Category Archives: Politics

I’d never buried a photo before. I was expecting it to feel awkward, odd even. Burying photographs was, in my mind at least, the past-time of the melodramatic.

But on this overcast autumnal Thursday morning it didn’t feel odd. It felt completely normal, completely natural, and as I found out, remarkably in common with others who have suffered the loss of miscarriage.

To understand how my wife and I got here I need to talk about a few months ago and the joyful surprise shock of finding out she was pregnant. It was certainly a surprise, but a very welcome one. The prospect of becoming first time parents is as exciting as it is utterly daunting. It is the sort of exciting that sits deep in your belly far away from the rationality of your mind.

Immediately however we were given words of caution. The pain in her gut we were told might be a sign of an ectopic pregnancy (we now think it was actually a symptom of endometriosis – a condition impacting around 2 million women in the UK alone and yet remains one of our societies many unspoken taboos).

There were however weeks, after which the possibility of an ectopic pregnancy was dismissed, where we could see a new life embedded into the womb, living, offering the promise of all that life could lay ahead of it.

There was one particular moment. A moment when my heart skipped a beat, when my life seemed to freeze for a second, when this gloop of cells that we had affectionately started referring to as ‘mischief’ showed a heartbeat, perhaps the most definitive sign of life. It is this moment that is both etched into my mind’s eye and also the one that is now printed on a piece of photographic paper decomposing in compost under an array of flowers.

As soon as we suspected a miscarriage was a possibility, my wife and I talked of a need we both felt to plant something, to grow something, to have something to mark this oh so sad possibility. At the time though I thought this was just us – something that said more about my wife and me than about the experience we were going through. It turns out however that this is remarkably common.

One of the wonderful staff at the hospital who talked to us with the patience and understanding that we needed gently dropped into conversation that decades earlier she had planted a tree. Her main reflection now is that she worries she wouldn’t be able to take it with her if she were ever to move house.

The hospital staff also gave us the compassionately crafted NHS literature on miscarriage which has a whole section on the prospect of burying something to mark the loss and that many also marked this by planting something nearby.

And so this is how we found ourselves folding a small photo of a gloop of mischief and placing it down into pot of moist compost. Mischief was measured in millimetres but sits with a magnitude hard to explain in our hearts. I can’t explain why but it feels right knowing that mischief is buried deep in moist compost surrounded by bulbs of snowdrops, daffodils and bluebells with a medley of late summer flowers sitting on top like a multi-coloured crown.

This is just my reflection of something that has happened to my wife and I, but one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage – which left me thinking how I had lived three decades of my life without hearing someone talk about it. I hope that if someone who has experienced a miscarriage reads this that they feel reassured that they are not alone.

Campaigns are brewing in the lead up to the General Election 2015. Have a look at these two mugs produced by the Labour Party and the Green Party respectively:

In the age of easy photo editing I checked the best I could to make sure this wasn’t a spoof. Apparently it isn’t.

This is what politics in the UK is reduced to – a mug’s game!

Update – some asked how I knew this wasn’t a spoof. I don’t know for sure but they both seem to have the product up on their websites (you can purchase either mug from here (Labour) or here (Green)) and I even asked a sitting (Lib Dem) MP (see here).

I moved into a flat in the constituency of Bristol West at the start of February – 3 months before the General Election.

It is, on first glance, a safe Lib Dem seat. Bristol West has a well respected and liked local MP (Stephen Williams) who is defending a majority of over 11,000 (48% of the vote – up from 39% in 2005).

But these are turbulent political times. The Lib Dems have nose-dived in the national polls hitting lows of 6% (averaging over a range of polls over the last few months 7% – just 1% ahead of the Greens), and significantly the Greens who are on a relative ‘Green surge’ have picked Bristol West as their second target seat (after Brighton Pavilion) meaning some money and, more importantly, time is being spent in the area.

With this in mind it is worth remembering it is Labour who came second in 2010 with 28% of the vote. And with about a third of 2010 national Lib Dem voters saying they are planning to vote Labour, compared to around 15% who say they plan to vote Green, Bristol West has become a genuinely open and interesting three way race.

Despite this, Lord Ashcroft (who is the one doing the most comprehensive polling of marginal seats) has deemed it to be safe enough to not yet be looked at in his surveys – a real shame in my mind.

So, with a distinct lack of any real data to judge life by I thought I would do a bit of citizen journalism and start recording the amount of contact, either face to face OR through literature, I get from the local parties.

One month in these is how things stand…

The Lib Dems are flying high in my Bristol West election league table. 3 leaflets in a month – each a different format (one traditional ‘focus’ newsletter, one red themed local newspaper, and then a green themed glossy election leaflet) – is a high ratio, it will be interesting to see if they maintain such a pace.

If the traditional electioneering adage of it all being about the literature turns out to be true, then Stephen Williams is well placed to being returned as MP for Bristol West.

As, I would add, is the neighbouring Conservative MP, Charlotte Leslie, who has put out this magazine style piece of literature that is a master class in election leaflet writing.

But, that said, we know it is not just about the literature. Although no one has yet knocked on my door (when I have been in) I have seen the Greens out and about twice already and have yet to spot any other party door-knocking and speaking to residents (although I am sure they will be doing it somewhere in the constituency).

The importance of door-knocking cannot be under-estimated. Lib Dem campaign strategist Mark Pack quotes Labour’s Cllr Rodwell in his book ‘101 ways to win an election’ on the importance door-knocking played in winning back seats in Barking from the BNP where they estimate they knocked on some 160,000 doors in the campaign.

Their success reflected their hard work! Meeting candidates and having that face-to face interaction is undoubtedly important to the electorate.

Now, before people get their knickers in a twist, I understand that this is not methodologically sound. I understand that local campaigners might well be out and I might just not spot them. All this is, is an interesting observation of the goings on in and around the constituency in which I live in the lead up to a very tight election.

Less than two months to go!