This year's election campaign takes me to my home ward of Headington Hill & Northway in Oxford. I have not previously had the opportunity to stand where I actually live, and have done for a dozen years now, but I have to say there is a certain amount of slightly smug satisfaction in saying so, as I find I am the only candidate in the ward who actually lives here. It will also of course be the first time I have been able to vote for myself. I hope I remember!

I can say with absolute honesty that "mine is the same bus service you have to put up with" or "your local Co-op is the one my Co-operative membership was registered at and is my twice weekly shopping place". My local chippy is in the ward. And where I buy my lottery tickets (yes, I know - fool and money and so on...) is also your corner shop. When I cross the main road to get to them I have to run the gauntlet of the same traffic, often speeding, or coming from five different directions at once, as you do.

It is a most unusual ward, with a very diverse population and distribution of households:

At the one end we have 1200+ students in halls of residence, where I am based. Most of these residents live here for just the two academic semesters of their first year at the university, so they change every year, they are usually new to the city, and often to the United Kingdom and many are away from home for the first time for any extended period of time.

Next there are multi-million pound houses in a series of private, almost country, lanes. Some of the most expensive property in the city is here. The older ones in particular each have interesting stories about who commissioned them (usually late 19th and early 20th century university and city grandees). And if you are careful, looking on a map you can still work out where the farm boundaries lay by the age of the pattern of each piece of subsequent in-fill development. And if you are not careful, and don't look at the map carefully enough, you could get lost in here, as I did the second night after moving into the hall all those years ago and ended up walking round and round the same circular street in the dark!

Then there are a couple of biggish chunks of private inter-war housing in the main - you know the ones - they make up a lot of Britain's cities - the hipped roof, bay windowed semi-detached homes, in relatively formally laid out estates, usually, as in these cases, with a theme to the street names - here it's mostly the lake names from the Lake District but also the musical theme of composers and players associated all, I think, with Oxford University.

And then beyond them, and inside the northern bypass nestles a middle sized estate of post-war originally local authority built housing rising up the side of the foot of the hill on which Headington stands and which made it such an ideal spot to be the home and lookout of Saxon kings. Quite a lot of this is of course now in private ownership but substantial parts are still council tenants. We also even have one of Oxford's five only tower blocks here - which must offer some residents a most fantastic view of the city's famous skyline.

Several major city employers more or less surround the ward on the east and the south - with my employers, Oxford Brookes University at the southern end, a couple of private schools in the middle and the JR Hospital complex at the northern end. All of these put pressure on the ward, particularly as regards traffic and housing, and whilst it's not the most popular area with students when living out, being on the wrong side of Headington Hill for the main student scene, there are plenty of houses in multiple occupancy housing both students and young workers having to share to make housing costs affordable in Oxford.

It is virtually all residential, with one pub only in the ward itself, together with a British Legion Club, three student union bars and a 1200 capacity club venue. There's one Anglican, one Catholic, one United Reformed and one Evangelical church in the ward and also a community of nuns. Two small rows of neighbourhood shops and, apart from the two private girls schools already mentioned, a Catholic state primary school and a non-denominational state primary school. What was formerly a middle school until a previous round of schools reorganization is now a community centre and social club, combined with offices of the city council and the home of the Oxford Womens' Training Scheme and the Oxford Lawn Tennis Association. Its former playing fields now create what is effectively a "village green" for the Northway estate, with football pitches and so on.

There is a small youth centre, one doctor's surgery and a dental practice - two if you include the one in the Students Union building at Brookes. And what was previously a girls' state secondary school is now home to Brookes's School of Health & Social Care. We have mainly one public service bus route to and from the city centre and one of the Brookes Bus services links the School of Health and Social Care with other Brookes facilities in east Oxford and eventually the City Centre. There is a much less useful cross town service which is a shame because the suburban centres of Headington and Summertown could do with the patronage.

We have three parks, one of which is a private nature reserve, all of which, from the vantage point of the side of Headington Hill itself, offer beautiful glimpses of the city centre, the Cherwell valley and the countryside beyond the ring road. The nearest main shopping area is probably Headington itself, but since radial traffic in Oxford seems to flow better than orbital traffic, the City Centre is often easier to get to, especially if you are reliant on public transport.

As is common where there have been no new laid out streets in the past fifty years, most of the roads and pavements are in varying states of disrepair, none were designed for as much traffic as now tries to cram down them and some, that were really never designed for much through traffic at all in the days when the main roads had plenty of spare capacity to keep traffic flowing have become regular, and quite dangerous in places, "rat-runs".

As is also common with areas of predominantly inter- and post-war housing, in places the community is now beginning to feel under siege a little and slightly out of control as original residents die and their houses are snapped up by small developers wanting to make a bit of money by creating a couple, or more, of flats, albeit it, dear knows they fill a great need in a city of house price hyperinflation. Victims of their own success and location in a way, many of the houses are just now out of the reach of family buyers these days in what would be, and probably once were, ideal surroundings for young families.

Sounds pretty average suburbia? Not a bit - every race, every walk of life, every level of the social and economic ladder is represented here. It is in microcosm a mirror of the whole city. Whilst on average not especially deprived, it has quite a large elderly population and so there are people who need more, and more local, services and facilities than they get and also quite a lot of people who have seen the area change a great deal and who are ever sensitive to more change in their neighbourhoods.

So what? Well, all of this is a most long winded way of me saying that this is a different kind of election for me than previous ones. It feels different. In a very real sense this is about way more than politics. This is about me offering myself as representative in the service of the place that I live, that I have lived in for nearly a third of my life. And that if in three and a half weeks' time I wake up on a Friday morning having won Headington Hill & Northway, I want everyone in the ward to know that they can call on me as a member of their community, whatever the issue, whoever they are, and I will do my best to help them.

If that happens to assist in the spread of Liberal Democrat support, influence and policy at the same time, that would be great!