Thursday, April 25th
My wife is taking the upcoming elections for the Parish Council extremely seriously, and has been out and about almost all day and every day campaigning. I do not really understand it: this is not a large village, and she is only standing for the Council, not for parliament. But when I asked her why she was running around like a blue-arsed fly (I probably should have phrased it differently, but there you go . . . ) she seemed to think I was being stupid, and said if a job was worth doing it was worth doing well, which I kind of agree with, but a few votes from the members of the yoga class she runs (“Oh Yeah! Yoga!”) and their friends and families will probably get her elected. I am pretty sure most people do not give much of a hoot about the Parish Council. Still, her being out of the house a lot has meant I have been able to spend most of the time watching the snooker World Championship on the television without her constantly interrupting and finding jobs for me to do around the house, although every time she comes in she makes a comment about how I’m “still watching that rubbish”. Anyhoo, over the weekend I will go out and stick some of my own campaign leaflets through a few letterboxes, and I hope it does not rain. But I do not think I have to go crazy and actually knock on doors or talk to people. I am quietly confident that my performance thus far on the Council, and in my role as the Advanced Round-the-clock Security Executive (ARSE) for GASSE (“Go Away! Stay Somewhere Else!”) – the organisation formed to stop our village hall being taken over by government lackeys and turned into a hotel for swarms of unfortunate foreigners – will be enough to get me re-elected.
Saturday, April 27th
What a [expletive deleted] horrible day! I went out to put some of my election campaign leaflets through some doors, and to start with it was damp and cold and miserable and it’s the end of April, for goodness sake! As if that was not bad enough, I got caught twice and dragged into arguments about the illegal foreign visitors. I had just stuck a leaflet through one letterbox and before I could turn around a lady opened the front door and said she “wanted a word”, and then had more than one. She banged on for about ten minutes about how she knew I was one of those selfish people who did not care what happened to the poor people who all they wanted was a safe place to live and how all we wanted was to make sure they did not come here and prevent us from doing yoga or playing Scrabble in the village hall and we should be ashamed of ourselves and what ever happened to British compassion and consideration for others? I think that was more or less the gist of it. Frankly, I was not really in the right frame of mind to discuss the matter, but it struck me that I ought to, so I tried to make the GASSE case that really the village hall and the village in general was never going to be really suitable to house the unwanteds and then it became clear that calling them the unwanteds was not a good move and I really should not have done it, because the lady’s husband had joined us by that time and he pointed out that it was what he called a very pejorative term and I had to apologise for it and eventually I had to say that we obviously differed in our opinions and I should really be going, and they said they would certainly not be voting for anyone who did not want to help people who needed help. Then I dropped a pile of leaflets in a puddle.
I was not in a good mood, to be honest, so when a chap who had his head under the bonnet of the car in his driveway and when I walked up his drive he looked up and asked what I wanted, so I handed him a leaflet, and he looked at it, then he looked at me, then he looked at the leaflet again, and then he said he knew I was “one of them busybodies who think they know what’s best for everyone” and his parents had come over from Eastern Europe back – I can’t remember when: in the Dark Ages? – and we should be welcoming people not turning them away when they needed our help, and I had already had this argument once and did not feel at all like having it again, but I had it again, with pretty much the same result, except this time the chap was a bit threatening, or at least that is how it felt, and he was pretty well-built plus he was holding a fairly evil-looking spanner and eventually I just weaselled my way away and felt about a foot tall. And it started raining.
Anyhoo, in mid-afternoon I abandoned the leaflet distribution and decided I had done enough and went home to watch the snooker and see if the commentators had come to any agreement about how to pronounce the Chinese lad’s name. My wife was out probably being nice to people.
Tuesday, April 30th
The Wheatsheaf has turned into a bit of a no-go area unless you fancy getting involved in some pre-election arguments, which I do not. Last night things got a bit heated between the GASSE and anti-GASSE contingents, the latter seeming to have been quite active in bringing out their supporters, who frankly I did not know even existed in any kind of significant numbers until now. I think I was not alone in thinking that the consensus in the village was that we feel very sorry for the plight of the foreigners but our village hall is not really a good place for them to be, and what about the Under 4s Playgroup, the Young Mother’s Knitting Society, the Scrabble Lunch, the Book Group, the Watercolour Art for All Afternoons Society, and my wife’s yoga class, never mind the occasional jumble sale or having The Ipswich Players come and do “Waiting for Godot”? The old cricket club pavilion proved to be far from satisfactory as an alternative venue while the hall was being repaired after the fire. But the anti-GASSE contingent have obviously been stirred up of late, and I think the young people might have had something to do with it. Anyhoo, I downed a quick half pint and came home for the snooker, because I am starting to think I want no part of it, especially as my wife has had her head turned – I do not know by whom – and she has declared for the anti-GASSE brigade, and says she has all her yoga ladies behind her, which I think is a bit of a slap in the face for me, to be honest, and the atmosphere in Chez Us has turned a bit frosty – at least, it has when she is there, which thankfully is not often at the moment. I think it is too late for me to withdraw my candidacy and opt for the quiet life, and it may be I am feeling unnecessarily negative, but be that as it may, until the election is over and things calm down I am staying away from the pub, and concentrating on the snooker.
James Henderson
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