Wahey! The day of the red-trousered philanthropist!

Well it's happened.  Bristol now has a mayor - and he wears red trousers!

For years we've been dogged by the crappiest council in the country.  They hate cars.  Intent on introducing controlled parking zones.  Let developers cram too much housing into too small a space without thinking about all the associated cars that brings, or the infrastructure needed for all these extra people. 

Every year they are surprised by the number of children seeking school places that they didn't know would be applying.  For goodness sake, these 4 year-olds didn't just spring out of nowhere.  They were all born somewhere and they're all known to health visitors and doctors.  Couldn't they just ask them how many were on their books? 

Similarly with secondary schools - well nearly all of the would-be new intake come from existing primary schools, so you know where they all live and where the schools need to be.  God help us if they ever needed rocket science.

They make it impossible to park in town.  They let FirstBus run a really awful bus service, too expensive, buses don't go where you actually want to go - and then wonder why Cribbs Causeway shopping centre (which is actually in South Glos) attracts all the shoppers.

So yes, finally, we have someone in control who can think outside the box and who actually GETS THINGS DONE.

Not much to live up to, eh?  Go, get 'em, George!

(Oh and because of the mayoral elections, we have the highest PCC turnout in the country which now has also gone to the independent on the second count with twice as many votes as her contender)

How many days to Christmas?

With nearly six weeks to go, the trees are on sale already.  Lucky they're growing ones in pots.  Any for sale round your way yet?

Wow! Gromits!

Last year here in Bristol we had Wow! Gorillas in which 61 gorillas were decorated by artists and placed around the city. 

Some of them arrived by boat.  A gorilla flotilla.  They were great fun, and a lot of photos were taken with them.  Every time you saw one, you smiled.

Now it seems we shall be sporting Gromits next year.

Which reminds me of a day back in 2005, when I was walking back from school and saw what was obviously a huge fire in the distance.  And that afternoon, when the wind was blowing gently in our direction, all the ash came with it.  The top of our black dustbin was thick with it.  And then we discovered where the fire had been. 

It was a bit like when it's been snowing and there's a blanket of snow over everything.  Except this time it wasn't snow, it was Gromit's ashes.

In other news, we've voted for the man in the red trousers.  Let's hope he wins.

Coming to a multi-storey carpark near you....

Sunday night in Cardiff was cold and raining, but a lot of fun was had here . 

You can see my daughter coming second at 3' 17".  For once, not much mud.


(Apologies for the advert on the front, you'll have to click and close that)

And here's another one in which she features (the moody looking girl on a high-viz bike at 55" in)

So SAD

It's cold and miserable and I feel cheated.

Outside it's raining, there's a north-easterly wind (never a good thing) and it's all very grey.  When the clocks go back on Sunday I shall probably put the heating on.

I feel cheated because we haven't had a proper summer this year, so there's no sense of crops harvested, gathered in ready for the winter.  There's no sigh of satisfaction.

There's a deficiency of SUNSHINE.

Hibernation, anyone?

To continue the chicken theme ...

Living in Bristol, we get a fair amount of traffic news relating to motorways, but today it reached a new high/low/level of bizarreness(is that a word?  Should it be bizarrity, or something?)

To the north of us we have the M4 with important people travelling east (towards London) and people travelling west, getting away from it all (into Wales, albeit at a cost - the Severn bridges cost going west). 

And then to the left of us (well, if you look at a map it is on the left) we have the M5.  There are those (misguidedly) going north, ready to encounter the motorway system around Birmingham, Spaghetti Junction and all - this is a really shitty bit of road system.  And then there are those going south.  Apart from usual motorway traffic, these are all holidaymakers. 

It's usually pretty obvious when something has blocked the M5 as the alternative route (the A38) is at the bottom of our road.

But today, the excuse was a little out of the ordinary ...

"M5 at standstill due to 1,000 chickens on road"

http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/M5-standstill-1-000-chickens-road/story-17089930-detail/story.html


(I'm sorry, the link should have been under the headline, as it were, but Blogger's playing up and won't display anything other than the actual link - technology, d'oh!)

Sorry, who did you say you are?

On Saturday I went to the library and on the way there I met a friend of one of my children, accompanied by her boyfriend. 

"Hello, what are you doing here?", I asked as I thought she should have been at uni and it seemed a bit early in the term for coming home for the weekend.

She launched into a detailed description of their plans for the day and I began to think I was not talking to who I thought I was. 

But it was only when she said "it's dad's birthday today" I realised that I was talking to C, a contemporary of my elder son, who's just lost her adoptive mother recently to cancer and not A, my daughter's friend who has never known her father (coming from a family of six children, all with different fathers - well apart from the twins, that is).

It occurred to me that it was interesting that both girls look so alike, both are pretty and lively and very intelligent, and they come from such vastly different backgrounds.

Still, luckily I don't think she realised that I thought she was someone else.