2008 - Autumn

[El Gordo]

I'll be there. It's all strangely compelling stuff and I'm a self-confessed media junkie.

The Beeb do a reasonable job on these things as do Channel 4; I'll probably ride the remote all night. It is of course a fairly explosive night in my home town. The preceeding 24 hours see late-night carousing with SP and Capn Tom on Badge Night, followed by a hung-over round of golf on the notoriously windy hilltops of Lewes Golf Club. It promises to be a testing time for all manner of constitutions.

One of my favorite quotes - from any walk of life - is Yogi Berra's It ain't over 'till it's over. He was speaking about baseball which appropriately enough is another wholly American institution that I struggle to understand. None-the-less, like it or loathe it, the outcome of the US elections will affect us all. If Obama slides home, be it comfortably or with the catcher (the bloke in the fencing/ cricket hybrid outfit) racing in to tag him in a dramatic plume of red dust, I'll be celebrating at least the prospect of a better world. Just as I punched ther air in the Richmond Arms, Houston, on the night they voted Tony in. History will judge Tony Blair. He may be forever tainted by (the decision to invade) Iraq, but if hindsight is anything to go by (and in the face of the current nightmare) he wasn't half bad.

Blair has/had many fine qualities, in particular his communication skills. He was an excellent orator and genuinely inspirational. All that said, I do sometimes wonder whether he actually delivered anything of major significance in his time. As they say, "he talked a good game". An example was transport. Do you recall when elected, he gave John Prescott the job of revolutionising public transport, making more it more 'joined up' and getting encouraging people to use cars less? What happened to that initiative? It was one of many things that just got discreetily sidelined once they got into power. I'm not suggesting it was a cynical ploy to get elected but I think it was Blair all over -- great ideas, passionately and persuasively expressed, but delivered without a plan about how they might be achieved.

I'm still glad he arrived on the scene -- he was a great antidote to Major and the Tories, but ultimately, I'm sad to say that he never quite lived up to his billing.