Time to Deliver Feb. 4, 2007

Before Christmas John of Whitehaven won a choice of a picture of mine in a competition, and finally I got to deliver it. He and his wife had chosen it together, going through the pictures on the website. It was one form the St.Maria’s Walk series, where she is stood by the sea.

Whitehaven on England’s north-west coast was once such an important place and the region ‘graced’ with big industries, albeit not ones that would return you home very clean at the end of a shift. Sellafield lives on as the last big employer (in these parts) because it gives work to a willing and skilled people. Many have however gone across the seas.

I then called on Mary-Anne, a singer, who lives in a bus in the garden of Randolph, formerly of the British Steel at Workington. He was cutting wood with a chain-saw, from his wheel-chair.

In Maryport I called on Willow – at least I was going to but could see there was an all-night party still raging (well into Sunday morning) in her place above the undertakers.

The radio was full of Tony Blair – pressure mounting on him to quit now. I mused at whether any other politician will ever again try and take on some of the domestic issues that he once tabled and would like to have got on with. He would better have been in politics 200 years ago where he could have been the politician to have abolished the slave trade, ahead of William Wilberforce.

There is almost only one campaign these days : the campaign to hound you out of office.