canvassed

Actually had a canvasser knock on my door yesterday evening. Well, a leafletter - a polite, well scrubbed young man, handing out little flyers for our incumbent Tory MP. I was in a rush so simply smiled and said no thanks. Anyway, it's not proper canvassing unless it's freezing rain in the middle of December. 

Aside from a single house on Tuffley Lane with its garden fence shrouded in the new mock-nationalist colours of our local Labour hopeful, that's the first hint I've seen around here that there's anything resembling an election coming up in a couple of weeks. On which note I don't know why, but I have a distinctive distrust of any political party that feels it needs to be so unnecessarily up front and centre with our national flag in its branding. It smacks of populism, and that just makes my hackles rise.

I guess I'm a little disillusioned with politics these days. But that's probably a healthy state to be in.

I almost felt sorry for the Tory flyer guy, and wish I'd had a little more time to chat to him. If only to say how I admired his nerve for volunteering as a poster boy for the debacle of the last decade and no, I'd never vote for them but appreciated the effort he'd made in knocking on my door.

Maybe if his candidate Richard Graham defected from the Tories and stood as an independent. I actually quite like the guy, just not his political allegiance, which I can't help but worry could be a direct tell as to his moral character. Or maybe if he went full on political survival mode and switched to Labour. I mean, if they'll take Natalie Elphicke, they'll take anyone these days. Anyone to the far right of the old New Labour's politics, anyway.

The photo at the top was a snap I took of the band that followed us at our first gig last Saturday in Yate. We hung around to watch them as we had an hour to kill before we had to to get to our next gig in neighbouring Thornbury. I took the photo because I was admiring the guy's guitar, a PRS like mine, and wanted to see what model it was; so I zoomed in hoping I could see the branding on the headstock or the detailing on the body. The resolution isn't quite good enough.

But I quite like the photo. Very much captured the mood of the afternoon. It was a great gig. As was the one that followed later that evening.