Untidy Glasgow elections

Apollo 10 Command Module - Charlie Brown over the lunar surface

Glasgow is an untidy city and litter laws are ignored. You would expect that at least prospective councillors would instruct their agents not to deface walls, shops and public buildings with posters. Nearly all voters received their literature via the letterbox, so there is no need for posters.

In future, candidates should be compelled to remove these ugly posters or deposit an extra £50 on nomination day to the Cleansing Department to deal with this nuisance.

Given your scribe’s earlier musings on the rubbish being tied around all the lampposts in Glasgow’s east end at the moment, you could be forgiven for thinking the preceding was written by the same person, but you’d be wrong.

The apparently random and unrelated picture may have given you a clue that there was something afoot (and the Apollonian reference is purely coincidental), and you’d then have been right.

The opening text was actually written by Name and address supplied of Glasgow, who had their letter published in the now defunct Glasgow Citizen newspaper of May 22, 1969. I happened to find this topical item when I found the old paper, and its photographs of Apollo 10, which it introduced with:

For the first time in any Scottish newspaper, readers can study the superb colour close-ups taken by astronauts Eugene Cernan and Thomas Stafford from only eight miles above the Moon’s surface. These pictures, the most exclusive ever taken, will pave the way July’s scheduled landing on the Moon by Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin.

Together with the Command Module nicknamed Charlie Brown, where astronaut John Young remained alone, and is usually forgotten, Cernan and Stafford piloted the Lunar Module, Snoopy, to test its radar and ascent engine, survey Apollo 11’s landing site, and also made the first ever live colour TV transmission from space.

Even though we are supposedly all green and environmentally friendly and aware, it seems that things are no better 39 years later, and an election still means rubbish plastered all over the place, and another rain forest giving its life in the name of election communication that have a life of around 1 second, as they make their way from letterbox to bin. I seem to have received as many mailings this week as I did last week, and all from the same people.

The most pathetic attempt arrived this afternoon. I already referred to the sad boilerplate letters, where the candidate pretends to know you by pasting your name and address into a template letter, apparently supposed to fool you into thinking it has been personally written to you. Today’s new low was delivered in an envelope that had been printed in a longhand font, in blue ink, presumably to make it look as if someone had taken the time to write it out in longhand – just for you. I still shudder as I think of our Sales & Marketing director bundling our typist off home with bundles of envelopes at the weekend, paying them a few quid to hand write the envelopes for his next, greatest, sales campaign – that made me shudder too. Anyway, having gone to all the effort of producing this mock, personally addressed envelope, the candidate involved lost any chance of winning a vote by addressing me as “Dear Resident” on the enclosed letter.

Yet another case of someone without two brain cells to rub together – but still good for a bit of a laugh on its way to the (recycle) bin.

And I managed to make a post that included by-elections, space exploration, and history, and all without being deliberately contrived.