Tuesday 16 September 2014

Referendum week. Tuesday.

Following on from yesterday's article, I got a call last night from local Yes campaign organiser Helen, who had been passed my number. I headed round to her house and picked up boxes full of The Wee Blue Book and Yes Scotland's 'Your Future' books, to be delivered to known "undecideds" in the area.

As I arrived at nearly 8pm, she and her family were just sitting down to a takeaway after a long day on the campaign trail - and she still made time to meet me, interrupting her dinner, to hand over campaign materials and chat for ten minutes. For me, that summed up the nature of the grassroots movement that is happening all across Scotland.

After a broken sleep, nervous and excited about Thursday, I watched a bit of Kevin Bridges' 'What's The Story?' referendum special over breakfast then headed out with my one year old in the pram to get started. As I was already covering an area of Kilwinning's Whitehirst Park with Yes Scotland fold-out leaflet/posters and Green flyers, I went out with a couple of pals this morning and killed two birds with one stone - hitting the undecided houses with The Wee Blue Books or Your Future books, and the rest with the fold-outs. Over the course of a few hours we must have covered a couple of hundred houses.

Some of the houses identified as "undecided" had evidently made up their minds in recent months - 3 displayed Yes materials while 2 had No stuff in their windows.

We came across 1 No sticker on a car, in contrast to around a dozen Yes stickers. The only negative reaction we had at doors was one guy coming out to hand back leaflets.

Otherwise it was all pretty positive - we spoke to 10 yes, 2 no, and 4 undecideds. 4 people didn't say. A couple of the undecideds came across as soft yeses, and I left optimistic that with the help of The Wee Blue Book they were likely to reach a Yes vote.

After a morning going round the doors, the wee one and I headed down to Ayrshire College in Kilwinning town centre, to help run a Yes stall during the college lunchtime. There was huge interest from the students, with loads taking badges, stickers, leaflets, and coming over to chat and get more information. Over the course of a couple of hours, we came across very few Nos, and had car after car after car tooting their horns and giving thumbs up in support.


There was another Yes stall just a short walk away at the bottom of the main street and we heard from them that the reaction was similarly positive.

This evening, I headed back out to cover more of Whitehirst Park, covering another 100 houses and having some very positive chats with people on their doorsteps.

Tomorrow I'll be spending all day leafleting, chatting to folk on their doorsteps, distributing The Wee Blue Book and getting together with pals to run more stalls/events in town.

Not long now... Fingers crossed!

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