hilary Mantel’s A Greater Place of Safety being my reading matter at the moment). And then I went to London, only to be let down once again by the privatised mess that is the railway system, and finally got home after 3 a.m.

Of the village I saw or heard little, just sensing a tension around the streets that had possibly not been there the day before. And a sense of resignation, that politics will be played with all of us, be that at national or at local level, because it’s not money that’s the root of all evil. The full quote is “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

Promoted by Richard Pierce-Saunderson of Spring Cottage, Church Street, Stradbroke, Suffolk, IP21 5HT.