Friday, April 15, 2005

On the campaign trail

Regular readers will have noticed that the old diary has been a bit thin of late. As you can imagine, it's been a bit a week what with the Wedding of the Year (I hope Ken and Deidre make it this time) and the big event in Rome. To top it all, yours truly has been out in the hustings in the Battle Datsun Sunny chivving up support for my In Vino Veritas party.

It's been an endless round of kissing pensioners and promising free Werthers Originals to babies, without, I have to admit, much success. As you know, we are a compact group - me and El Magnifico, my Minister Without Cogent Thought. So I decide to co-opt Quentin from the PR company and Old Cove from the Planet Bollocks to help out with the manifesto.

We meet up at the Bar Rhumba for a drink with an umbrella to discuss tactics. Old Cove goes into one about focus groups and suggests a little 'blue sky thinking' about party values so that we can define the voter demographic. So I give them both barrels. At end of twenty minutes, it appears that I will not tolerate; children, foreigners, foreigners with caravans, young people or old people and I am in favour of; free pre-written essays for students, corporal punishment for people at the supermarket checkout without the correct change and a lifetime ban for drivers who hold everybody up in car parks waiting for someone to leave their space. OC and Quentin go into a huddle and come back with the result.

Apparently my target voter is a rather strange woman in Dungeness. I wonder if I can get her telephone number?

Monday, April 04, 2005

Grope dot com

I'm back from a few days away in my seaside retreat to find that all is not well at Camp Grope. For a start, the new web site and shopping experience is not online so I call up Quentin to get the latest. Apparently, there's been a big fall-out about how much to charge for the GROPE ROCKS! t-shirts and the web developer has had a hissy fit downing keyboards until everything has been sorted out.

I call an emergency meeting in the Bridge and Coda to see if I can retrieve the situation. Quentin turns up with a face like a smacked arse which doesn't improve when I point out that he's probably depriving a village of an idiot at this moment. This sends him off into girly sulk which doesn't help yours truly's cause one bit. At this point, Old Cove pitches up fresh from some skiing jaunt. Now normally, I find OC about as useful as a wrongly-dated Royal Wedding souvenir but for once, he comes up trumps by 'dear boying' Quentin back to some semblance of normality. Now we are back on track, I bring up the question of the web site launch date. I suggest this Friday which for some reason doesn't go down too well.


Is it me or does no-one have a sense of priority?