Bath, South Carolina is a former cotton mill town where the mayor, Hector Rodriguez, has done wonders in pulling the community together on projects that have improved the place - the annual Sassafras Festival (great T-shirt), the Veterans' Park (picture), and so on. He showed us round, introduced us to Sharon who edits the lively community newsletter, and all in all we had a fascinating glimpse of how a small town can reinvent itself and develop when the main employment - the cotton mill - closes, which it did in the 1980s.

Hector himself was an interesting fellow, a Puerto Rican who has become one of the reliatvely few Hispanic mayors in the States. As he's now in his third term, he can't be doing such a bad job. I'm not the sort of person whose vote can be bought cheaply, but anyone who gives me a can of coke and a T shirt gets my cross on the ballot paper any time.