Show's over for a while now...and Ihave been hideously bad at posting to this blog... Reading for Summer Theatre is next week, and I have the horrid task of choosing which of my friends in the group will be part of the cast. I know that some of them will be very disappointed, but also that they will all accept it in the best spirit, and hopefully I can use them behind the scenes. There are only six characters - 3 male, 3 female.. so...

Had a good chat with my dad the other day about the American Elections. They look like they might be shaping up to be one of the most interesting contests in years. In the previous ones there was a real sense of inevitability about who would be the candidate etc, but on both sides this time the races seem to be all too real.

OK, the Republican one is a Hare and Tortoise event... Can Mick Huckabee's tortoise catch John McCain's hare before the finish line of 1191, or is he just too far behind? Should McCain ignore him and coast along while building up a national campaign machine or should he get out there and tackle him head on, thus also giving him the credibility he lacks?

But the Democratic race is much more equal... Most commentators seem to agree that Hillary is bound to lose heavily in the next couple of primaries, But she is a political heavyweight, and Obama cannot afford to get too confident. At this point this race is definitely too close to call, and much though any true lover of democracy hates them, the smokey backrooms will no doubt soon be buzzing with negotiations about the discarded votes of Michigan and Florida, and about the 'John Edwards' delegates.

CNN and Fox News have been talking a wee bit about the Superdelegates - To my mind this is not the undemocratic problem that they think. The Superdelegates are there to give a safety valve... Only when the public cannot decide will their votes become important(witness the fact that only the democratic ones are really being discussed- not the RNC votes in that race), so they should rather be regarded as a "kind of" casting votes... If the democratic voters cannot decide effectively then there has to be some kind of mechanism, so why complain when it is put into operation? The only question is... are there too many of them, and will they prove to be as split as the rest of America?