East of England flood exercise

For the last two days I have been in a large room in Lincoln with two other Army Majors, senior representatives of the Lincolnshire's Constabulary, Lincolnshire Fire & Rescue Service, the NHS Trust, utility companies and representatives from the Environment Agency. We were all pretending that there was a massive flood along the east coast.

Similar control rooms were set up in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent and North Wales. This was a very large scale civil emergency exercise! There were a number of points that I took away from this:

1 The blue light services work very differently to the Army.
2 A lot of people need to be involved in a major incident like this.
3 It would take many months for the area to get back to normality.
4 Terrorism is not the only thing we need to worry about!

I was very impressed by both the scale of the exercise and the professionalism of the people taking part.

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A lorry rolled over on Lee High Road on Tuesday night creating a consternation at the Lee Green cross road. Yet again details are sketchy at the moment.

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The 10th of June may well go down in history as the date of the electoral cock up. The debacle in the all postal vote areas was bad enough but not to be out done Lee Green had its own piece of polling day drama. The polling station at St Winifred's School in Lee ran out of ballot papers at 8.30 in the evening, a number of people had to wait until more papers were brought out.

Some waited, some just didn't bother to vote.

I would have thought that the formula would be quite simple, take the number of received postal votes from the number of people on the electoral roll in that polling district and the remainder is the number of ballot papers that you need. Some one didn't get it right! The council are looking into it.

Keeping Busy

As you can imagine the tail end of the week was a busy period. The very late night on Thursday made Friday a bit tough. I am planning an "Employers' Evening" at the TA Centre in Bristol so most of the morning was spent doing the preliminary work for that. I found out that I have been nominated to take part in an emergency planning exercise in the East Midlands this week, it will exercise the emergency services and the armed forces in their ability to react to major flooding in the area. It should be interesting.

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On Friday afternoon Susie, Freddy and I drove up to Bury St Edmunds to spend the weekend. This was paid for by Susie's employer, she had won an incentive and a weekend away was the prize, very nice. This gave me the chance to spend "quality time" with Susie and Freddy, something I have had very little chance to do recently. The laptop was banned (hence no BLOG) and we all just relaxed. I had so much fun just being in the company of my family, we got Freddy back into a swimming pool and after a bit of hesitation he loved it. I have to thank my wife for this time together, for winning the trip, for organizing the hotel and for being wonderful.

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The results from the London elections were coming out over the weekend but I chose not to find out about them until we got back. Sunday evening was very interesting, Labour in meltdown, UKIP picking up a big anti EU protest vote and the Lib-Dems claiming great things of even the most modest of results. The news of Conservatives wasn't universally great but the overall picture is pretty clear, we are back!

Even the most partisan left winger would have to concede that these elections were very bad for Labour. The Conservatives now have the kind of lead that we need to win the next general election and I can't see what Tony Blair would be willing or able to do about that.

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As if my life was not busy enough we picked up a new puppy on Sunday, Rosie is an 8 week old German Shorthaired Pointer. She is generally very well behaved but like all young puppies does not like being left alone, even for a instant. She is still a bit boisterous and Freddy swings between being scared of her and wanting to cuddle her, they will have to get used to each other quickly as I leave them both alone with Susie while I go on exercise for two weeks with the Army. I apologize in advance to my long suffering wife.

Incident at Hither Green

As I was coming home last night, eagerly anticipating my chance to vote and the knocking up of Conservative supporters, I was stopped. Stopped by a calm and professional looking man in a high visibility vest at the corner of Nightingale Grove. Stopped from driving to my house, stopped from getting my polling card, stopped.

I don't get stopped all that often, I would imagine that in some countries of the world, at some points in time being stopped is a common occurrence. The closest that I come to being stopped is the delay I experience while security check my identity entering military or government establishments, I am delayed, never stopped.

Yesterday I was stopped. The reason? An explosion! At the moment with fear of terrorism omnipresent my first thoughts should have been "terrorists" but in fact it was "How am I going to get to my polling card?", I take my vote seriously.

At the time of writing details of the incident are still scarce, my understanding is that the explosion was caused by someone using an incorrectly connected propane bottle. This information was gleaned in a rushed conversation with my wife so may prove to be wholly inaccurate, I have looked for the story on the internet but nothing has been published yet.

Eventually I was allowed to go home, I got changed, picked up my polling card, voted and then spent the rest of the evening making sure we did well in the elections. The debrief over a pint seemed to indicate a good campaign, both Brian Chipps (Lee Green council candidate) and Gareth Bacon (Lewisham and Greenwich GLA candidate) looked exhausted, they have both been working very hard.

I stayed up to watch the election coverage on the BBC. Dimbleby and Snow making sense of the results are worth watching on their own. Seeing Labour ministers putting a brave face on what was an appalling result was better still. We won't find out how we have done locally until Friday afternoon, I'm feeling confident.

Mad dogs .........

It was the hottest day of the year so far. The sensible thing would be for me to have gone running early in the morning or late in the evening, I chose neither, I chose the hottest part of the hottest day. It started uncomfortably, as all my runs do, and then got steadily worse.

I had intended to run for around an hour, in the end I was only out for about half that time. I still hadn't stopped sweating at 7pm when I went over to Romford for the Battery training night. The training this evening? A run.

Military Planning

This weekend was my only non-political one for some time. The Saturday was spent looking at ways in which my TA regiment could increase its numbers, recruitment is the order of the day at the moment.

100 (Yeomanry) Regiment Royal Artillery (Volunteers) has provided quite a lot of troops to serve in Iraq over the last 12 months and the situation doesn't look as if it will change in the very near future. In order to maintain this level of support and to continue our training we need to make sure we are fully recruited.

The senior officers of the regiment had a recruitment planning meeting, there were maps, plans, minutes, decisions about where we could best utilize the limited time that we have etc. Very much like a political strategy meeting.
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Today is the 60th anniversary of the D Day landings. I'm in the UK this year but I went to the Normandy beaches about 8 years ago with the veterans of my regiment. When I went there was no big anniversary celebrations, no TV crews, no royalty, no politicians just a dozen or so old men in smart blazers and about the same number of serving soldiers.

On the trip out the young men from the regiment tended to keep together as did the veterans, there was no animosity just a lack of common ground and a difficulty in initiating conversation. After a few days, a few drinks and plenty of stories the invisible dividing line between the two groups had gone. I felt humbled by what these old men had done and how unpretentious they were, they did what they had to do and then after the war they went back to their usual lives.
Walking through the military cemeteries with these quite old men was easily the most moving experience of my life. The rows and rows of immaculate white headstones strike you first, then a story from a veteran about one of the fallen, then a tear shed.

The television pictures from Normandy brought these memories flooding back. I cried 8 years ago and I cried again today.

You wait for ages then two come at once

A number of us local Conservatives were out talking to supportive voters around Woodyates Road last night, this tends to be a good area for us. We canvassed this road a few weeks ago so we had a very good idea where the Conservative voters were.

It was quite amusing to find that the Lib-Dems were working the same road as us, they were obviously there for the first time because they were doing door to door canvassing. Their candidate was conspicuous by his absence, perhaps he was stuck in traffic coming across from the other side of the borough!

The weather has been kind to us so far this campaign but last night there was a light drizzle which threatened to turn into proper rain all evening. We were luck enough to miss the worst of the weather.

Freddy starts potty training

Even though the political world moves on at a pace my family life still needs attention, at the moment the big issue in the Cleverly house is getting my son out of nappies. Before becoming a parent I would never have believed that one day my wife and I would be crouched down on the floor of our bathroom cheering along with our son after he asked to "wee wee in potty please daddy".

At a little over 2 years old the timing is right but until recently he seemed to be very shy about using something as public as the potty. We have been trying to make the idea of a potty interesting and fun for about a month without pressurizing him to use it, he seemed very happy to sit on it but would then get up and wee on the floor, not good.

The big breakthrough came yesterday and we have now made the big leap out of nappies and into pants, there will be lots of washing to be done. I will keep you informed as to his progress. Baby number two is wriggling and kicking like a mad thing and Susie is starting to get back aches.

I still ache from the PT session with the battery on Tuesday night, it used to take 1 day to recover from even the toughest physical activity, now it seems to take a week.

Muslims called out to vote

The Muslim Council of Britain are urging Muslims to get out and vote on the 10th of June. They are concerned, as am I, that a low turn out will let the BNP slip into the European Parliament or the Greater London Authority.

The proportional representation system used in both these elections, linked with a low turnout, could be the key to BNP representation. If they win a seat in either of these elections they would be eligible for state funding. I have been encouraging the people that I speak to to vote in the election, I would rather they voted for the Conservatives but better that they vote for someone else than not vote at all.

Dodgey photo incident

Could we be about to see a photo incident similar to the fake Iraq photos here in Lewisham? The leader of Lewisham council Conservative group, Barry Anderson, was give a photo of a street littered with Conservative election leaflets. None of the canvassing team can recall loosing such a large number of leaflets (with election expenses so tight you tend to be very careful about looking after the leaflets that are produced).

There is some speculation that this could be a hoax! Obviously if we did inadvertently drop these leaflets we apologize unreservedly, it will be very interesting however to see if any of the individuals involved in the by-election try to make political capital out of this.

Weekend in the sun

Spent Saturday canvassing with Brian Chipps and other members of the local association around Lee Green. There is still some support for the local independent candidate , who we bumped into while we were out. He seemed nice enough, he's mainly campaigning on national issues rather than local stuff. His support is very localized and seems to be coming from disillusioned Labour voters, it will be interesting to look at the results. The fact that the Lib Dem councillor resigned so soon after taking up her seat seems to have dented their support quite a bit as well, I think that this will make this election a tight one between ourselves and the Lib Dems. Labour look as though they might get a stuffing, might even be beaten by the independent candidate.
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As we are getting a new puppy in a few weekends time, Susie has made me fix the fence in the garden. So, armed with some screws and wood I set to work. I did my usual trick of getting over involved and rather than just fixing the fence and leaving it at that, I built the steps up to the lawn, planted some chamomile and thyme in amongst them and some jasmine against the back fence. Freddy was "helping" me and Susie seemed very pleased with the results, so time well spent.
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Visited my parents on Monday, dad has now completed most of the work on the car port. "Car port" sound so ugly but dad's is built out of green oak and fits in very nicely with the arts and crafts look of the house.
Had the chance to catch up with a close TA mate of mine, who has recently come back from OP TELIC (Iraq). His feedback was very interesting, I won't go into the details here because a lot of it is very military.