Incapacitation is seldom to be welcomed but this week, having of necessity cancelled a number of meetings, it did at least give me an opportunity to catch up on some private work from home.
Said incapacitation mainly took the form of an excruciatingly painful attack of "gout" in my right foot. I write "gout" because it has never been diagnosed as such with any certainty. My doctor, and his colleagues who work alongside him at his surgery, seem obsessed with measuring my blood pressure even though they concede there is nothing actually wrong with it, and any other malady that I complain of is usually discussed only superficially, and inconclusively, before the subject is changed and the strap is tightened once again with an almost manic enthusiasm around my arm.
Unusually, this week's "gout" attack appeared on Monday, subsided a little on Tuesday, then mysteriously returned with a vengeance on Wednesday. To complicate matters my left foot was simultaneously assailed by plantar fasciitis, a condition probably brought about by a combination of too much walking and leafleting, and having small feet.
Whatever the causes of my woes earlier in the week I was able to hobble along yesterday (Friday), penguin-style, to the Thai Restaurant at the Bridge Inn in Isleworth where our departing Principal Community Cohesion officer Sabin Malik (right) was enjoying her last afternoon with some of her colleagues before moving on to her new job at the Home Office.
Sabin will be hugely missed by her friends and colleagues at Hounslow, both on a personal and a professional level. She was not just a Community Cohesion Officer, her expertise in the field was a massive asset to us as we set about our ultimately successful bid to win Beacon Status for Cohesive and Resilient Communities. She possessed a sound knowledge of Islamic theology which enabled her to challenge some of the myths peddled by minority elements within Islam who would threaten cohesion in our society, and to do so from a position of knowledge and authority. She was also something of a champion for Muslim women through her work with the National Muslim Women's Advisory Group.
Sabin's recruitment by the Home Office or suchlike was always an unfortunate inevitability. Working with Sabin was for me like being the manager of Brentford FC and having a Brazilian international playing in the team (without any disrespect intended either to her fellow officers at Hounslow or to the Bees, whose promotion to League One will hopefully be confirmed this afty). There was always going to be a Ferguson or a Benitez lurking somewhere in the stands.
I wish Sabin all the very best at her new job - she will without doubt be a tremendous asset to her new employers - and I know she'll keep in touch with all her many friends and former colleagues in Hounslow.
In late November Caroline spent some time in hospital recovering from a malady known as cellulitis. It is a condition that I'd previously never heard of, but apparently it is completely unrelated to the skin problem of a similar name. Whilst in itself it is not life-threatening, it can if not diagnosed in time lead to septicaemia, which of course is, so we had an anxious couple of weeks.
No sooner had she recovered than my own 73-year-old father was taken ill. Thankfully, it transpired, he was only suffering from stomach ulcers.
Then, after having spent a few weeks in West Middlesex Hospital with an illness which we still haven't got to the bottom of but which was likely to have been pancreatic cancer, my step father-in-law, until a few weeks ago an apparently fit man and outwardly a very young 66, passed away just after Christmas.
Under the circumstances my short attack of gout seems to have been the best deal going this holiday season. I've had better ones (holiday seasons that is, not attacks of gout). But now that it's over with, it would be appropriate to look ahead to the New Year and the challenges and opportunities that it is likely to bring.
I find it difficult to believe that we have been in administration at the London Borough of Hounslow for some thirty months. When we first negotiated the terms of the coalition and took up our respective portfolios I was confident that we had all the time in the world to exorcise the organisation of the old ways of thinking and of doing things. Whilst I believe we have made great strides towards that objective, it becomes increasingly clear to me as the months roll on that we will not have completely finished the job by the time the borough goes to the polls again in May 2010.
My goal is to create an authority which could not, upon re-electing an unreformed Labour majority at some future time, switch effortlessly back to the old ways of patronage, political matesmanship and institutionalised inequality. Everything that the Community Group has done as a partner in this coalition administration has been with that purpose in mind.
Of course, we don't know what will happen in 2010. We are thankful that the opposition remains lucklustre, disorganised and demoralised, a situation doubtless induced by its rejection locally coupled with its cyclical unpopularity on the national stage at this present time. Whilst there are no signs of a change of attitude locally, the national pendulum will in not too many years' time swing the other way once again.
Quite possibly we could, if we stand for election again and retain our seats, find ourselves as a minority Group under a fully-fledged Conservative administration. A Conservative administration would quite naturally wish to pursue a Conservative political programme and our role under such a set-up, I imagine, would be to ensure that the decronification process in which we have led the way does not get left by the wayside or end up playing second fiddle to ideology, a thing which we believe to be of lesser importance at a local level.
Whatever happens, for the first time we find ourselves facing a situation which is not entirely in our own hands, one of which the outcome is not one that we can predict with confidence. All we can do is continue to do our job (a job which has been done fantastically well by our first-time councillors in particular), improve where necessary, and last but not least ensure that we use our remaining time under the current term to maximum effect to help move the authority closer to where we always wanted it to be, at the very heart of our community.
Happy New Year.
