The Magic Voter Summoning Book

Well, election day rolled around again last week, meaning that I spent 15.5 hours sitting in a church hall issuing ballot papers for the local and European elections. It actually went quite well - busier than I expected, and no really tricky queries, except that a nearby polling station failed to read their register correctly and kept sending some of their voters to my station. Fortunately they were all good-natured about it when I had to send them back.

I had a new Poll Clerk this time. For those not up on the lingo: the Presiding Officer (me) is the person in charge of the polling station, whereas the Poll Clerk is there to help out the Presiding Officer. They both work the same hours, but the Presiding Officer is paid more, as they are ultimately responsible for the whole thing running smoothly, including correctly completing all the ballot papers, taking charge of the ballot box, and transporting it plus all the ballot papers to and from the ballot paper count (no mean feat with two full sets of ballot papers). We also have some cool legal powers to challenge people who we suspect of impersonating other voters, ordering people out of the polling station, and if necessary opening up an emergency polling station if the one that's supposed to open is locked or there's a fire. (The flipside of this, and the reason we get the extra money, is that if it all goes wrong a la Jesmond polling station at the last General Election, guess whose neck is on the block?)

Incidentally, the Presiding Officer is usually not the person who greets you as you come in and does most of the talking. It's more common for the Poll Clerk to be in charge of marking people off on the register, whilst the Presiding Officer issues the ballot papers, deals with queries, and watches the ballot box. Continuous custody of the ballot box is a big part of the job; we are only supposed to leave the ballot box to go for a pee or deal with issues outside the polling station, and even then you can only leave it if the Poll Clerk is around to keep an eye on it. I rather suspect that if it were practical, they'd clamp the box to the Presiding Officer's wrist with handcuffs, like that guy in Ronin.

My Poll Clerk turned out to be an ex-Council employee, who took voluntary redundancy as she was about to retire, and was occupying her time learning to swim and ride a bike. She was also trying to read a book on her Kindle. I never learned the  name or author of the book, and I suspect nor did she, as everytime she opened it, she would get one minute's reading time, then someone else would walk in to vote. By 5pm we were calling it the magical voter-summoning book.

No really difficult queries or customers, although I did have one really classic conversation:

Voter: "Why are the ballot papers marked with pencils, not pens?"

Me: "You can mark them with a pen if you like*, but we have pencils in the booths because they don't run out like pens do."

Voter: "I don't trust that."

Me: "Well, the ballot box is sealed with two seals, it gets sealed closed at the end of the day by me, then taken straight to the count and only opened when they're ready to start counting the ballot papers. If anyone wanted to tamper with a ballot paper, they'd have to get the rubber out in front of two other people on the counting table, the person observing the counting table, plus every other person in the room who happened to be looking, including the police and the local councillors."

Voter: (pause) "I still don't trust that."

Upton Sinclair once commented that it is very hard to get someone to believe something if their salary depends on their not believing it. To that, I can add "and if it interferes with their pet conspiracy theory".


* This is legal, should you wish to do it - so long as your vote is clear, you can mark the ballot paper in pencil, pen or crayon if you like.

There Will Be Buns

I am by now well-known for my love of baking. Fortunately, many of my friends are known for their love of quality homemade baked goods, which is lucky because I bake for most of them (work, church, reading groups, etc) about once a month. I've taken to signing off the fortnightly text message reminder to one of my reading groups with "There will be buns", which has led to the following strange conversations, with me and a friend I'll call C:

Me: "See you all on Tuesday. There will be buns."
C: "There Will Be Buns? Is that the crap English remake of 'There Will Be Blood'?"
Me: "I. Drink. Your. Tetleys."

Me: "See you on Tuesday. There will be buns."
C: "The kind you sit on or the kind you eat?"
Me: "I advise not getting the two mixed up when taking a bite."
C: "True dat."

The Tales We Keep Telling, 8: Conversation in my Home Town

Much as I love my family, there's a reason I don't live in my home town. (I usually joke that it's because I didn't want to get pregnant, become a hairdresser or work in a shop. I respect people who undertake any or all of those options, but that was never going to be me, and in the 2000s my home town didn't have a whole lot else to offer me. It's got better since, but still...)

A conversation I had there when I returned a few years ago sticks in my mind. I was visiting my family, and called in at Costa Coffee. Behind the counter was someone I'd done my GCSEs with. We did the hi-nice-to-see-you conversation, and she asked "So what are you doing these days?"

My reply: "I moved to Newcastle, got a research job there, I go scuba diving on a weekend, thinking of buying a flat... how about you?"

Her reply: "I'm serving you a coffee."

What followed was one of those rare moments of telepathic silence, when two minds are thinking the same thought in unison.

Specifically: "Yep, there's really nowhere else this conversation can go from here."

Headbutted a Bee

I'll admit that my approach to blogging is to pick the most bizarre-sounding title I can squeeze out of anything that happened to me recently, then fit the post to it. I'm quite proud of this one, as it really did happen.

I was heading over the Armstrong Bridge in Jesmond on my bike, probably doing about 15mph, then felt something smack hard into my forehead, then slip down behind my glasses. I pulled over, removed the glasses, and a very stunned bee fell out.

I'm not sure which of us was more surprised.

The Pike of Ellerton

After nearly half a year off, I jumped back into the water yesterday, or rather waddled into it in an ungainly fashion. It is difficult to do anything but waddle when you are toting 15kg of compressed air and steel, plus assorted neoprene and rubber, and another 10kg of lead round the waist.

I was back at Lake Ellerton, of "The Swamp" reputation. Ellerton is not particularly exciting, but after half a year off, that was what I was after. If you're going to discover all the things you've forgotten and any bits of your gear that don't work, best to do so in 6m of water with no current and no time pressures than out in the Farne Islands, with their drop-offs, and their rocks, and their currents with unappetising nicknames like "Fast Lane to Norway". I had a new buddy, A, who trained at the same dive centre I did, plus my drysuit and my camera, in the hope of catching sight of the Pike of Ellerton.

I was there early, so I did the traditional diver's thing of wandering down to the shore line and peering thoughtfully at the water to judge the visibility. I could see the bottom (at Ellerton this is not a given), so decided that was a good thing. I also realised that the Swamp does have one other advantage, of providing free entertainment when the triathlon swimmers in their very thin wetsuits jump in the water. It's even more entertaining if you're wearing a drysuit and can wave at them cheerfully whilst they shriek and splutter.

A arrived shortly after, we kitted up, got in the water, and set out towards the buoy marking the underwater platform. I made the welcome discovery that none of my kit was leaking so far (the old diver's joke is that there are two types of drysuit; ones which leak, and ones which haven't leaked yet). A made the unwelcome discovery that his mask was leaking, but after a certain amount of fiddling about, we found the platform and the guideline, and set off to find a car.

Ellerton's underwater attractions, such as they be, are connected to each other by guidelines, making it easy to find your way around. The first one you come to is an old car, I am guessing a Ford Escort, but by now no-one can tell. We approached it with some relief after swimming along the line for a few minutes, and then we saw the Pike of Ellerton hovering elegantly above the car.

Unfortunately, it saw us, decided it didn't like the bubble-blowing monsters, and vanished into the murk.

We made do with looking at some very large perch hiding inside the car, then headed off in search of the van and the caravan. (Yes, there is a caravan at the bottom of the lake which borders a caravan site. Speculating as to how exactly the caravan got there does leave you wondering "did someone's brakes fail?".) As the dive drew to a close, and the mug of coffee called, we headed back along the line, and there, in all its striped glory, was the pike.  This time around, it obligingly posed for a few photos. It occurred to me that this might well be the largest fish I've swum with, at least in Britain, and it really is a magnificant creature. I hope no-one ever catches it.

A and I headed back to the dock, hauled ourselves out, rinsed our gear, and amused ourselves by drinking coffee and swapping tales of all the divers who have ever annoyed us on dive trips. (There was some overlap.)

It also turned out that A's weekend job is being a marine mammal medic. We agreed that there is nothing cooler than being able to say, when someone asks you on Monday, "What did you do this weekend", being able to reply: "I rescued a whale".