Woof

Roger turned up at the Meeting with fingers in plaster.

His mood was surprisingly upbeat. Especially considering he had been doing a bit of canvassing. Actually talking to people about how they intended to vote.

Ours is not the most receptive part of the country for the Labour vote, one’s range of expectations runs a short way from outright abuse to truculent disinterest.

This does not phase Roger. Roger is possesses that rare confidence born of bedrock decency fuelled by a certain fluency with the English language and a very strong beilief in liberal principles. And Roger happily engaged in dialogue with innocent voters then went off leafleting

He was bitten. By a dog.

Dog was lurking by the letterbox. Our leaflets are not the quality they were, Roger needed to push the dammed thing through the aperture and through the draft proofing and he was nailed by hound. It actually bit one finger, the other was injured on its way out of the door.

Now Roger, being a sensible man, concentrates on those addresses where we reckon we might at least have some chance of securing a vote. So, not for him the Wyvern Road or the Moor Hall Drive, he does more work in Fowler Road and Falcon Lodge Crescent.

There is a certain irony here.

Our leaders have been pounding away for 11 years now pretending to emabrace the ills of word capitalism while shovelling barrowloads of loot towards poor families – tax credits, fuel allowance et all.

But their tactucs of tiptoeing around the Daily Mail and Rupert Murdoch in particular means that the entire spin underpinning the government is one of making the rich richer.
A case if ‘never mind what they do, listen to what they say’.

Dog, dumb animal that he was, could not be expected to figure out he subtleties of national strategic necessities. The fact that the UK has always been governed by a centre ground broad church was completely lost on the mutt. The explanation, that there are good guys and bad guys and things are not always what they seem, cut little ice in the hallway.

So when Roger goes into the Lodge and proselytes, you might not expect brass band and bunting. But on the other hand, you could be forgiven for anticipating a degree of quiet satisfaction that our people had noted a significant change in the standard of living of the poorest among us, particularly the children.

We forgot about the dogs.


Nightwatchman