Mercury, he was that messenger fella wasn't he?

I had words with some people from the city council today. They keep accusing the Mercury of "talking the city down".

The politicians have been saying it for some time and now, most recently in a letter we published last week, the civil servants are saying it too.

One of them rang up to ask me why I'd left a fairly facetious comment in response to the letter on our website. I decided to defend our honour.

Why, I'm asking, is this same phrase cropping up time and time again.

It smacks of a PR strategy. I might be wrong though because this really isn't my field.

But, my reading of it is that some of these council people really do see our scrutiny of their affairs - sometime critical, sometimes supportive - as an attack on the city itself.

No, it's nothing of the sort.

If we have a pop at a council policy we're aiming at an administration, not a city.

There is a big difference.

Browsing Twitter earlier today, we found this post from the "Labour voice of New Parks", Councillor Colin Hall - otherwise known as Ultra_Fox. We know from past experience he's not our biggest fan.

He has referred to us as the Daily Heil. A good socialist lad should know better than to mess around with Nazi imagery. It's poor taste, isn't it?

He was reflecting on the failure of the city's bid to be part of the World Cup party. He's not happy with the football authorities and, it seems, us.

Councillor Hall - the city's high bailiff no less - wrote the following: "Recriminations over this defeat will continue. In particular, the treachery of the Mercury in past 6 months won't be forgotten or forgiven."

We've backed the bid from the very beginning.

Treachery?

Isn't this all getting a little overheated?

Thankfully, my job doesn't take me too far in to the political world.

I covered the city council beat for a wee while some time ago while we waited for a new correspondent to arrive.

I hated every minute of it.

A few days in, I wrote a story about some part of town getting new road safety measures.

I spoke to one of the local councillors. "Great news for my ward, I'm delighted.....", he told me.

A day later someone from another party said to me: "I saw your article. Did you know he voted against those road safety measures at every opportunity?" Grrr.

Someone read the blog, I said, someone read the blog.

Kingswood have removed the 'to let' sign one of their contractors attached to the front of my house.(See below).They came within a couple of hours of my complaint and took the sign away - but left some bits of wood and a couple of nails.
Oh well, it's a victory of sorts because the few lines I wrote about this the other day attracted a reader's comment. And not someone who sits within 15 yards of my desk.
Is this the start of an online publishing sensation?
My contributor is called Ned and I followed the link to his blog and, although I haven't read it in too much detail just yet, I noticed he has posted a series of photographs of Leicester's best buildings.
There are some ace places in this city and I think it's easy to forget that sometimes - especially when I'm walking past the spot where the Pump and Tap and the Bowstring Bridge used to be.

My name is Ciaran and I like meeting people in uniforms.

I broke into new territory this week - Keyham Lane police station.
For vague historical reasons - I've no idea what they are - we've never really had so much to do with this place, even back in the days before I got here.
It's in Hamilton, Leicester and it covers a huge part of the city, neighbourhoods like Belgrave, Thurnby Lodge and Netherhall. Big, important and, above all, newsy places.
I arrived at the station the other night and, straight away, one or two officers pointed out that other stations get all the publicity.
Well, the job now is to win the trust of these officers and see if we can get them in the paper as often as some of their colleagues.
I look forward to doing that - the softy stuff and the less easy side of life there.
It started really well.
I spent a few hours walking around Belgrave and St Marks with Pc Laura Nutt.
This will be part of a series of features I'm putting together toward the end of the month.
I've got half a notebook of shorthand notes and I'll get around to reading and translating them over the next few days.
Pc Nutt was great though. A real beat officer.
She knows what makes this area tick, what gets under people's skin.
She also dealt with one of the resident ne'er do wells brilliantly. I watched her search the lad in the street, while chatting to him like a concerned mum.

Why do the small things bother me so much?

Slightly off topic this one.
Imagine my surprise when I got an angry call from home earlier today to inform me that my little castle is apparently on the market.
It's mine, all mine - and I've got the mortgage statements to prove it.
Kingswood estate agents apparently have other ideas.
A contractor working for them stuck a 'to let' sign in my front yard earlier today. Grrr.
I made a couple of calls to their office - which is a couple of hundred yards away from home - and asked them to take it down.
Six hours or so later it was still there.
I'm leaving the office shortly and I'm hoping it's gone by the time I get back.
Again, I say 'grrr'.

I used to like the Guardian, now I despise it.

My colleague, education correspondent Ian Wishart, sent me a link to this Guardian thought piece. What a demoralising start to the day.I have only the vaguest of ideas who George Monbiot is because I stopped reading the Guardian years ago.
I stopped when I realised I'd started to hate its snobby elitism. It's just so back-breakingly right-on about everything.
Now, I'm a progressive sort myself, but it said absolutely nothing to me.
From its news to its fashion spreads, its music coverage and even its football writing, everything annoyed me.
Plus - and this is the big one - so many its readers I've met are nothing short of know-it-all bigots.
The disrespect Monbiot shows to local newspapers and journalists in this piece - not to mention his shallow research - is breathtaking.
Why doesn't he tackle the question of standards at the paper he's associated with and the other nationals?
Collectively, they cosy up to the most powerful political and commercial interests in the land and never let on that they're doing it.
I've written this in work time.
So, I'd better get on.
Bosses from a large supermarket chain, the chief constable and the council leader are popping over to deliver the plan for next week's Mercury.

I love writing fluffy stories. There, I've said it!

So, I've been moaning about how I've spent the past couple of weeks looking for conventional hard news stories. And failing miserably.
The week ended with me marking the retirement of a police sniffer dog called Bill.
I enjoyed meeting Bill and his handler and companion for the past seven years,Pc Terry Durham.
Bill bowed out on Friday having helped police trace all kinds of drugs and guns. He's going to live with a real friend of the paper, Leicestershire's beat bobby of the year, Pc Harvey Watson.
The happy pic on the left of Harvey and Bill was taken by one of our snappers.
The story was fun to write and it went down well with the bosses, it's today's page five fluffy story.
Knowing how stats-obsessed the modern public sector has become, I asked the police semi-seriously if they could provide Bill's detection rates.
They couldn't, but I wouldn't have been too surprised if they'd said: "No, but we can say he has consistently scored 90-plus per cent in public satisfaction surveys."
I love the mad directions this job sends me in.
The stories we cover are often distressing and it's easy to go home feeling a little blue about the world.
Hopefully next week will bring something a little harder my way, but I hope the fluffy stuff keeps coming.

Join the Q.

The police officers I've been speaking to this week have all agreed: things are quiet pretty much everywhere across the city.

Only they don't use what they call the Q-word.

I guess they think they'll jinx themselves if they do. I tend to ask them if it's been 'eventful' or not on their patches.

Well, it's been a quiet time for me too.

As someone who lives in the city - and will have done for 10 years come the end of the month - I'm more than happy. In fact it's great.

However, as a reporter I have to say it's not a good situation.

I'm wondering what my newsdesk colleagues are thinking. Are they running out of patience with me?

If they are, they're hiding it well.

So, as a citizen I should be glad that the stories I've been looking at have been about relatively minor - but never trivial - matters.

This past couple of days it's been bike thefts, purse 'dipping' gangs, a small cannabis 'factory' and, today, a lady who has cooked curry for 200 police officers to raise a couple of hundred pounds for the Poppy Appeal and Help for Heroes.

Reporters like big crash, bang, wallop stories.

There's no escaping that, but I will never lose sight of the fact that losing out to a petty thief is a nasty experience.

The elderly ladies I've talked to down the years after their purses have been lifted from their shopping bags have been among the most troubling interviews I've ever done.

One, she was in her late-70s, once told me: "I didn’t come into the city centre for some time afterwards because I didn’t like the idea of being in a crowd.

"I was convinced it would happen again. It wasn’t about the money they took from me – that was only a couple of pounds.

"What they did was make me feel unsafe in the city I was born in."

Most newsrooms have long since banned phrases such as 'callous burglars' or 'cold-hearted thieves'.

I agree, they are rotten cliches and I've not been caught trying to smuggle them into my stories for a long time, but sometimes they just fit.

Maybe things will start to speed up next week.

And maybe Liverpool FC will start to speed up too.

And maybe, just maybe something will come out of the blue to save the Pump and Tap and the Bowstring Bridge.