Dadblog

What a very very odd two weeks it’s been. First there was the flu. If you’re a chap, you probably think you’ve had the flu loads of times. Let me tell you, you probably haven’t. That was a heavy cold, that was. The flu, the real thing, hits you like a particularly stubborn truck, in that it knocks you sideways and then keeps knocking you sideways for day after day after day. I was so ill that I began to understand how flu epidemics kill people.

What it made it particularly gruelling was the knowledge that at the end of the week I was due to fly to California for a week. As the big day approached, I began to wonder if I was going to make calling in sick look easy by cancelling a major work trip due to illness. Is this all part of getting old?

No, it’s all part of being a male hypochondriac. Flu’s nasty, but not nasty enough to keep me off a transatlantic plane. The day before the flight I was up and about, and then I got on the plane. Coughing my guts out, mind, and generally making myself unpopular with my fellow passengers, but on the plane nonetheless.

The trip was to San Francisco to visit the HQ of my new firm, and for the first time in my life I wasn’t flying Economy. No, I had crossed that yawning gap to reach Premium Economy, where the seats are a bit wider, the movies a bit more varied, and the air hostesses more expensively made-up (and did I imagine that they leaned in a bit further?).

After a couple of days in SF, we were to go to Santa Monica to visit the other HQ of my new firm, and I decided I was going to drive. How often are you going to get the chance? We had a fairly new Pontiac Grand Prix, the tank was full, the sun was high, and it was 400 miles from Sunnyvale to Santa Monica.

Took us just over six hours, down the 101. There are basically three options for driving from Silicon Valley to LA - the 5, which is the quick one but is dull, the 1, which snakes all the way down the coast, takes up to 10 hours and can only be done with Frank Sinatra on the stereo, Clint Eastwood in the passenger seat and a couple of blondes in the back, and the 101, which is a compromise between the two.

What a drive. What a drive. Agrochemical stations giving way to mountains giving way to vineyards stretching to the horizon (I was travelling with a Frenchman. He may have cried a bit at this point). Occasionally, we hit the Pacific (including, rather wonderfully, at Pismo Beach, which for some reason I always associate with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck). We got out of the car at Santa Barbara and Ventura to feel sand beneath our feet and suck in the sea air. And the 101 into LA goes through the Santa Monica mountains and makes the whole place feel like it’s going to be beautiful.

It isn’t, of course. But there are other compensations. Like being propositioned by a working girl in a player’s bar. Or eating steak in a shack that had been turned into a posh restaurant. Or eating pancakes and bacon. Or seeing Carmen Electra recording a ThighStyler promotional video on the beach. Los Angeles. Whatta town.

Local elections are funny things. The other day one of our three local councillors came to the door. Like her two colleagues, she’s a Tory, part of the minority Tory presence on Lambeth’s LibDem-Tory coalition. And I’m a Labour Party member. So we had an interesting conversation, and I found myself saying “you know what, Clare?” (for ’twas her name). “You’re a great local councillor. You’re visible. You get things done. You reply to emails. When we had three Labour councillors we never heard from them.”

This feeling of dislocation from the normal course of things was deepened when a couple of days later the election pamphlet from Labour hit the doormat (unlike the Tories, they didn’t bother to knock). And what was the party of social justice, redistribution of wealth, infrastructure investment and a fair deal in education and health offering the electors of Lambeth?

Tax cuts.

Yep, tax cuts. That was their big idea. The Lambeth council tax is too high, they said (for which they blamed the Tories and LibDems, natch). Nothing about schools, the subject local people care most about. Nothing about the local environment, the next most important local subject. Idiots.

And this at a time when my flag waving for Blair has become less and less enthusiastic. I actually think he’s getting an easy ride from the press at the moment. His government seems to be collapsing in on itself, bobbing around in a sea of low-level sleaze, high-level arrogance (is there anyone more undeservedly arrogant than John Prescott?), factional in-fighting and a general disconnection from what normal people care about. It’s actually a fascinating historical test case in how British political power has a maximum shelf life of five or six years. The sooner Labour stops arguing about the succession and starts connecting with real issues the sooner they might start getting our attention again. And while I support every penny being invested in the NHS and education, the structures that have been put in place to maximise the returns on that investment are scandalously dogma-driven and ineffective.

So, you know what? I’m not voting Labour at this election. It’s the first time my vote’s going elsewhere since I first voted in 1987 (and what a shitty result *that* was). I’ll probably split my vote three ways between Lib Dem, Tory and LEAP, a local single-campaign group pushing for more investment in local schools. Yes, one of those votes is going to the Tories. Tribal factionalism you can stick where the sun don’t shine.

But, I mean, what is going on? How can a vote for local investment in schools and the environment *not* go to Labour? Where the hell did we lose our way?