Too Many Names

Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays
And the week with the whole year.
Time cannot be cut
With your exhausted scissors,
And all the names of the day
Are washed out in the waters of the night.


No-one can claim the name of Pedro
Nobody is a Rosa or Maria,
All of us are dust and sand,
All of us are rain under rain,
They have spoken to me of Venezuelas,
of Chiles and Pargaguays;
I have no idea what they are saying,
I know only of the skin of the earth
And I know it is without a name...

Pablo Neruda

Sunday morning

Sunday morning, praise the dawning

I've got a restless feeling by my side

Early dawning, Sunday morning

It's just the wasted years so close behind

Watch out, the world's behind you

There's always someone around you who will call

It's nothing at all



Sunday morning and I'm falling

I've got a feeling I don't want to know

Early dawning, Sunday morning

It's all the streets you crossed, not so long ago

Watch out, the world's behind you

There's always someone around you who will call

It's nothing at all

Sunday morning

Lou Reed

A time for change? A new voting system

Our present system of voting makes it difficult to oust the party in government, because that objective is coloured by where to place your vote. If you place it with any party other than the main opposition party, there is a danger that it will not be effective.

I propose a system that would address this problem.

Each person has two votes
The first is a direct vote to say if you wish the present party to remain in power or not. A straight yes or no.
This is counted as a total, nothing to do with the local candidate, and thus voters in constituencies where there is a big majority will not feel that their vote is wasted.
The second vote is for your favoured candidate.

Scenario 1
If you vote to oust the present government you can then proceed to vote for your chosen candidate, safe in the knowledge that the vote will not be wasted.
The new government would be made up of MP's from all the other parties, and government posts allotted in a proportional way.

Scenario 2
If you voted to keep the government you would then vote for your candidate in the normal way.

Zimbabwe? or ... oh my goodness

Not since women were denied the vote has Britain's electoral system been so "breathtakingly undemocratic", says The Business. If Labour and the Tories win exactly the same share of the popular vote on 5 May, Labour will still end up with 140 more MPs. This is because boundary changes have failed to keep up with demographic trends. People are moving out of the grimy inner cities (traditional Labour strongholds) to the suburbs and shires (Tory strongholds). The average Labour constituency now has 6,000 fewer voters than its Tory counterpart; yet the declining inner cities are still massively over-represented, and the growing suburbs under-represented. The Tories "have largely themselves to blame": when the electoral boundaries were last redrawn, ten years ago, Labour fielded a crack team of lawyers, while the complacent Tories put up a B-team. As a result, the electoral system was redrawn in Labour's favour. Combine this with the risk of postal fraud, and it looks like Britain is "becoming one huge rotten borough".

Driving us to .... death?

Letters to the Daily Telegraph:

Sir,
On a trip from London to Bristol, where there is about 100 miles on which the speed limit can be ignored, the difference in journey time at 80mph instead of 70mph is 11 minutes. Is the wear and tear on the nervous system, the increased chances of an accident and the 20 per cent additional fuel worth it?

Derek Evans, Chippenham, Wilts

Sir,
The answer to the question posed by Barbara Davy (Letters, Apr 15) - to name a piece of machinery other than the car implicated in more than 3,000 deaths every year - must be, according to the recent figures for deaths from MRSA, the hospital bed.

Bernard Mahan, Edinburgh