Sign Of The Times

It's conference season and the Conservatives are in town. Bournemouth plays host to at least one party conference every Autumn and there has always been, for at least the last 10 years, one part of the ritual that is missing this year - the vehicle registration number camera van.

This is a converted Police van that has two cameras in the rear, a bank of computers and is usually supported by at least one police car and two police motor cycles. It sits at a place called Blackwater Bridge, about five miles north of Bournemouth on the A338, and takes photographs of all the cars heading south towards the coast. If the number on the photograph matches that on the vehicle recognition software you get stopped.

This year it's not there.

There's a theory doing the rounds as to why not, the IRA are no longer a threat. There are plenty of cases of people in the area who, having visited Ireland for a holiday in the summer in previous years, were pulled over by the boys in blue during the Conference season. It seems a credible idea. We live in an age when security services are more concerned with Muslim extremism and presumably its easier to keep tabs on cars that don't leave the mainland, the van is surplus to requirements.

It's a shame really, there was nothing I liked more than driving really slowly past the van and waving to the camera on my way home (childish I know).

Security in the town itself is pretty tight, so much so that for five days hardly anybody bothers going shopping, in fact three years ago the only people in MVC one Saturday morning were Geoff Hoon (then Minister of Defence), his bodyguard and me! Geoff likes Blur by the way.

The local evening paper ran a story a couple of years back about the high number of prostitutes who flood into the area for the five days certain of extra business - apparently they do better when the Conservatives are in town, which gives a lie to one theory anyway!

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How The Other Half Live

Billie Piper drove her husbands Ferrari to work today and parked it so that anybody standing in reception couldn't avoid looking at it. Apparently her Mercedes was in the garage, the ashtray was full of sweet wrappers probably, not bad eh - works seventeen hours a week and drives the Ferrari when the Merc is off the road - shows the financial differences in our office when one of the other female members of staff can't afford £60 to get the inhibitor switch on her car fixed!

She did offer me a ride up and down the road when I said I'd never been in one but I had to decline on the grounds that my back probably couldn't stand up to the bending down to get in.

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The Truth Is Out There?

Steven Gerrard's autobiography has been described as the best post-2006 Autobiography this summer, not much of an honour when you consider the competition is Fat Frank, Wozza and Rio. The strange thing is that Stevie G has a different version of one of the key moments in Liverpool's recent history to the generally accepted version.

At half-time in Istanbul in May 2005 with Liverpool 3-0 down in the Champions League Final, Rafa Benitez had to make some tough decisions, well he didn't I mean his team were losing how tough was it to decide to go and chase the game? Anyway Stevie says in his book that Rafa sat everybody down and calmly went through the first half and how they were going to play second half.

This is at complete odds to the version that has been doing the rounds for the past year and a bit which says that Rafa was in such a state of panic that he actually ended up sending out twelve players for the second half to begin with and then took two off so that he only had ten!

Mind you, he started the game with ten plus Harry Kewell.