It came as no great surprise to me to read that Cornwall's Liberal Democrat MPs clock up some mega travel expenses.

They do, after all, have to commute between Cornwall and London on a weekly basis.

St Ives and Helston MP Andrew George topped the expenses league in Cornwall with a total claim during the last full financial year of £16,023. He is, to be fair, the furthest from London.

Falmouth-Camborne MP Julia Goldsworthy claimed travel costs of £11,210 - £3,000 less than her Labour predecessor, Candy Atherton, during her last year in office - and Matthew Taylor, in neighbouring Truro, was paid £12,433.

The expenses claims would have been much higher if the MPs received the same rate for using their cars as county and district councillors in Cornwall. The MPs can claim only 40p for each mile they drive whereas Cornwall's councillors are paid 55p a mile. That's curious, don't you think, especially when the cost of fuel has gone down since the councillors voted to bump up their mileage rate from 50p to 55p?

The higher rate paid to councillors probably explains why David Whalley, the leader of Cornwall's Liberal Democrats, picks up more in expenses for driving around Cornwall than some of the county's MPs who travel to London and back each week.

Although I can't see much wrong on the whole with the expenses claims of Cornwall's MPs there is one unusual entry for Mr George. His £16,023 expenses for the year include £9 for using a bicycle.

I thought expenses were supposed to be about reimbursing people for the costs incurred in doing their job. But how can you incur costs riding a bike?

Well, according to the House of Commons you can. MPs are allowed to claim 20p for each mile they pedal and Mr George has taken advantage of this little perk.

It's a pity Mr George didn't take a leaf out of the book of Westminster's most famous cyclist ... Tory leader David Cameron didn't claim a penny for his journeys by bike.

*****

There's nothing worse than being stopped in the street by some anorak with a clipboard who wants you to sign a petition.*****

Most of us just scribble our names so that we can get on with our lives and haven't actually got a clue what we've just agreed to support or oppose. That's why I think the new online voting systems are so good. To add your name to an e-petition you have to log on to a website and click a mouse. You wouldn't take the trouble to do that unless you really felt strongly about something.

The most astonishing online petition at the moment is on the Downing Street web site. More than 1.5 million have so far logged on to petition the Prime Minister to scrap the government's planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy.

Locally, an online poll on the Packet's web site last week recorded nearly 3,000 votes over controversial plans to build houses on the Falmouth recreation ground. That's a huge response from a community the size of Falmouth.

Like everything, of course, the facility to run online polls has attracted its fair share of nutters. One of the e-petitions on the Downing Street web site calls on Tony Blair to "stand on his head and juggle ice cream." Astonishingly, 3,500 people have taken the trouble to log-on and sign this one.

That's rather more support than another petition on the Downing Street web site calling for the Prime Minister to recognise Cornwall as a separate state. That attracted only 265 votes - and among the signatories was "Pasty Muncher" and "Donkey Dave."

I bet a petition calling for all road signs in Cornwall to be in Polish as well as English would get more votes than that!