A little bit of this and a little bit of that.

I feel like a little miscellany of tit bits to wean me gently back into this blogging. It won't hang together very well, I'm afraid.

I have been very busy creating and establishing my new business.

• Countryside Communications is going well. The best bit is the feeling of liberation. Decisions can be made quickly and efficiently. Things move from ideas to actions in seconds rather than weeks. Spending of money suddenly becomes interesting and challenging. I'm learning to bargain!
• You can see what I get up to on my website www.countrysidecommunications.co.uk.
• I miss being in an office. I have always liked ranting and now I have no audience. I need an audience!

Ebay. It's just porn for women!

• "Marriage in ruins as wife admits to 5 million images of Ebay tat on her computer". "I couldn't help myself" she said, "I just had to keep looking. I started off just looking for curtains, but one thing lead to another and I before I knew it, I was searching for porcelain figurines and Jackie Collins first editions."

The Tory leadership game has come alive.

• Maude was rightly flattened in his appalling attempt to make the Party look ridiculous, and succeeded only in making himself look ridiculous. I never ever want to see him again. If Howard Flight can be expelled for saying perfectly reasonable things in private, it is hard to see what punishment befits him for saying what he said in public.
• Davis has obviously built up a terrific stock of thumb screws, looking at the list of MP's propping him up. I do sort of admire them all for trying to create such a swell of support that the leadership election was over before it began. Trouble is - they all got behind the wrong man.
• Cameron, my preferred candidate since June, has started to gain ground. He looks like a leader, sounds like a leader, acts like a leader. Oratory may be old fashioned but it is the essential skill of any politician or leader. Speech is the oldest and most basic means of human communication and is the means by which 95% of our perceptions are derived, consciously or unconsciously. It cannot be overlooked or under-estimated. Davis has all the communication skills and popular appeal of a hooded yoof. He will NOT win a general election. Cameron will. Throw off the screws and jump ship, y'all.
• I absolutely despise Ken Clark. Not just, as you might suppose, because he is pro-Europe and is fundamentally un-Conservative, but because he is arrogant and self serving to the most damning extremes. He contributes the square root of jack shit over the last decade or so, loafing around selling tobacco and making piles of cash out of third world misery and then has the nerve to suggest that we have "kept him waiting". He genuinely believes that time has just stood still and that his experience of failure in the Nineties is just what everyone needs now. You epitomise everything that is wrong with the Tories these past ten years, Ken. Please go away forever and take all your aged, loser supporters with you.
• I still think my way of choosing a leader is best. The list of candidates should go to the membership first. Members would then send the most popular two back for the final selection by MP's. However, only members under 45 years of age get to vote in the first round. This achieves two things: firstly the MP's don't spend an embarrassing few months manoevering sychophantically around the favourite; and the ordinary members with most to lose and gain from the nomination hold the aces. Now that's radical.

The English football team continue to amuse.

• Since the last time we spoke, England have been beaten by Northern Ireland and scraped a win against Austria. I will be glued to my seat on Wednesday. Beckham was just great. On being sent off, he decided to seek out his bete-noir and shake his hand. Now either this was an act of cynical petulance or he genuinely thought he would look good in apologising. Sorry, David, you just looked like a bloke who lost his temper and committed three fouls in one minute. Leading by example as always!

Time to honour my pledge.

• I did promise myself a long time ago, that I would use this site to think through and write down some positive policy ideas for the primary aspects of Government. Annoyingly, had I kept my promise a bit earlier, I might now be in the proud position of pointing to previous posts and claiming "Here, that's where Cameron got his ideas from!!" Well at the very least I hope that on Dec 7th, I will have called it right since June.

We have finally caved in and got Sky TV. So that's where all the Big Brother contestants end up!