The Edges of the Vast Victorian Hotel Lounge.

At the Party conference, stalls were situated around the edges of the Vast Victorian Hotel lounge. Some sold books, some gave away bags, cloth recyclable bags emblazoned with slogans, some sold badges. Some campaigned against alleged world overpopulation, another advocated wind power, another, the cause of the Palestinians. All gave out leaflets; many, many, many leaflets.

In daytime, this big room was a bit like a market place as conference goers and hotel stayers promenaded around it. The persons personning the stalls, depending on their degree of fanaticism and the nature of their relationship to the cause espoused in their particular location, either watched the passers by pass like goldfish in a glass tank; or attempted to engage them in signing a petition, buying some geegaw or  accepting yet more leaflets.

In the evening, the footfall thinned out. One evening Boris Dooligan was almost the only person left still sitting at a stall. He sat drinking sweet fizzy bottled cider which about as much bang for his bucks as he could get from the Vast Victorian Hotel bar. He sat at the Trade Union Group stall with his back to screens onto which various banners and been tied and/or stapled. He made half hearted attempts to tidy the piles of leaflets, pamphlets etc which were scattered across the trestle table before him.

The Vast Victorian Hotel lounge was big and tunnel shaped, as big as many a small provincial town railway station, and it had something of the atmosphere of one  as people, singly or in separated small groups drifted in, out and about it. It had an echoing acoustic too, so that when a concert of singers started up in an adjoining dining room, the dismal lyrics of folk-blues dirges drifted through clearly into Boris’ ears. He then heard every word of a Computer Scientist regurgitating the crusty old lament of some bloke who had been catching Herring, (and probably crabs as well). Then mad people sang opera, with great power and no music in their voices. The sound that they made had such force as it echoed and bounced around the Vast Lounge, and like migraine round the inside of Boris’ own bone dome, that he expected it to shatter glass and powder the meaningless ornamental droplets  that hung down from several chandeliers above. Boris would have run out on the streets screaming, to escape, but it was not his own town out there.

Yesterday he had gone out around noon. Black clad twitching figures had abused one another in incomprehensible accents around a cash machine. Boris could not grasp meaning from any of the phonemes that they had uttered, although he knew them to be using a local variant of his own English tongue.

So now Boris had no wish to leave the Vast Victorian Hotel again except to get back into the metal worm that went three hours down south to his own Smoke.

But where was that,? When he got back, he stood as a candidate in a local council by-election, representing a fourth and minor Party in a polity dominated by three, older, better organised and better funded rivals. Boris knew that he had no chance of winning or even of slightly upsetting the borough balance of power between its three current major beneficiaries.

There was a local spat brewing, which could, Boris hoped, give a political outsider a slight chink of an opening. A borough cultural centre building which housed a library, an art gallery and meeting rooms used by nearby churches, was threatened with closure by the Council. Boris’ conspiratorial take on this act of municipal vandalism was that it had been in the offing for a bit. The cultural centre had also once been home to a popular cinema and a café/bar that had hosted music gigs. Boris suspected that these had been allowed to run down, close and provide statistical ammunition for the argument that the whole of the cultural centre was “under-used” and should therefore be closed and demolished to make way for a profitable “re-development” on the flattened site where it had once stood.

Arguably, Boris hoped to argue, all three major rival parties were somehow mixed up in this piece of shennanigins. Party A were doing it as the party that ran the borough council and parties B & C together participated in a coalition National government which demanded spending cuts of every local council in the land.

“A Plague on all your Houses!” was an example of the type of ringing denunciation that echoed inside Boris’ skull as he thought about what he would say to the one hustings meeting that had been organised for this obscure local political contest.

When the hustings took place, about a week before polling day, Boris did deliver his rhetorical flourishes from the dusty Church Hall platform, and the audience liked them. However, this little bit of political point scoring was to no avail because the “hustings” weren’t really hustings, in the sense of being a meeting of potential voters in the impending by-election. They did not even hust within the ward where Boris was standing, so most of the audience couldn’t vote for him as they were inconsiderate enough to live in the wrong place; they were drawn from all over the borough and beyond.

After the brief pseudo-triumph in the non-hustings, Boris’ campaign faltered. Boris was physically crippled and so could not deliver leaflets or canvass voters on their doorsteps.  He had just a handful of helpers and by polling day only about two thirds of potential voters might have been leafleted on his behalf.

Furthermore contacting electors from street stalls, the one form of electioneering that Boris could manage relatively easily, and enjoyed doing, was inappropriate to this by-election, because the Ward was in some senses shapeless. It was not a town or village with a coherent popularly used centre where large numbers of its residents might regularly congregate or even pass through en route to somewhere else.

The Ward contained no commuter railway stations, although it was criss crossed by railway lines. There were no big bus interchanges, and major nearby shopping centres and big supermarkets were outside the boundaries. And then, like most of 21st century British suburbia, the Ward suffered from “street death” rather than hosting any form of street life.

In part 21^st century “street death” was a consequence of a northern climate, no British town or city had ever had the kind of public evening promenade of citizens such as that which happened in many Mediterranean urbs. But, this was the land where CAR was God, very household had to have two, most had three and many peaked at six per semi-detached home, even after excluding trades vans.

Thus it was that when Boris attempted street stalls, he spoke to about half a dozen people, and that very briefly, within the space of about three hours, as he gradually lost sensation in his ungloved hands and sock clothed feet due to immobility and cold.

The end result was a meagre 79 votes, about 3% of a turnout of about 3,000. Boris felt like a meaningless sound bouncing round the inside a hollow skull or the lounge of a Vast Victorian Hotel, like a false folk song sung to no one, Boris wondered why he had bothered and was not surprised to find himself, shortly thereafter, whingeing to a counsellor about how the pressures of this life had driven him to drink.