Well the papers are in and have been verified, and assuming I don’t pull out I’ll be facing re-election for Park Ward this May. Due to us having boundary changes I only got one year as being a councillor, and there is the possibility that if I get the 3rd largest vote I’ll be up again next year! Good luck to all the other LibDems from across the country, including my better half Heather Quinton, who will be joining me in defending Park with our good friend Stephen Morgan.
Today at full council the Liberal Democrat group refused to vote for the budget. The only reason for doing this was because the budget arrived on our doorstep on Friday 2nd March, after we had already departed for a weekend in Harrogate.
We found it totally unacceptable that such a serious document which was between 150-200 sides of A4 was sent out as an “item to follow”. If the controlling Labour group expect a debate, an amendment or even an alternative budget we expect next time to receive the paper at least two weeks in advance.
We had also decided that under the same reasoning, if the opposition Tory group had submitted or proposed any changes that this too would be voted against.
Several Labour councillors failed to understand our position, believing somehow that the few consultation sessions to decide what priorities should be made are equivalent to analysing the full and complete paper.
Let’s hope that next year, whoever is in control that we can have a serious debate about how we are to spend the tax payers’ money, by ensuring that everyone has a full chance to read and discuss the proposals with the relevant officers and political groups.
I’ve just come back from the studio of Radio Lincolnshire where I’m one of the main features of the Breakfast show. After getting readers of the Echo to help me out, I’ve now got the listeners of the local radio.
You can listen again today once the show finishes via the stations website.
I’m in the Lincolnshire Echo again. Second time in seven days! Something to do with my slight obsession with number plates.
Warning when walking down streets. Watch out for falling roof slates. They hurt, hurt lots. Not only that but they can cause a large amount of blood to appear.
Yesterday as I just left the doctors surgery a roof slate fell off of a house on Portland Street and straight on to my head. Blood was everywhere, we run into the Sun Cafe where kind staff, volunteers and locals called for an ambulance and kept pressure on the wound.
The ambulance staff got me to A&E quickly, and after spending 1.5 hours waiting a doctor examined me. Turned out that the cut which was first expected to be about 1-2cm turned out to be 10, I needed nine stitches and have wrecked a t-shirt from the massive blood stain.
I was kept in overnight and got almost no sleep as between the nurse checking my blood pressure every hour an old lady kept shouting in her sleep.
In the morning I was allowed to leave, but have to return next week for a check-up.
Not too sure if I can get away with saying that I can’t make it to work today.
Snow seems to have appeared around 8.30 and whilst it’s still going, at worse we seem to have 1cm of the white stuff.
Fingers crossed that the snow does disappear by next week, I need to fly out of East Midland for my birthday.
During this and last week the Lincolnshire Echo have been running a promotion with RyanAir to get 1p flights.
To get your cheap flight you need to buy 12 newspapers collecting the letters which appear each day. Next you need to rearrange these letters in to a 3 word passphrase to get the cheap flights via a special URL.
To put this offer to the test I went to the RyanAir website on the weekend to look at the price of flights if I booked them right now.
What did I find? The ability to book flights from 1p without the need for any Echo promotional code. My worry for the Echo readers is that they will wait until Saturday for the last letters to appear and then suddenly find all the cheap seats to have gone as other readers have got there first. To avoid this problem Heather and I booked two return flights to Dublin straight away all in for £67.96 from East Midlands Airport. Compared to the cost of getting a Saver Return to London of £105.40, it allows us to get a much nicer hotel room and hopefully we won’t have to stand all the way as well.
I have now discovered that trying to play CNPS in Hemel Hempstead is almost useless, whilst I can see a number 67 everyday, there just doesn’t seem to be the large quantity of valid cars, like Lincoln.
