Fluent Radical

I started blogging in early 2005, with a big burst of enthusiasm. I left it at the end of 2006 with some regrets.

Looking around I’m a little sad at how few of my old blogroll friends made it from then to now. Non-trivial Solutions has left and his blog is missing. The Daily Ablution has given it up and his content is no longer available. Eu-serf has gone. Tory Convert has left and deleted her blog. James Hellyer’s Belief in Britain seems to be no more. Once More - the party group blog we started after the 2005 elections - is now occupied by squatters.

I understand that blogging is not necessarily something people want to do their entire lives, but I’m sad that the content is missing. It’s now as though they never blogged at all.

I believe that this blog will be online for many years to come, even though I won’t always be posting on it. I think it’s ok to post for a couple of years, drop it, and then come back to it. You’ll never be a network kingpin like Dale or Montgomerie, but your thoughts are still there to be reviewed later.

In fact I’ve had a real kick out of reading my old posts here. It’s great to see how fired up I was. I’m a little bit sad that I lost that.

So, to my future self: I hope you’re still blogging. And if you’re not, I hope you enjoyed reading this. And to friends who made it this far - Gavin Ayling, Little Man in a Toque, The England Project, Not Proud of Britain: it’s good to catch up with you again!

It’s beautiful.

Coming out as a conservative to my family was an interesting experience. (I did it a little bit before Cameron arrived.) Reactions varied widely. Some were simply astonished. Others, I am sure, considered it (and still consider it) a betrayal. The most memorable comment has been

I just don’t think you can be a conservative and a christian at the same time.

Hmmm. Well, since I’m not christian I suppose that’s ok.

It is interesting that when compared to some in my family, I am very liberal. There are members of my family who believe in bringing back the death penalty and sending all asylum seekers home to be tortured. (I don’t think they are too hot on the gays either.) But it’s my supporting the Conservative Party that’s really scary.

In my head I get the chance to thoroughly explain why I am conservative and through a kind of Socratic dialogue bring my relatives onside. In real life there are no such opportunities.

One time someone did ask me outright, in shocked tones, “why are you a conservative?!”. I replied, ducking the question entirely, “because I hate poor people.” This was hilarious because for about 5 solid seconds everyone just looked shocked. It took the one other guy in the room who I know to be Tory to start laughing before they picked up I was joking. Sheesh.

That was from The West Wing of course. The hot Republican guy is asked by the hot Democrat babe, why is he a Republican?

Because I hate poor people. They don’t have jobs, some of them smell bad. I hate them Donna.

Fortunately I had this in my head when I was asked to defend myself, and I think it’s an effective way of unloading the question.

Of course this is less necessary now that Cameron has done such a good job of decontaminating the brand. In a way it makes me sad. There’s nothing like being a real Radical.

Tomorrow I’m flying to the United States o yes.

Actually, holidaymaking in the US is closely related to blogging in my mind. You notice that the archives on the right go from June last year? Well that was just after coming home from a trip to Washington D.C., where I read The Right Nation and decided that it was time to start blogging.

That is one seriously inspirational book. If you are on the right and in the UK then this is such a great read for cheering you up. It describes how the Republican Party went from being almost locked out of power in the sixties, with permanent minorities in both houses of Congress, to being in a position of unprecedented strength. It’s like a manual for how to build a right-wing political coalition, even though the authors are scrupulously even-handed.

I’ve been away from blogging for a while, and I’ve decided to re-read The Right Nation while on holiday. Hopefully it will inspire me to return to the keyboard when I get back.

News from Oxford University, the great appeasers:

Oxford colleges are to lose their 800-year-old right to select undergraduates in response to Government pressure to admit more students from state schools and lower social classes.

I tried and failed to get into Cambridge twice. Guess what? It never even crossed my mind that it had anything to do with me being from a state school. Fact: not until right now, 5 years later, have I considered the possibility. And rejected it.

Also is news:

Candidates will be able to state a college preference once they have been offered a place but in principle all successful applicants will be centrally ranked on the basis of their performance, then distributed randomly.

Idea: what OU needs … is a sorting hat!

Actually this leads to an interesting idea (it’s like that lateral thinking technique). If you’ve got a school with ‘houses’, as I understand some extremely posh schools did/do (anyone know?), then you should give all entrants an in-depth psych test. Then house 1 can be the studious and hard working, house 2 can be the sporty types, house 3 can be the irritating prodigy geeks, and house 4 can be the party animals. Wouldn’t that make school life go much more smoothly?

Last night was my first time out canvassing for the Conservatives ever. It was survey canvassing, so we knock, say:

Hello, sorry to bother you. We’re doing a resident’s survey on behalf of the Wimbledon Conservative party, and I was wondering if you had a few moments to give us your opinions on a range of local issues in this questionnaire.

Although the first time I tried it, it was more like:

hellosorrytobother youwe’redoingaresident’ssurveyonbehalfoftheWimbledon
ConservativepartyandIwaswonderingifyouhadafewmomentstogiveusyouropi
nionsonarangeoflocalissuesinthisquestionnaire.

thanksverymuchbye.

Some observations:

• Although terrified of knocking on a stranger’s door at first, by the end I was perfectly happy with it all. The two ladies I was out with - one a councillor - were very nice and supportive.
• There are more ingenious ways than you might think to hide or disguise your doorbell.
• In the two streets we were canvassing roughly one gate in five worked properly. This despite being a ten minute walk from a B&Q and in a fairly well-off area in Wimbledon.
• A well-kept garden is no guarantee of niceness.
• Don’t do streets at the same time as carol singers - people get confused.

I look forward to picking it up again after the new year.

Any Internet Explorer programmers from Microsoft had better stay the hell away from me.

I just spent all day working on a new theme for a new blog (details later). It get’s to five o’clock and it’s a perfect layout in Opera and Firefox. I then fire up IE, and spend the next three hours fixing stupid CSS bugs. They call it the IE bug ’suite’ apparently. Haha. The fixes designers have to use to make IE work properly have their own little names. One is called the “holly hack”. How cute.

My theme is going on an adventure this weekend.

I’m free! No more crappy Blogger publishing that always hangs half way through, no more stupid bugs that delete posts when you press publish.

There’s a whole new universe of bugs out there…

soon I will be free.