A very good organisational day, briefing and training LibDem colleagues and candidates and putting in place the measures needed to plan for a very organised Polling Day. Meetings with Sally and Brian Guinee, Michael, Percy and several other helped and members as all of the arrangements started slotting into place.
I was up before 5.45am after a restless night and brought morning drinks for Diana and I to the bedroom so that we could have a chat. In the event, she was all grumpy at having been disturbed and so I wished I had not bothered to show her the consideration. I had also showered, shaved and dressed by 6.15am and so got the car out and drove round to see Brian Guinee to see if he could take my diskettes to work and copy them. My computer works with the new 1.4Mbyte three-and-a-half inch floppy disks and John Davidson's machine (which I was intending to use in the other ward) had a five-and-a-half inch format so that data could not easily be transferred between the two. I met up with Brian, walking down Avenue Road, before 6.30am and he was most surprised to see me but had to say that he was off to London for the day and could not do the job.
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Home to breakfast and then a hectic session amending and photocopying election briefs in time for a meeting afterwards with Michael, Sally and Percy. We met from 10.00am until lunch and went through the election briefs for organisers, candidates, Knockers-up, Telling, Committee Room etc and agreed that we would use the help and skills of less-active members for running the committee-rooms so as to leave the main candidates free for "front-of-house" duties. I was also producing referenced maps with a location-finder for particular streets and making sure that everyone had copies of the telling rotas and lists of names and addresses. After lunch, Percy came round and helped draft and send a press release announcing our arrangements for the day and how well things had been going and alerting them to the opportunity of covering our campaign in detail.
We also announced that we would be holding a Press Conference on Tuesday after a week-end series of discussions so as to prevent them trying to ferret things out before then. I then received Derek Giles here for a briefing before tea and spoke to him whilst Percy was busy sending out the releases by Fax. After tea, I was round at Derek Giles' house in Eaton Socon for the evening session. We sent others out canvassing and Derek and I got Judi O'Callaghan over to talk to us and to tell us the extent of the problems that she had been experiencing with the breakdown of her marriage. She was in an Eaton Socon flat with no telephone, cooker or fridge and needed a telephone connecting and mail redirecting.
I undertook to help tackle some of these problems for her and she was going to get back into the campaign and be available on polling day and also, if elected, to still serve as a councillor. The Derek and I went across to Chris Colbert's house in Old School Gardens to discuss the use of her house as a committee room. She not only agreed, but we found out that her husband, John, had a plethora of computer hardware and the ability to copy between the disks that we wanted all along! Things were beginning to get organised by now and I managed to brief the four remaining Eaton Socon candidates on what was expected of them and also to drive by John Davidson's house in Priory and get the data to him on the right format.