Consolation Prize By Lydia Rivlin

I came to Hull at the beginning of the year, to run as the Conservative Candidate for Hull North. I am a Leeds girl and would have loved to have got back to Yorkshire (yeah, I know Hull is supposed to be a separate entity, but as I said, I'm a Leeds girl). Well, I didn't make it. Labour got the seat and what I got was the consolation prize. Although we are all familiar with the expression consolation prize, we do not often stop to consider that it joins together two concepts which are completely irreconcilable.

The words consolation (meaning comfort for spiritual sorrow) and prize (a physical reward received in triumph) are so at odds with each other that, linked together, they are forced into a completely new meaning embracing neither consolation nor prizes. Deep down, we all realise this and tend to ignore the adequate but spiritless dictionary definitions in favour of our own gloss, which probably runs along the following lines: the bag of cheap sweets; the deserted room; the loser morosely gulping dismembered jelly babies and indigestible lumps of pride between choking, salty sobs.

Well, it didn't happen like that with me. I was told that Hull was going to be a tough selection when I started and so it was. It also turned out to be a surprise package of unexpected delights. The journeys to Hull presented me every time with a visual banquet, starting at Junction 32 when, with a thrill as of ripping away the plastic on a chocolate box, I left the suffocating M1. The curving ribbon of the M18 unfolded a lavish spread of lush, buttery countryside, thick with fields and trees, luxuriant with creamy river valleys and strewn with villages and towns clotted around their church spires.

In Hull, the feast continued with the magnificent bridge in one of its infinite moods -rising bittersweet dark out of the mist, frosted in the icy air, or sparkling like spun sugar against a violet sky; while my campaigning brought a sumptuously enriching assortment, from the acid tang of my night with a police patrol to the vanilla and rose-savoured sitting rooms of hospitable constituents. Throughout, I was sustained in my efforts by a Conservative association of helpful and unremittingly kind colleagues who are, like the liquorice for which Yorkshire used to be famous, strong, spicy and - an irresistible pun - occasionally crisply candid.

How could I have expected more? But this collation of experience had yet one last flourish. Being Jewish, I made contact with the local Jewish community and found myself offered huge slabs of spiritual nourishment from a group of people as welcoming as a cinnamon-warm strudel with its succulent combination of tastes, medley of texture and gentle nuttiness. I came to Hull to run for political office. It was a goal I did not attain but I am not ashamed to say that I took away a consolation prize well worth having, notwithstanding its supposedly undistinguished nature. I have now and will always have a handpicked mixture of luscious memories and choice friendships which I can recall and sample again and again in joyous overindulgence. And not one jelly baby amongst them.

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