There must have been a couple of hundred people there specifically for the rally – and then all the passers-by who were shopping at the French market.

I was pleased to be on the same platform as Roma Mills and Anne Main because there is nothing party political about this battle. We sink or swim together.

In summary I said (as I have said previously) that this proposal has perfectly horrible implications for Park Street and the villages but it is also a knife in the underbelly of St Albans.
In short I spoke about all the issues highlighted in my earlier blog on my formal letter of objection to the scheme. Now we have the hard work of mounting the technical arguments.

I hope to see lots of people at the St Albans District Council Planning Referrals Committee on Monday evening!

I was absolutely fascinated and made him repeat the process over and over again, just to observe how he walked along and the rods then suddenly moved in his hands as though of their own volition, always over the same bit of roadway. My architect wife says water divining is not uncommon in the construction business to find springs as well as leaks but I had never seen it done before.

Anything that saves unnecessarily digging up the roads seems OK to me. And there is something pleasingly old-fashioned about the whole idea.

There must be a political metaphor there somewhere but I will leave it at that.

Inflation according to the RPI formula has gone negative – but that’s not the case for old people who don’t have mortgages and spend disproportionately on food and energy. Later on the same Budget Day afternoon I spoke to an elederly resident in Chiswell Green. He hasn’t seen a rise in his private pension for eight years.

We don’t yet know what the long-term impact will be of “quantitative easing” (printing money to you and me). The cynic in me says that whatever party gets into government, there will be the age-old temptation to allow inflation to reduce the real cost of the eye-watering levels of national debt. That is bad news for every pensioner who does not benefit from guaranteed index-linking.

But the biggest disaster of this economic smash is that it condemns Britain to yet more decades of shoddy and under-invested public services. For it will always be the frontline which bears the brunt of so-called efficiency savings.Partly this will be because within the overall envelope of much lower planned increases in public expenditure, a much bigger slice of taxpayers money will need to be used to pay huge interest bills on ballooning public debt and to pay benefits to far greater numbers of unemployed people.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies calculates that spending departments will face annual budget cuts of 2.3 percent. Hands up anyone who believes this won’t result in more schools with leaky roofs, more unimproved council houses, less money for crucial medicines and treatments in the NHS, and more holes in our roads.

That is why we need to have a proper debate about which areas of public expenditure need major changes and reductions rather than simply salami-slicing everything. Vince Cable has highlighted the increasingly absurd ambition that 50 percent of people should go to university. Can we really afford to go on playing world policeman? What do we do about publoc sector pensions?

It is certainly not a time for Conservative political point-scoring and gloating at Mr Brown’s discomfort – the Year 13s of Townsend School deserve better.

The main speaker was Lord McNally. But just as much excitement was generated by the table challenge. Each table was given a cardboard tube, a plastic cup, sellotape, sheets of card and paper, some lollipop sticks and a picture of what they had to model. In our case we had to make the Batmobile and you can see our rather nifty result here.

Tom McNally’s table had to make Thomas the Tank Engine and their model was voted best on the night – it’s amazing how people want to butter up a peer… Robert Donald’s table built the Regent’s Park Mosque, other tables had the challenge of everything from the Starship Enterprise to Sydney Opera House.

The ingenuity and determination shown by everyone was a wonder to behold. It made for a very entertaining evening. Whoever said LibDems weren’t practical?

PS This was one in a regular series of fun events for St Albans Liberal Democrats and friends and supporters combining good food, good conversation and a bit of politics. If any reader is interested in attending future occasions, just send me an e-mail and we will put you on the mailing list.