h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I went into town today for a bit of 'on spec' volunteering at my favourite local charity. A very good outcome was secured for one of the service users, and I got to send off a batch of snot-nosed letters - citing the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 and the Housing (Scotland) Act 2001, and demanding access to various policies etc. - to a local public body, always a favourite pastime. Snot-nosed seems to be my (unconscious) default setting in written communications with public bodies. Maybe because I used to work for one, and therefore recognise the nature of the beast. However, many good and decent people toil away unthanked in them too, and without them we'd all be living in squalour.

Anyhow, I had a lunchtime meeting with one of the local parliamentary candidates, who was after a briefing on housing and homelessness issues. I have him one, and got the impression that he might even do something with it - having little hope of even keeping his deposit on 5th May, let alone winning, but with an eye to the next lot of council and Scottish Parliament elections (which will be under PR) and wanting to put some markers down for his party on local poverty issues, he may well actually do something. I have him going to the eviction/small debt Court in Aberdeen next Thursday. That's always an education.

Here's a timely quote from Dickens (Little Dorrit):

"The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time, without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong, without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

"This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation, and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving--HOW NOT TO DO IT."


Douglas

I must have missed this, Douglas. It is great to make things move and with Dickens as your guide, you can't go wrong.