A mid-term survival guide

I'm sitting at the breakfast bar writing this as a desperate attempt to distract myself from scratching my feet.


I don't know what I did to upset the insects of Florida, but they seem to find me very tasty. Sat on my friend SB's porch last night waiting for trick-or-treaters to come round, some of the state's tinier and more irritating residents decided to have a feast on the one bit of me I missed with bug spray - my tootsies. I have bites in-between my toes, for God's sake, while everyone else is bite free!! If you ask me there's some serious injustice happening here.


I am also trying to ignore the TV because I am being bombarded with advertising that might as well have been written in Greek for all the sense it makes to me. For those of you that don't know, tomorrow is the mid-term elections here in the USA, so all the different candidates for Florida are advertising like mad on TV, radio, and billboards.


I am not going to go into any ideological detail here, because one of my main rules in life is 'never discuss politics or religion - it just gets messy'. But to position a bit, I'm a bit of an ideological liberal - not in a deeply political, I-know-every-last-detail-of-policy kind of way, but in a 'can't we all just get along?' kind of way. So in the cut-throat and (I don't think it's unreasonable to say) fairly right-leaning world of American politics, I often feel a bit at sea.


Plus, I'm British, so I am used to all our political advertising being heavily controlled - political broadcasts have to be clearly announced as such before and after the broadcast; they tend to come immediately after the news and that's about the only time; and there has to be a balance of representation across all the terrestrial channels (so for instance, the BBC can't only show Labour party political broadcasts, ITV can't only show Conservative broadcasts, etc.).


Over here, with the elections happening tomorrow, virtually every ad I have seen has been for one candidate or another (as I understand it, if you can pay for it, you get the airtime, although they have to be clearly marked as political too). Now I've got to be honest, I have absolutely no bloody idea what anyone is talking about. What is Amendment 4? Amendment 5? What did so-and-so do that was so awful?


You don't need to understand American politics to get the gist of all these adverts though. It just all seems a bit - well - like mud-slinging. Every commercial I have seen and heard has focused on slagging off one of the other candidates, portraying them as evil people, without ever really getting into the detail of why you should vote for that person and what they would actually do in office. It isn't just one side doing this either - Republicans, Democrats, and independents are all as bad as each other.


I'm not saying that British politics is above all this - they all go in for a bit of mud-slinging every once in a while. It's just not so...how to put it...vicious. Not that I have a vote in this country, but if I did I'm not sure I'd use it - just because they all seem as bad as each other.


I said this was a mid-term survival guide, and so it is. And the one way to survive is - ignore it. That's my plan, anyway!!


As this has all been a bit serious I'm going to sign off this post with something more light-hearted. Saturday was my very bestest friend's birthday party back in London and I was a bit down in the dumps that I couldn't be there. But my best man, Andy, (yes I have a best man, deal with it) set up a Skype web conference and I attended as a 'virtual' guest - including playing virtual ring of fire! 

It was the best virtual birthday party I've ever attended :)