Westminster is gripped with ‘100-day fever’ as the countdown to the election ticks on.

Like all MPs, I am getting new photos, ordering literature and making plans to take our Battle Bus (my VW Camper van) to as many places as possible when the campaign kicks off at the end of March. Electioneering is an odd process and before the campaign starts the idea of knocking on people’s doors and asking for their vote seems very strange, while seeing enormous posters featuring your own face seems like an exercise in egotism. However, when the campaign whistle blows, all this squeamishness evaporates and off we all go in a determined quest to meet as many people as possible. Hopefully I won’t be a stranger to many of those I meet as I have been determined since the day I was elected to be an active local MP. That has involved spending every possible moment out and about across our area. I am helped in this, of course, by living in the heart of the Pewsey Vale and Devizes is my local town.

Many people are used to seeing me out and about, running errands, shopping locally or walking the dog (a very short walk these days as poor old Zinzan the Labrador is nearly 14 and can barely stagger to the end of the road). Sadly my time at home is a bit curtailed at the moment as I have had a frenzied schedule of rail visits and debates – most of the latter in Westminster Hall, referred to by many as the ‘Baby Chamber’ where smaller- scale debates take place, often on local issues that an MP wants to raise, but with all the pomp and circumstance of a normal debate in the main chamber. One of my first-ever acts as your new MP back in July 2010 was to hold a debate in Westminster Hall on the lack of minor injuries services in our constituency, and since then I have campaigned for better health services for local people, especially in Marlborough and in Devizes.

It was a delight, therefore, to visit Savernake Hospital last Friday with a team from Prospect Hospice to see where the new hospice outpatients centre will be when it opens later this year. Thanks to the generosity of local people the funding target has been smashed and it will be wonderful to see this great local hospital get even more services. We still don’t have a solution for Devizes, despite all the work, but I am determined to find one.