Voting in the rain. And parrots.

Today is a rather gloomy day for an election - moderately cold, more than moderately wet, very, very grey. Traditionally such a day is better for the Conservatives. We shall see.

Apparently there were long queues this morning at polling booths in places like Clapham and Balham. Presumably these were people wanting to vote before they went to work. Our polling booth was much quieter - just a steady trickle I think.

A German friend of mine who does not get to vote, despite living in the UK for 40 years, is asking everyone she knows to vote Labour, partly in the hope that they will reform things and she will be eligible to vote next time.

Another friend is driving people to and from polling stations in her area. Very noble?

She plans to stop at around 4.00 so that we can meet in Manchester and go to the carol service at the cathedral together. We have done this for a few years now, a kind of symbolic beginning to Christmas celebrations, and this year hoping our songs might work some magic.

By the time we get home it will be all over bar the counting. I will not be sitting up to watch he results come in but I suspect that both the friends just mentioned might well do so.

I hold my hands up and confess to a reluctance to go out canvassing from door to door. We have, however, actively encouraged all the members of our family who can vote to do so. That’s about all we can do for the moment.

So let’s look at other things. I was reading about parakeets living wild in the UK. I see them at my sister’s in the south of Spain. And I have seen a few in Galicia. But I have never seen any here. I suspect they are only seen down in the southeast of the country. They probably would not like the damp northwest. Although on grey days like today a flash of green in the trees would be quite nice.

There are various theories about where they came from. “One urban legend traces their origin to a pair released by Jimi Hendrix on Carnaby Street in 1968; another suggests they arrived in 1951 when Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn visited London with various animals in tow to film The African Queen, set in the equatorial swamps of east Africa.” I find these theories much more interesting than the alternative suggestion that quite large numbers of people released their pets into the wild when there was a “parrot fever” scare.

 That’s all for now!