Rob, Rambling - A lot of things interest me...

It’s been one of those Fridays when you feel like it’s remedied the shit-heap that has been the rest of the working week. Something came together that I’ve been looking to do for a long while, and handily it’s happened right in the middle of the pay review process.

With it having been a lean couple of months, I was worried that the boss wouldn’t have too much to look at in terms of justifying any pay rise, but today’s events should put me in a pretty good light.

Well, I hope so anyway.

Why is it I always seem to do better and be much more enthusiastic about my work when my colleague with whom I work closest is away? He’s very much my senior, and I guess I’m in his shadow on a daily basis. It’s evidently only when he’s out of the office that I spread my wings a little (to thoroughly confuse metaphors…).

I have an aversion to pregnancy and small babies, it seems. I met up with a friend of mine for a quick bit of lunch earlier, and she’s seven months pregnant, blooming and pretty big.

I quite enjoyed chatting about the ins and outs of how it’s affecting her, but when she asked if I’d like to feel the bump and the movement coming from inside her, I politely declined. Well, in truth I think I made a face and said something “gross, no thanks”, but it’s all the same.

It just doesn’t appeal, feeling something that’s not quite alive moving around inside someone else. I’m not usually squeamish about many things, but that’s one.

And it’s a similar story once they’re out in the world: a colleague stopped into the office with her four month-old girl yesterday, the first time we’d seen either of them since she went off on maternity leave. Whilst she was very cute, and I liked making faces at her and her grabbing my finger, when it came to being offered to hold her, again I politely refused.

This time, I used the excuse of the girlfriend never forgiving me if I went home and told her that I’d been holding a baby, but in reality it’s more a case of me being really, really nervous about doing something like dropping the damn thing.

Seriously, I wouldn’t trust myself to hold onto a baby. I’m not clumsy, but I would definitely have a million “what if” thoughts running through my head, and by the time I’d hand her back I’d be in a state of panic with all sorts of horrible scenarios already played through to conclusion in my mind.

Maybe it’s best if I don’t have kids for a little while…

I just thoroughly depressed myself by realising that I’ve not had more than 2 consecutive days off work since September last year, when I was in the States. The longest break I’ve managed to get is a 4-day weekend a couple of times. Even at Christmas I was back in the office between Christmas Day and New Year.

It’s hit me all of a sudden this week, probably because I was so busy last week and this weekend. It’s caught up with me, and now all I can think about is next Saturday, the 5th, when I go on holiday for an entire week to Croatia.

Seriously, 8 months is too long a period to not disengage for longer than a day or two. What I need is to get a complete break from work and just shut off. It’s too easy to still be thinking about work when you’re only out of the office for one day as part of a long weekend, whereas with a week away you can disconnect entirely.

All I can think about each day at my desk this week is that I’m ever closer to getting the hell out of here for a holiday. I’m practically operating on autopilot, and my enthusiasm has gone through the floor.

6 more working days, that’s all.

Since getting home this evening, I have done the washing up and cleaned the kitchen, and I’m now flicking through a couple of cookery books.

When did this become my life?!

So, as the polls close and the results come in I can at least be satisfied that I was politically active during this election. I asked questions, I responded to the propaganda that was put through my door. I tweeted, I blogged, I watched the live debates, I read manifestos, newspapers and encouraged those around me to do the same. Whatever the result, I can rest happy that I participated as fully as possible.

Uponnothing, writing on Angry Mob, and pretty much summing up my thoughts on this campaign.

The reason I’m so pissed off and disappointed this morning is because I care. Because I put effort and energy into this campaign, to make sure that I was making the right decision for me and my beliefs. Because I’m probably more engaged with politics than I ever have been before. Because it was important to me. Because it mattered.

Anonymous asked: Have you voted Lib Dem (tactically) because Labour is a wasted vote in Putney or because The Guardian have just pledged allegiance to them?

Well, this question was asked (I’d love to know by whom, email me or leave a comment) whilst I was writing a big long post explaining my reasons for voting Lib Dem. Christ, even in the photo of my vote I said that I’d be explaining my reasons later on today.

I would never vote tactically. The statements yesterday and today by two leading members of the Labour party, pretty much telling supporters to vote Lib Dem so as to avoid the Tories winning particular seats, is nothing short of a disgrace.

To run a campaign based on fear (and the Tories are equally guilty of this in terms of their crowing about a hung parliament) is to lower yourself to the very bottom of political debate.

If your policies aren’t strong enough to beat the other guy, then you need some new policies. You can’t just become negative and try anything to keep the other party out of power. You have to merit being elected, not just get it by default because you’ve scared people into believing that the other party will fuck things up.

Negative campaigning is abhorrent, which is why the Lib Dems have been a fresh of breath air this year. For me, they have genuinely risen above the pooh-pooing of the other two parties and tried to present their own policies positively, correcting the falsehoods raised about them by the other parties.

In Putney, it’s actually more likely that voting for the Lib Dems is a wasted vote. Look at the notional voting split for the constituency: the Lib Dems are a long way back. Yes, Labour will no doubt lose some votes, but Justine Greening was a pretty clean MP in terms of expenses, and hasn’t really done anything wrong. There’s not a huge campaign to oust her, and she’ll probably get re-elected. It’ll have to be a big Lib Dem surge to unseat her, but I hope I’m doing my bit.

And in terms of voting for who the Guardian is supporting? I’d actually made up my mind to vote Lib Dems shortly after the manifestos came out. I didn’t even know that this weekend’s Guardian and Observer had published the editorials I linked to until the girlfriend pointed it out to me this afternoon.

Just because I read a newspaper doesn’t mean I agree with everything it says. The Guardian can be as bad as other papers from time to time. I happen to think it is less often though.

And yes, I probably do consider myself as smarter than the average bear for being able to see through the bullshit which masquerades as news for most media outlets. I have no problem with seeing myself as quite clever in those terms. You can take that as arrogance, ego or whatever, but I know where I stand in the food chain.

I view the media critically, rather than swallowing its crap whole. It’s a shame that a lot of other people can’t or won’t.

So yes, I’ve finally voted in this year’s general election, choosing the Liberal Democrats. It was probably pretty evident from my posts over the last month or so that I was leaning in that direction, but I tried to refrain from being too party-political or biased. Hopefully that came across.

I’d like to explain the reasoning behind my choice, in what will probably be a long post. For edited highlights, try reading the Guardian and Observer’s endorsements of the Lib Dems. They sum up most of the points I’ll be making below, with a few discrepancies here and there.

When I’ve thought about it over the last week or so, there are three main policy areas in which I find myself agreeing with the Lib Dems more than the other two parties, and which for me are vitally important.

Firstly, Europe. I’m one of the most pro-EU people I know, and the Lib Dems are the most similarly aligned of the three largest parties. In fact, only the Greens come anywhere close in being as continental in outlook, with Labour resolutely undecided about Europe, and the Tories too nailed to a eurosceptic point of view.

Maybe it’s because I have first-hand experience and knowledge of how the EU has improved and benefited our country that I am such a big fan. I spent a year living in Germany as part of my degree, and I also studied EU law too. This combination has given me a massive insight into just how much we need and should want the EU in our lives.

I appreciate that it has a bit of democratic deficit, but if more people paid attention to what it actually does, rather than believing the crap they read in their newspapers, they’d engage with it more. The EU is vitally important, but we Brits seem to want to keep it at arms length.

The Lib Dems embrace Europe (it helps that their leader, Nick Clegg, was an MEP, but that’s not always a good thing, since the leaders of both the BNP and UKIP are also MEPs nowadays…), and for that I support them. I’m not certain as to whether we should be joining the Euro just yet, but in the long term I think it would also be to our benefit.

The second major factor for me is electoral reform. Again, I consider my experiences influenced by Germany, which to my mind has a better electoral system than us. They use proportional representation (PR) with a link to local constituencies, and it seems so much fairer than our elections.

For too long our elections have favoured the big two parties at the expense of all others, and this is systemically unfair. The Tories and Labour want to maintain this system, because they are the biggest winners. The Lib Dems have campaigned for many years to change it, especially in the light of a changing Britain which is more pluralistic in its views.

And, as the two old parties have moved towards the centre ground, becoming so alike that our politics is one of managerialism rather than ideologies nowadays, there is room for different views, and for different voices to be heard.

Maintaining the status quo that first-past-the-post gives us is simply not enough. Change is absolutely necessary on this, and only the Lib Dems are calling for it.

The third major point for me is immigration. I’m not one of these people that believes immigration is inherently a bad thing, nor that our Englishness is something necessarily worth protecting at all costs. I definitely don’t believe the thinly-veiled racism that passes for media coverage of the topic, and I don’t think we need to be hardline on it.

People come to this country because our standard of living is so high. Even doing menial jobs here is a thousand times better than many of the homelands of our immigrants. And those jobs are available because the British public seems to view them as below their status in life, for want of a better way of putting it.

“We’re supposed to be a relatively rich, advanced society, so why does someone need to flip burgers at McDonalds, or clean floors?”, so the line of thinking goes. And yet these people complain when someone comes to the country, willing to do those crappy jobs and theoretically freeing up a Brit to do a better-paid job in a more fulfilling role.

It’s not that all immigrants come to do those kind of jobs, of course. Doctors, nurses, and so on: many of them come from abroad to fill a gap where our education system is lacking. Yes, it’d be great to fill all those posts domestically, but in some respects it’s just not possible right now. With more money pumped into training and education, it will be, but those jobs need to be filled now.

The Lib Dems’ policy of an amnesty of sorts for those long-term residents here who were born abroad, but contribute massively to our society is a welcome position, and in stark contrast to fear-mongering elsewhere. I could point to plenty of studies which show that immigrants in fact contribute much more to our tax system than they get out of it, but those aren’t really ever frontpage news…

Those are my three main reasons for choosing the Lib Dems this year, but there are others:

I support their opposition to renewing the Trident nuclear programme, which is a £100 billion relic of yesteryear. We don’t need nukes, and to be honest I think Britain is trying to maintain the glory days of punching above its weight in world politics. We should embrace the new world order, and take our relevant position at the table. A pointless nuclear show of force won’t help that.

Scrapping ID cards is both a cost-saver and a step in the right direction in terms of restoring civil liberties which were taken away under the post-9/11 regime. Likewise the plans to do away with police DNA storage from innocent citizens, and attempts to regulate CCTV better. We’ve sleepwalked into a time when the state has far too much power in this realm, and this needs to be stopped.

The proposal to scrap tuition fees will probably never see the light of day, but it’s a good one. There must be room in the budget to subsidise further each university student to the tune of £3,000 per year, surely?! Even with tuition fees in place, the government pays the lion’s share of the cost of educating that student at university. Ending tuition fees would ensure students graduate debt-free, and enable more poorer students to attend university.

Raising the minimum threshold of income tax to £10,000 is another good move to help the poorest people in society. If this has to be paid for by increasing taxes at the top end, so be it. I probably fall into the top tax bracket, but I’ll pay more tax if it means those at the bottom of the income scale fare better. It’s all relative anyway: an extra £700 a year to someone earning £10,000 means so much more than say £2,000 missing from my pocket.

I’m pretty left on the issue of taxation, and I’m a fan of the state in certain areas, like health and education. The state should be the one providing everyone with a minimum standard of health and education. Those standards should be high, obviously, but the market is there to create even higher standards, and charge for them too, should people want them.

The Lib Dems are pretty green too, although I don’t agree with them on their firm opposition to nuclear power. Although I’d love to see much more renewable energy used (wind farms all round our coastline? Yes please!), nuclear power is cleaner than other fossil fuels, and safe nowadays. We shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.

Whilst the other parties also had policies that I liked, I feel that the Lib Dems have come the closest to being the complete package for me. Yes, I’ve probably missed out a few areas here and there, but these are the things that I deem important, and on which I’m basing my vote.

I’ve voted Liberal Democrat this year, and I hope the above explains why.

Just voted. Feel like an adult at last.

EDIT: I’ll explain my reasoning behind voting for the Liberal Democrats when I get home tonight.

Just voted. Feel like an adult at last.

EDIT: I’ll explain my reasoning behind voting for the Liberal Democrats when I get home tonight.

I don’t need a fuck-off big house to make me happy. I want to go to places, see people, do things. That’s what makes me happy, and the memories of those things keep me happy.

Me, in my last post.

I tend to write in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, just pouring words out onto the page without really editing as I go, but occasionally I spill out the odd gem. For me, the above is one of those moments.

It just about sums me up, as a whole. Make me happy in this exact moment, and that’ll see me through many, many days. I don’t need material shit to get me through, I really don’t. Yes, many of the experiences require money to do, but some of the best don’t.

Give me a day sat on the sofa with the girlfriend, doing fuck all, and I’ll show you the happiest moments of my life.

The girlfriend asked me the other day whether I think we take too many holidays.

I’ve posted a lot here about the places we’ve been over the last few years, and what we have planned for this year, and I can see that it might seem as if we’re constantly travelling here, there and everywhere. I’m not being boastful in that we take a lot of holidays, but I fucking love travelling.

In Britain, we get a lot of time off work as standard, five weeks per year at each of the girlfriend’s and my companies. I’ve actually carried a shitload of days over from the past year, so have something stupid like 45 days holiday this year, although I’m only planning to take my usual 25 days. It’s generous, yes, but I couldn’t contemplate working an entire year with only 10 days to use as holiday.

I need to break up the year a little, which is why I try to plan my holidays at relatively regular intervals throughout the 12 months. This year, for example, we went to Venice in February, and are going to Croatia in June, followed by Tuscany in September and then South Africa and Zimbabwe in December. We might to fit in a city break either in August or November as well, should finances and time dictate.

To my mind, it’s noticeable that I’d much rather spend my money on experiences rather than things. 2010 in particular is all about doing things than accumulating physical objects. We’re travelling to some cool places, and seeing some awesome bands live. I don’t need something on my mantelpiece to tell me that my life is good. I’d rather tell someone about the amazing time I had at a particular event or place, and relive that memory with the girlfriend.

And what else are we going to spend our money on? We don’t have a stupidly expensive wedding to pay for, nor any kids to look after. It’s just us, and we’re doing what we want to do, right now. We’re debt-free (ish), so why not spend what we’ve got on what makes us happy in the here and now?

I don’t need a fuck-off big house to make me happy. I want to go to places, see people, do things. That’s what makes me happy, and the memories of those things keep me happy.

So yes, we do go on holiday a lot. And I’d go on holiday more if I could. It’s about the here and now for me, it really is, wherever the “here” may be.

About

Londoner, thinking and writing far too much about far too many random things. Wannabe photo-/videographer of my life. More likely to be found propping up a bar somewhere.

I also write about football.

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