Thanks very much Linda for the namecheck the other day and the excessively kind words about my election blog.

It's really shaping up to be a close contest in terms of overall percentages, which wil make things reasonably exciting; but of course because of our cranky first-past-the-post constituency system, it's highly, highly unlikely that Labour will wind up losing its overall majority in the House of Commons.

The Conservatives need a swing of around 10 per cent for starters just to get us into a hypothetical hung parliament scenario. Ain't going to happen....

But stay tuned - there'll be some fun, I'd guess, between now and May 5.

Since a couple of other friends also asked why the blog is behind the paper's subscription gateway - and there is no reasonable explanation as far as I can tell - I have set up a mirror blog, like a doodle pad, where I post the blog entries before filing them to the paper.

For what it's worth and if anyone's interested, but doesn't subscribe to the paper, you can see that here.