Apologies for not getting things done

Blood and Property has not been updated since mid December. Apologies. My excuse is that I have been trying to tackle a dangerous cocktail of hoarding, procrastination and day dreaming.

I'm hoping to find the cure in some ideas outlined in a book called "Getting Things Done". I may have misinterpreted the instructions but a room in my flat has now become an "inbox" and as there aren't many rooms in my flat it seems reasonable to prioritise sorting out this inbox ASAP.

Unfortunately that's the only priority I'm allowed to make. So, until the task is completed, I have to process everything without prioritising - doing the top thing on my inbox list (finding homes for instruction manuals, guarantees, old notebooks, statements and other rubbish - as well as ideas about what to do with this blog). So I haven't got much time spare.

In the meantime the gap since my last post has become embarrassingly long. Last week Dave Hill kindly mentioned this blog in a piece on the Guardian website (thanks for that!) and I thought I better explain why I haven't done much for a while... I hope someone will still be reading this by the time I get back to it, hopefully next week.

This attempt to sort things out started before 2011 but it's now become a new year resolution.

And if there's anyone reading this... happy new year! And I hope you're having a better time with your resolutions than I am.

Is Diane Abbott lazy?

Diane Abbott chose to give the Daily Telegraph her first interview since being nominated for the Labour Party leadership contest.

The tone is friendly despite the fourth paragraph reading: "Her critics, some of them women, view her as an arrogant or idle upstart manipulated by opponents who stand to benefit by having a plump, black, 57-year-old single mother to enliven what promised to be a homogenised field."

Diane is quoted saying: "Some people say 'Oh, Diane’s so lazy.’ They don’t realise the demands of a busy constituency and bringing up a child alone...”

Michael White, political editor at the Guardian also discussed this lazy allegation in a blog post last week. He said it wasn't uncommon for Labour colleagues to describe her as "Arrogant, unpopular, lazy, disloyal, the kind of foolishly leftwing MP who had done Labour so much harm since the 1980s..."

White also said that Abbott appears to have upset Hackney North Labour Party: "My apparatchik friend claims that Abbott's constituency party was cross with her for not supporting fellow Campaign Group MP John McDonnell, the would-be candidate who stood down yesterday in favour of helping a black female contender make the cut."

However White said he was a fan of Abbott's leadership bid.

On the eve of the elections in May, Dave Hill wrote in his Clapton Pond Blog: "More seriously, there has to be a danger that when incumbent politicians are as firmly installed as most of ours they get complacent and lazy and dull. Abbott, after all, has recently been accused of getting a bit grand and we don't want that sort of thing round here."

In the Telegraph piece she said that she wants to get married again and that public school was the making of her son. Hackney was mentioned in the piece once.

Bloggers and tweeters vs Hackney Gazette: History

Tweeter Northsixteen (any relation to N16?) and blogger Raggydeeann chart the misdeeds of the Hackney Gazette and crime reporting. As far as I can tell, the Gazette tried to credit the source for a story - but got it wrong. This looks like it might be an improvement on the bad old days:

Dave Hill had a run in with the Gazette back in 2008 - "It was all about bloggers and how they're a bunch of nutters who have no business complaining if, by some miracle, they publish something of interest that a newspaper - such as the Gazette - helps itself to without acknowledging its source."