Miss East

In between reading Hansard and watching BBC Parliament (I don’t tell my friends it’s not all about playing badminton with the Camerons), I do get to occasionally do cool work things.  

This year (yes, they are that often), the cool work thing is shouting about the newly named Jubilympics and this week I got to shout about it at a nice party on the terrace of the House of Lords.

Even more specifically, the cool thing is what dear chartered surveyors have done in planning it, designing it, building the big stuff and probably most importantly, making it all work properly during and after the Games so London isn’t an international laughing stock.  The architects and designers of the attention-seeking bits like the velodrome and the pool will get the glory but the backroom surveying staff should be pretty proud of a job well done.

See if you can spot the surveyor below.  

I love politics, I really do but even the London Mayoral election has left me cold this year - noone really likes repeats, people generally just turn over.  But I also don’t like single issue campaigns - governing stuff is actually quite difficult and can rarely be distilled into one issue.

But I can’t help thinking the Londoners On Bikes types are doing a good thing - they aren’t trying to put a candidate forward on a single issue, just telling you to think about cycling (if you like that sort of thing) when you vote for the actual politicians with real experience of Government and the civil service - whatever you might think of their policies.

And there was a chap standing on Old Street roundabout handing out cards in the rain - now that’s commitment.

http://www.londonersonbikes.org.uk/

When I was growing up, ‘topical comedy’ was all Ben Elton being shouty and anarchic sketches on late night Channel 4.  Having been to this week’s News Quiz recording with Sandi and the gang, the next comedy revolution will start in Waitrose lead by nice people from the Home Counties wearing Debenhams.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01ghgt4/The_News_Quiz_Series_77_Episode_4/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2012/apr/26/russell-brand-keith-vaz-select-committee

Select Committees used to be the last bastion of proper parliamentary process - so dull, noone cared and they just got on with quietly examining what the Government were up to.  Now Keith Vaz is turning them into Piers Morgan’s Life Stories.