Love letter to democracy

Today we’ve launched our first finished mySociety project. It’s called WriteToThem and it performs magic. OK, not quite magic, but some things which haven’t been done before. Go on, try it out:

  1. Enter your postcode.
  2. Find out all of your elected representatives.
  3. And then easily send them a letter.

I’m betting you didn’t know who your local councillors or your MEPs were before, never mind had such a convenient way of contacting them.

Fifty springs are little room

This afternoon it was sunny, and I went out to look at the crocuses near the back of St John’s and Trinity colleges. They’re roughly here on a map. Every spring I wait for them to magically appear, the first magnificent sweep of flowers, they make the eyes glow to stare at them. Today there was even a bee happily buzzing between them, as if in a childrens’ book. You can kneel down and peer, but no amount of biology will resolve the flowers’ mystery.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It leaves me only fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
Above the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A E Houseman

So, that time is here. Make a break today to find some flowers near you.