The weather was hot and humid so I waited until the late afternoon for my walk, choosing a route with plenty of shade.

After lunch I took advantage of a sunny interlude to go on an afternoon jaunt. I took in Little Apley Pool and Tee Lake before making my way home along the Silkin Way.

I had another encounter with a dog that wanted to be by me. I had stepped off the pathway to let the owners and their two dogs go by (with social distancing in mind). One of the dogs had other ideas. He came over to me, looked up at me and stood by my feet.

He refused all calls to go back. As he turned to his humans he buried his nose in the soggy leaves and retrieved a stick that was completed concealed to my eye, still staying at me feet. I have to confess it always makes me feel special when a dog greets me in this way

The owner came to retrieve him, apologising in my face they did so. So much for me trying to respect social distancing…

I beat a hasty retreat and continued my walk home without further incidents.

The focus of the hustings was Public Services and several questions had been collated in advance of the meeting, although these had not been seen by the candidates beforehand.  The questions included the PCS public service pledges as well as issues and plans that are affecting public services locally.  After these questions, there was time for questions from the audience.

Each candidate had a chance to give their view on the question and the debate was quite lively at times with one or two of the candidates tending to interrupt when others were speaking.  On occasions some of the candidates got a bit sidetracked or misunderstood the question and went off at a tangent so the independent chairman had his work cut out.

All in all the meeting was very interesting and worthwhile, although I will keep my opinions about the various candidates to myself.

There was a lot of  correspondence with tech support who after all else failed tried to restore the pages to how they were before they stopped working properly.  Even that didn’t work so I was advised to do a manual upgrade of Wordpress.  There was one small hitch with that, which was just me being silly and forgetting to change one of the settings in the config file.

Before all that could happen I had to do a separate, fresh installation of Wordpress to see if that would work.  Whilst I was doing that I came across this new theme that I am using.  I hope you like it   I have done a little tinkering around with the sidebars but I still need to upload my own header.  So please don’t ask me where that picture is because it isn’t one of mine.

In addition to fixing my blog I have been very busy planning for campaigns in the run up to the general election.  We have proved that the government are going to ignore PCS until after the election.  Despite making a lot of noise, saying that BA and Network rail should get back to the negotiating table with the unions the government have remained stonily silent on requests  by PCS to talk to it’s own employees about the Civil Service Compensation scheme.  The PCS union have made several requests for talks, to cabinet office minister Tessa Jowell and to Gordon Brown who have not yet replied.

So for now we will be concentrating on the Make Your Vote Count  (MYVC) campaign which we have been building on for the past four years.  We will be engaging with the prospective MPs to find out their views on Public Services and to get them to sign up to five pledges.  All responses will be made publicly available.  This will also involve a local public hustings which is being organised by the Shropshire Action Group and resulted in me attending another meeting last night, where I was told I ‘had to’ take notes!!!  I have yet another meeting tonight which I could really do without.

On the plus side, I did have one evening off to visit my Mum for her birthday and my brother was in town which was nice.  The spiky plant I mentioned the other day was much appreciated

One of my PCS colleagues sent me an email about a forthcoming meeting and asked me to let other members of the PCS Shropshire group know when it was taking place. The email also said that on no account should I forward the original email out to the group. I complied with those wishes and as the original email had an attachment I left that out too.

Apparently that was wrong but instead of phoning me to explain what was required he phoned a colleague who sits round the corner from me at work.  This second colleague then proceeded to phone me up and dictate a letter over the phone to me, which took some time.  I was in the middle of processing over 20 Priority operational buys through our section so I got rather irritated about the total waste of everyone’s time.  I began to feel like telling someone where they could stick their email…  Maybe that is why I did not get phoned by  the first colleague

I have also been trying to arrange a branch committee meeting and the first date I sent out was a disaster, only two people were able to attend.  So I suggested we change the date to a more suitable one. I suggested this to colleague A who told me to phone colleague B to get a list of dates when he (colleague A) was available to attend the meeting.  Didn’t he know  himself when he was available???  The other problem was that it is always very difficult to get hold of colleague B and he doesn’t work in the same place as me.  I did however manage to sort that one out although I still have to type up my dictated letter and send the email in my own time!

Now what were those girls up to today?  Well today it was comparing bra sizes (there had been a fitting yesterday). I tried very hard with my selective deafness, but when someone starts shrieking your name at the top of their voice it becomes just a little difficult.  Then there was the trying to see if the works pass with it’s cord would reach round the upper ribs,  I am not sure what that was all about.  To keep the peace I tried and was the only one who could manage this, it even overlapped.  Suddenly I was no longer required for the conversation

During the process the inevitable happened and I revamped and updated the style of the page. Well it is still a work in progress really

In the process I thought we needed a new look business card to get us right up to date. Long term readers will remember my previous cards and how much I enjoy using Moo.com.

City Slicker

Campaigning through the years:

For more of this weeks PhotoHunt pictures check out tnchick.