Recently we’ve been branching out, investigating new idea, playing around and one of the things I’ve done is set up a publishing house. Doesn’t that sound grand?
The whole reason behind it was that I wanted to collect all my newspaper columns together and then get them published. I sent off my first collection to a publisher who promptly failed to return my enquiry and so I took that rejection as an indicator of my abject rubbishness and gave up. A week later I decided that that was rubbish and I’d publish them myself. Half a year later I now know why people prefer agents and publishers, this is so long winded and for complete beginners it’s full of problems.
I’m not saying that it’s akin to curing Small Pox but the learning curve has been steep. In order to print the book I needed to get the text ready for print and design a book cover. So I had to learn how to use publishing software to design a cover. I tried to do this but discovered my talents and patience were not up to the job and so I got in touch with a few designers with my brief in mind. After a month or two and some money gone I realised that to get the cover I wanted that I would have to spend a lot more money. Couldn’t afford that so back to the actual drawing board. I found an image I loved and sent off for permission to use it and then waited an age for a reply. Gradually things inched forward.
The next step was to get an ISBN, again not straightforwards and in order to buy an ISBN you have to be a publisher and buy them in sets of 10. So Mudlark’s was born. More months of what to call it, where to put the apostrophe, what should the logo look like and so on.
Finally it was time to submit the book file and jacket file for publishing. I had chosen two printers so that I could compare having shopped around for the best prices for small print runs. I went with Amazon’s in-house company Create Space and Ingram Spark, a huge printing company with an excellent reputation. My proof came back from Amazon within a fortnight, all looked good but apparently Ingram were the better company so I want to check their version. the problem was that they kept rejecting my cover file. Month after month the computer just rejected my file, every time I made the requested changes but no joy. Months and I mean months later my file was accepted and the proof was printed and sent off to me. It arrived and I couldn’t believe it but on one of my revisions I had hidden my name and had become so margins focused (the main issue) that I had missed the bigger picture. MUCH swearing ensued. I unhid my name and resubmitted the file to discover, ho ho ha ha, revisions after a proof had been printed cost $50. I looked at the two proofs but could see very little discernible difference. If anything, I preferred the Create Space version. So that was that, many months of delay, for nothing except frustrated tears. Yes I’m sure I learnt something, probably that I’m a lousy proof reader but I already knew that.
And here we are today. 50 copies on order. Soon to be for sale in the shop and book two, another collection of essays, is underway. Then I plan on writing a collection of walks in the Mevagissey area and a short history of Meva, nothing earth shattering but it will provide me with new challenges. No idea how to do the columns layout. Beginning to quail even thinking about it.
Oh Facebook! You with your hidden algorithms, and arcane suggestions, how is anyone supposed to know how to get you to work properly? I run two pages Hurley Books and I Love Mevagissey. I mothballed the Mevagissey site last year as another similar site was doing the same thing and I decided to just focus on the business one. I left a little holding message redirecting people to the other site and left it at that. As you can see over the year it pretty much flat-lined. Meanwhile Hurley Books continued to gradually grow. I posted regularly; comments, links, shares and photos. Some items proved popular and we would have lots of interaction. Despite all the Facebook wizards suggesting that a particular type of post and a particular time of post was the way to get noticed nothing actually fitted that profile. If I posted a photo on one night at 7 pm lots of people would be shown it by FB, try the exact same thing the following night and nothing. Try it again a week later on the same day and still nothing. Whatever the logarithms are are quite frankly anyone’s guess. So I continued plodding on, posting whenever the mood grabbed me and building up a really nice relationship with my FB followers.
I Love Mevagissey
Then something funny happened. Mevagissey hit the news over the Hitler’s Walk sign and suddenly my I Love Mevagissey page sprang to life, as you can see in the graph. The story first made the nationals on February the 4th That made a bit of sense but then the story faded away but the likes didn’t, they continued to rocket. To make things even more remarkable, during this time FB removed deadwood from its accounts. You can see this occurring on the Hurley Books page as we lost 16 dead accounts. Obviously not a real loss in any sense but look at I Love Mevagissey, that page lost 7, but you can’t see it as it was still ratcheting up likes.
Hurley Books
Now the real head scratcher is that I was doing nothing on this page. During the last month I posted just two posts. Both asking people why they had liked the page. The posts were hardly seen and only attracted a few comments. Over on Hurley Books, lots of great conversations and shares were going on, that is a vibrant and busy page. I Love Mevagissey is a barren desert and yet. Since Feb 1st Hurley Books has gone from 935 to 923, we lost 16 and gained 4. I Love Mevagissey went from 328 to 568 lost 7 and gained 240! In two months of doing nothing. The Hitler story can account for about the first 70 but what on earth caused the massive spike on March 5th – 11th or March 20th – 26th?
The page was receiving virtually no comments, likes and no shares, so something else was occurring. Maybe the word Mevagissey was a more popular draw than Books, certainly it’s more unique but it hasn’t suddenly become unique. Again the news story was a little fillip and to that extent I have added Mevagissey to the Hurley Books page to see if it has any bearings on the matter. I did this three days ago and so far no meteoric explosion of likes. 🙂 The only other thing that springs to mind is that one new liker said he saw I Love Mevagissey in a suggested likes post issued to him by FB, for whatever reason I Love Mevagissey had been highlighted and promoted by FB. As far as I know Hurley Books has never had the same exposure. Is this because Hurley Books sits in the Retail category and I Love Mevagissey sits in the Companies & Organisations: Travel/Leisure category. Does FB think Leisure and Tourism needs more support and exposure? Did the page just get lucky? Is there some arcane knowledge to which I am blind? Almost certainly the latter. So I shall continue to watch the two pages and see if I can divine any received wisdom on the situation.
Recently invitations were issued to apply for The Independent Bookshop of the Year Award. We had a go at this a few years ago and made it to the shortlist. We polished everything up, made it look really shiny and submitted our entry. We didn’t get any further than the shortlist and in all honesty we didn’t expect to because we were nowhere near the standard of at least one other name in our region who not only went on the win the region and, unsurprisingly, the national award as well.
Even had they not been in the running all the others were still doing a better job than us, in terms of the competition criteria. That’s the crunch really. We don’t do author events, reading groups, school visits, outreach workshops etc etc etc. We don’t bang our drum, wave our flag or do much at all with the community. Call me old fashioned but I think those are the functions of a library. Don’t get me wrong I don’t think a bookshop shouldn’t do them and when they do it’s pretty great if it works for all parties. Fundamentally though, the party it needs to work for most is the bookshop. I know this is going to sound horribly mercantile and quite frankly a bit grubby but bookshops are there to make money and thus stay in business. That’s pretty much as bottom line as it gets. Everything else is window dressing. If that window dressing brings you more customers, spreads the word, then great. If that window dressing costs you more time and money than it creates then why are you doing it?
Bookshops are going out of business and we are all facing tough times. We have to be ever more careful about how we function as it doesn’t take much to shut us down. We don’t owe it to our communities, our customers, our authors or our bank managers to stay in business but to ourselves, first and foremost.
For Hurley Books this means providing great service, selecting stock very carefully and watching our profit margins. I think we do a good job and that we are a great bookshop but this brings me back to the first point; we are not good in terms of the awards criteria. So I decided to apply again this year without the polish and shiny in order to put a voice out there for all the hard working quiet bookshops.
This was our application. We didn’t get shortlisted 🙂
Our application isn’t going to look great but bear with us and you’ll see why we have bothered
Welcome to Hurley Books. We are a independent bookshop in Mevagissey, a small fishing village on the Cornish south coast. It is owned and run by myself and my husband, Liz and Steve Hurley, and a range of staff, currently two excellent part timers. We work with Emma and Jane, who provide a friendly and informative service. We are all book readers and all have different backgrounds and tastes, we work hard, we enjoy our jobs and we love where we live. None of us are overly bothered by fashion or trends. The atmosphere is friendly, warm and not intrusive. We offer assistance but we neither hover nor ignore our customers. We have been in business for the past 14 years, moving to Mevagissey nine years ago where we have settled down nicely.
We stock new, second hand, collectables and ephemera. Our balance is probably 30 / 70 new to old. Our new stock reflects our location and the desires of our customers plus a dollop of stuff that we find interesting and would like to share. Our second hand stock is pretty eclectic, although well laid out. As a professional librarian I have always loved order, as a lover of old bookshops Steve has always preferred chaos but somehow we find a comfortable middle ground. New shinny stock is in the front of the shop, old curious stuff is out the back.
Our website is www.hurleybooks.co.uk which we use to post our blogs and links to our online shops on Amazon and eBay. It is a useful tool but our main form of online communication with our customers is our Face Book page /hurleybooks. We also tweet @hurleybooks.
Our opening hours expand and contract like the tide. In summer we are open 7 days a week from 9 a.m. ’til 9 p.m. In winter, it’s Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. ’til 4 p.m. We are enormously influenced by the tourist trade, in winter the resident population of Mevagissey is far too small to support a bookshop and much as we like our villagers we would be fools to rely on them. Not because they would be unwilling to support us and indeed they do but there just aren’t enough of them.
In fact it is not their place to support us. We are not a charity nor an essential service. If we can’t survive on our own two feet then we need to bow out.
Marketing and promotions. Yeah, we don’t do that.
Community outreach. Yeah, we don’t do that either.
Loyalty Cards?No. Author events? Nope. Reading Groups? Nope. Local Hub? No, no, no. We’re rubbish aren’t we and yet we exist.
We do more than exist. We thrive. We flourish and grow. Actually we do do the odd event, if someone asks us to help out launch a book then of course we are there to help. If they need advice on publishing a book we go through the steps with them. If people need a new reading list we set something up for them. when a new book comes out and we think it has someone’s name all over it we get in touch with them. We find our customers their next book, we offer a warm friendly space to just browse and buy if they want. Sometimes it’s enough to just try and solve our blackboard puzzles or come in and sit out of the rain. Dogs are welcomed but not ice creams.
We offer a range of stock at all price points on a wide range of subjects. We happily offer discounts when asked but not always and sometimes we give free books and comics when not asked just because they were lovely customers. We also have a great relationship with our local authors, supporting and promoting them as much as we can.
Don’t get me wrong, we do get awful customers, who doesn’t, but the majority are great and some are priceless. In fact I have asked our online community to tell us what they make of us going for this award and goodness me they made us blush. We didn’t ask our customers in the physical shop because that would just have been too embarrassing. A transaction in a small bookshop is intimate enough as it is, asking them to rate us as well would just be uncomfortable.
Here’s what our online community had to say.
https://www.facebook.com/HurleyBooks?fref=nf
There’s also a thread on this subject on the 6th of February. By all means have a browse through our face book page posts and photos, it might give you more of a feel for us.
I could send you clippings of a glossy magazine book group that we hosted. The EV Thompson fan base that we ran until his death. The time we gave free copies of Rebecca to the fishermen. Or coverage in the national press about our dog biscuits. The radio show that we sponsored. I could tell you about the publishing company that I am in the process I’m setting up. Or the bookbinding that I do. We could show you photos of author signings, but all these things are few and far between and don’t offer a true reflection of our everyday existence.
So this is why we have entered because we want to offer an alternative view of what a successful, popular bookshop can be. It doesn’t have to be the one with a regular and exciting calendar of events, with strong out-reach community ties but one that knows itself and just gets on with being that.
Highlights of the Year
·Reading the amazing comments from our customers.
·The fact that another year has passed where we have not woken up one single day and thought “ugh work”
·Discoveringa collection of letters from HRH Edward VIII written at the beginning of the first world war, amongst a collection of school reports bought in auction.
·Meeting an American FB fan, who made a point of coming to Cornwall when she was on holiday in the UK to say Hi!
·Receiving my ISBNs for Mudlarks Press
·Learning how to book bind.
·Watching a lady jive in the shop when she thought no one was watching.
It’s cold and blowy and the only people about are locals and there’s not many of them either. I don’t blame them, I don’t want to be out in it either but the sales have to be sent. I finish tieing up my post sacks and nip over to the post office to drop them off, I want to be quick because Postie hadn’t been yet and I don’t want to miss him. Stopping at the Post Office I get caught up with Kath chatting about the book that she’s reading, she wasn’t chatting, that would be me, I can’t resist asking what people are reading. I go and grab some milk and popcorn from Moore’s. Another reason for doing the mail early means that Dave hasn’t opened the sweet shop yet. I do like the dark chocolate brazils a little too much.
Anyway I get back and sure enough there’s the red slip on the cobbles telling me I’ve missed him. So I’m straight back out on the street, playing Find the Postie. He hasn’t returned to the Post Office, the fishermen haven’t seen him, I trudge back to the shop when Morley bangs on the window and points up Jetty Street. I nip out onto the harbour and spot Postie at the far side who sees me and waves. Standing by the lobster pots I sign for my parcel, wave up at Morley and go and put the kettle on.
Christmas day and everything is warm and wonderful. You’ve had breakfast, maybe gone to mass, been on a bracing walk. The fire is roaring and you are gathered around the tree. What will this year’s gift be? An itchy jumper? Some vouchers? A food blender?
Or what about a tailor made hamper full of books and little luxuries? Can you imagine how great that would be? Some wonderful books, a journal, a bath melt, some chocolate all packaged in a wicker hamper with straps and carrying handle.
We can make up any hamper on any theme; avid reader, sporting enthusiast, writer, connoisseur or Cornish interest. We can also make it up for anyone; husband, father, boyfriend, wife, daughter, godchild, postman.
Hampers start from £25 this include as wicker hamper, book, bar of chocolate and luxurious bath melt or soap. You can either leave it up to us which flavours / title to put in or you can specify every item. We’ll let you know what’s available and you can pick and choose. After that the world is your lobster. How about just books! Or some exquisite pieces from Rory Dobner. Add a bottle of something sparkly. Whatever you do you’ll be sure of getting and receiving the best present ever!
It all started my my dentist peering into my son’s mouth and then asking me how many fizzy drinks he had. None, well maybe one a fortnight? Hmm, fruit juice? Nope. The dentist’s concerns were that Finn’s teeth were showing considerable acid erosion, this is something different to decay caused by sugar. She was concerned but told us to keep an eye on things for the next six months. Six months past and the next conversation went along the lines of “Are you sure???” In fact the erosion was so severe that Bridget gave us some litmus strips to test everything he was drinking. If it wasn’t in his intake it might be stomach acid.
The small little indents are caused by acid erosion.
So we came home and tested one of his milkshake drinks – no problems, we then tested one of his sports drink. Off the scale! Instantly the paper went bright orange indicating high acidity.Everything fell into place really quickly, Finn drinks loads of these but they’re not fizzy and not particularly sweet so I hadn’t really thought of them.
Proposal What were the pH levels of sport drinks?
Parameters I was only interested in sports drinks, although I also added a fizzy drink, a fruit juice and an energy drink as bench marks.
Methodology All drinks were to be tested as soon as the bottle was opened. The pH stick would be rinsed in distilled water after each test. All drinks were done at the same time at room temperature. I wasn’t sure if the composition of the drink altered after a few hours enough to change pH levels but decided not to risk it and did them all at the same time.
Apparatus pH measure. This had to be calibrated using distilled water and a pH sachet (4.01) – learnt how to make distilled water (I love the internet)
Results Lucozade Original 3.2 Lucozade Pink Lemonade 3.2 ” Orange 3.6 ” Isotonic Sport 4.0 ” Energy Caribbean Crush 3.4 ” Energy Blackcurrant 3.5 ” Sport Elite Orange 4.3 ” Sport lite orange 4.3 ” Revive 3.2 Powerade ion4 Berry 3.4 Tesco Active Isotonic Orange 3.9 Little Big Shot Energy 3.6 Get More Vit D 4.3 ” Vit C 3.8 ” B Vit 3.7 ” Multi 4.5
Fanta Orange 3.7 Coke 3.1 Power Horse Energy Drink 3.7 Mixed Up Stimulation Drink 3.6 Orange Juice 3.5 (this will vary as the fruits vary)
Conclusions Isotonic drinks are acidic!
Other findings So citric acid is a massive culprit and if it appears in the top 4 list of ingredients you can guarantee your drink is going to be too acidic. If sugar / syrup is in the top 4 list of ingredients you have given the acid something with which to glue itself to your teeth. Hmm.
If you’re an athlete that wears a gum shields think about how you use it. Typically you will have a slug of your drink and then replace your gum shield. This effectively locks the acid liquid against the teeth. A further problem for athletes is that due to their performance and exertion there is a lack of saliva in the mouth and it’s saliva that washes away sugars and bacteria from the mouth. Replacing saliva with a sugary, acidic drink is a bad swap.
Further research I’d like to test a further range of products including energy drinks and sport gels. There also needs to be research into the effects of gumshields on teeth when used with isotonic drinks.
Initial Actions Drink water. Do not drink anything other than water when using a gum shield. If you drink an isotonic drink, reduce your consumption. Do not brush teeth immediately as dentists are concerned that this additional abrasion may cause further erosion. Although to be honest there aren’t many basins on the race track 🙂
Peer Review This article has not been peer reviewed unless Facebook and some likes from friends count!
Hurley Books is undergoing a bit of a transformation. We are moving the warehouse into the rear of the shop and turning the front of the shop into a new bookshop. We are also re-launching our website so that you will find shopping online with us a bit easier.
The first noticeable effect is that the bricks and mortar shop will be closed all next week whilst we start moving stock around. Hurley Books online will go off the air for a few days, hopefully over the weekend. The following week, October 7th we hope to open but let’s be honest we will be moving around 10 000 books it may not go according to plan.
There will be a further shop closure when we start knocking things down but our carpenter has just torn his shoulder and as we would rather work with him we are happy to wait until he is fixed. This was due to happen next week but it can wait. What it does mean is that for a while the new layout will look a bit odd. Please bear with us.
There are obvious upsides and downsides to this. The shop will now open all year round as Steve or I will always be in managing the online operations, ordering will be faster, communications will be better and the range of items we sell will be vastly improved. The downside of this is that we will lose our lovely staff. Pauline will continue to run our weekends, Kim will no doubt still help out on high days and holidays and Jan will get to put her feet up for a bit. They, and previous staff have all been wonderful and we will miss them.
There’s no doubting that these are tricky times for bookshops but Hurley Books has always risen, like cream, to the top of any situation and I look forward to all your support and understanding over the next few months.
It looks as if our website has been causing confusion so I’ve given it a few tweaks and whilst I’m at it I may as well remind everyone what we’re about.
We are a second hand bookshop. We also sell books online. We also have a sibling called The Cornish Bookshop. In our bricks and mortar shop you can find a wide range of good quality second hand books. Occasionally we carry some new titles (Harry Potter for example) and we have a small selection of new Cornish titles. Customers will sometimes ask us to order books for them, we will search for the cheapest and quickest that we can find. Often this means we use Amazon. By and large our customers understand this and aren’t bothered. Those that don’t like Amazon ask us not to order from them and we don’t. We have lots of local and national wholesalers who we support but generally only for bulk orders, our discounts with them are low as we are a second hand book shop and don’t place enough large orders with them, which is understandable.
The books we sell online are on Amazon, eBay, ABE and Alibris and stored in our warehouse. We don’t handle these sales directly as we couldn’t afford the fees for hosting our own site. Plus not enough people would visit our personal site to make it worthwhile. After all what are the chances that we will have the second hand copy of the book that you are looking for?
We have set up The Cornish Bookshop as a specialist site to help authors and publishers find an outlet for their books that doesn’t cost them the earth. Amazon demand around 60% discount from the author / publisher to stock their titles which is really harsh, especially when we are talking about low print runs and small profit margins. The Cornish Bookshop as well as having its own site is also on the Amazon market place. Confusing? Not really. What it means is that for a small commission we get to sell these specialist titles to an enormous audience and the authors don’t have to pay the 60% fees. (You see there’s a lot going on behind the scenes).
We have a website (you’re on it) where we just like to pull all the strands together. You can see the books we have in the warehouse if you go to our eBay home. On the Amazon link you can shop to your heart’s content and we receive a little commission so you are still helping a local independent bookshop. Or you can browse our Cornish titles and support the local economy. Finally you can flip over to our Facebook page and see what’s happening in the bricks and mortar shop.
Our views on Amazon. We understand that people want to support local bookshops and we love you for it but we do get surprised when sometimes people expect us to hate Amazon. We’re all booksellers and just because they do it better than us doesn’t mean that we’re going to snub them (let’s leave the tax issues to one side for now). What Amazon can’t do as well as us is offer a friendly informal chat but honestly people don’t value that so much and that’s OK we know the market that we’re working in.
Our views on Kindle et al. Well, this is a whole new ball game. As a bookseller I’m pretty much out of the loop because of the directness of the download. I can live with that, the market for physical books is going to get smaller and tougher but Hurley Books is fine. After all we’re second hand and specialist Cornish. We’ll be around for a long time yet!
At the moment I’m supposed to be concentrating on writing this column but life seems to have jumped into a handcart and is on its way to hell.The chief issue is the printer that seems convinced that the A4 paper that is in the tray is not actually A4. Its way of drawing our attention to the problem is by printing the same packing slip every time with an accompanying note saying that this isn’t A4, so clearly there’s a fault but it has nothing to do with the size of the paper. Now we can’t print any of our customer’s orders and the backlog is building. Typically I am at home and Steve is in the warehouse trying to fix it and trying to flag down the nearest saint so that he may steal their patience because I’m afraid I’ve worn all of his out.It’s hard to know who finds the following sentence more frustrating, “have you wiggled the blue toggle?”I’m exasperated because wiggling the blue toggle would be the first blatantly obvious thing to do. Steve is exasperated because he doesn’t know what a blue toggle is, where to find it or how to wiggle it.In a minute I’ll have to drive back to the warehouse, which I don’t want to do because I’ve just left there and returned home to find the puppy has been sick everywhere, won’t eat her food and is looking pretty fed up with life.I have just cleaned up the wee, poo and sick and I too, am looking pretty fed up with life.
I was going to chat about cookery programmes as they are a nice way for me to switch off and think of new ways of serving some of my favourites. Clarissa Dickson-Wright made me laugh the other night, on the boning of rabbits, she suggested that you could ask your local butcher to do but “really, don’t be so wet!”and on the whole squeamishness about eating bunnies? “Don’t be so ridiculous” It was like having one’s Nanny come and put you straight. Nigel Slater is another favourite for putting together some great tastes but does he have to be so earnest in his delivery? He sounds like he’s addressing NATO and Lex Luther has the bomb! It’s only anchovies Nigel, breathe deeply. His current series is all about making leftovers last to another meal. Yesterday he cooked a family pie and showed us how to make a lunch out of it the following day.Now clearly Nigel isn’t cooking for a family because the clue is in the title “family pie”. When I cook a family pie it feeds the family, there are no leftovers.Ho hum, the other clue that Nigel isn’t cooking for a family is his ridiculously clean fridge, devoid of any form of junk or basic staples.Just the odd parcel of meat lovingly wrapped in brown paper.Well, he doesn’t live in my world but sometimes I wished I lived in his.
On well back to my life, sorry I’ve not been on form today but it’s all been a bit of a mess. Hope you’re all getting along fine and enjoying a quick break from your daily chores, whatever they may be.
Chilly nights and the new Bond film have set me thinking of Scotland again but even without these prompts, Scotland is very much on my mind at the moment due to the upcoming referendum.Will Scotland choose to leave the United Kingdom? An issue that is going to cause a lot of talk and speculation but hopefully no change. The issue that I am finding really fascinating about the whole debate though is that the vote is being opened up to 16 and 17 year olds.This decision I think will have far greater ramifications. Thin end of the wedge, horse has bolted, genii is out of the bottle; however you phrase it, once you say that Scottish 16 years can vote on a national topic then why can’t all 16 year olds vote in national elections? Or any elections?
I was chatting to a father the other day who felt it was a really bad idea as children will just vote the way their parents tell them. Interesting to hear that argument being used again, I think it was last dusted off during the time of the suffragettes, and before that, letting servants vote and so on. Personally, I think if you tell the majority of teenagers to do one thing you can be sure they’ll do the exact opposite.Besides once they are in the polling booth no one knows how any one has voted.
Certainly many teens will not bother to vote but when we have a national voters turn out, of under 60% I don’t think the adult population has anything to boast about.A 16 year old can live independently, work full time, have children, get married. They are legally responsible for themselves and can make their own medical decisions and be responsible in a court of law.They can even join the army with their parents’ consent. And yet they can’t vote. Surely every aspect of their lives is affected by the decisions made by government but they have no say. For example, on the minimum wage tariff, anyone under 18 earns £3.68 an hour; someone over 21 earns £6.19 for the exact same job.Hardly fair.Maybe something they might like to vote on?
Of course the government passes laws that affect the rights of children; they don’t get a vote because they are children and because they are still in the care of adults.Whilst the vast majority of 16 – 17 year olds are still at home with their family, they are now legally on a different footing and if they can be held responsible in law and pay taxes towards the government through their earnings then they have the right to vote.
Personally I think that they’ll shake things up a bit. They’re all wide eyed and enthusiastic, they get worked up about stuff, they fight and argue all the time, they are passionate and they care. If politicians think that they won’t understand the issues then the politicians had better earn their wages and explain the situation properly.If the currentvoters are concerned that a youth vote may unsettle the apple cart then maybe they had better get off their apathetic behinds and vote.What I’m looking forward to is a pincer movement from the retired voters and the teenage voters and maybe we’ll get a new political party that’s in in for the people rather than themselves?Giddy stuff this Scottish air!
