There is a fact about politics that is luminously obvious to everyone who does not inhabit "the Westminster village". And that is that only weirdos go into it. (Naturally, I speak as a journalist - and yes, you should see our lot.)
Whether it was always like this is debatable. There is a school of thought that suggests that those who entered British politics in the two-and-a-half decades after the second world war were different, having been forged in the fire of that collective national horror, and moved to shun the professions they might otherwise have adopted out of a noble yearning to change things. In recent years, we've been rather light on collective national horrors. Even the second series of Celebrity Love Island failed to galvanise a new generation of idealists in quite the same manner.
These days, almost without exception, people who launch themselves into political life are those whom we might delicately describe as having something "not quite right about them", and come election time, we are required to decide which of them we wish to go home with at the end of the night. It's quite a privilege.
Yesterday Mark Lawson referred on these pages to the "beer test", the theory that election results can be fairly accurately predicted by asking voters: "Who would you rather have a pint with?" In your average Joe's mind, that inquiry would need to be prefaced by the words "if there was a gun to your head ...". Were the government to announce a policy of randomly stationing politicians at the bars of local pubs, it would most likely have a dramatic effect on our drinking epidemic.
Not sure the same applies to Holyrood. For example, Mr Salmond and Ms Goldie seem more or less paid-up human beings, although I have my doubts about Ms Alexander and Mr Stephen.
But I urge you - at all costs - to avoid political bloggers. To a man (and a woman), they are obsessive nerds and weirdos ...
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