The sunshine of hope breaking through the clouds of disappointment

Yesterday was an day of mildly hedonistic loafing. Although I had some plans of catching up on some code I decided instead to abandon the day to serial TV watching. Lee turned up from his late night meanderings and Karen and I where eventually joined by Andy (only slightly pouting at the fact we'd started on Doctor Who before he got home). Other audio visual treats included the animated Lord of the Rings and Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure. It was all very chilled.

Today so far has been interesting. We have had leaflets from the incumbent MP and her main challenger. I read both. The Labour leaflet was rather wooly (8 years of us being great, please vote for us again) compared to the Conservative one (Our survey said these are your top concerns, this is what we will do about them). They didn't even play the immigration card until the very last line of the text. I'm still waiting for the Liberal Democrats to post their leaflet.

Seeing as morning politics had put me into a marketing frame of mind I allowed myself to get pulled from the crowds by the market research people in St Anne's square. For some reason the computer decided I was going to get the beer selection of questions. The final conclusions seems to be I actively don't associate with any particular brands, apart from the fact I occasionally find the John Smiths adverts funny. It was interesting the word associations the marketing people where trying to draw to given products, words like "confident", "successful" and "masculine". All obviously irrelevant to me as I don't feel the kind of beer I drink sends out any particular message apart from the "I like to drink beer", and generally good beer. The representative sample was not good beer, mainly covering the Carling and Carlsberg's of this world with the honorable exception of London Pride which featured on a slide or two. Still I got a free pen out the deal, always handy for reffing.