How Not to Choose a Candidate

The Lawyer is going to be 18 soon.

There is going to be a local election for County Councillor.

These two facts are not unrelated.

So, the serious business of who to vote for now affects the whole family. The serious business of local elections seems to be very serious. Every five minutes or so another candidate’s minion hobbles by our door and inserts another exciting hand-crafted leaflet.

There are some pretty big issues at stake. We read the exciting hand-crafted leaflets very carefully:

The Tories have a two-colour printer. They are very keen to get the footbridge reopened. In blue.

The Plaid people’s candidate went to Oxford. This is obviously a point of division within our home. He’s very keen to get the footbridge reopened.

Labour also have a two-colour printer and are extraordinarily abandon with their use of red. They are very keen to get the footbridge reopened.

The Lib Dem candidate has a leaflet that folds. She’s a bit of a super-model. There are shots of her in various outfits in a variety of exotic locations – In an anorak outside the post office, in a twin-set outside the school, in tweed outside somewhere that could be a field. She is very keen to get the footbridge reopened.

The choice was, frankly, mind-boggling. At first we thought that really, on a local level, that we should leave our natural party-political prejudices aside and vote purely on the issues. We are very keen to get the footbridge reopened.

The election is next week, or possibly the week after, or, sometime soonish. If only someone had mentioned that in their leaflets.

Today they reopened the footbridge.

We are fairly stymied.