That was the week that was — and I can do without another one like that in a while.

About 18 hours “hard at work” in the Chamber is enough for anyone for a while.

Hard at work? I can hear people asking: “I thought you all sat on the comfy red benches and closed your eyes and drifted off...”

Well some people do sometimes, though when you see peers with their ears close to the back of the seat it’s often because that’s where the speakers are located and of course a lot of peers are not as young as they were.

But if you are taking an active part in a Bill (as I was in the Marine, Local Democracy, and Political Parties and Elections Bills last week) you have to be fairly wide awake — even more so if you are sitting on the front bench, as I was in two of them.

The Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill (to give it its full and rather pretentious title) contains a lot of nonsense, notably the eight pages and 3,000 words setting out detailed rules on how local councils must deal with petitions.

To be fair to the Government, I did persuade them to drop some of the worst nonsense — for instance the idea that to be a “valid” petition, each person signing it had to write on it the date they signed.

But the whole idea is still ridiculous and it really is a sign of a government that’s lost its direction and sense.

So it was a good time for the Local Government Association to release its words that councils ought to ban.

This guide to gobbledegook includes words that people in local councils use all the time — best practice, capacity building, community engagement, empowering, worklessness...

This is all jargon handed down from the Government and it’s hard for a council to operate without using it, not least when talking to the civil servants in government departments.

The public sector is now full of this New Labour management jargon.

Silly phrases like “cross-cutting stakeholder strategies” are trotted out by huge numbers of people who ought to know better.

So “nul points” to the Government and the best of luck to the LGA. They’ll need it.