and if the ground's not cold, everything is gonna burn

I cast my vote earlier this morning. As usual it was a strangely downbeat experience: this year it was in the hall of an otherwise completely deserted infant school. The two election officials looked pretty bored, even though polls had only been open for a couple of hours. One sorted me out with my two ballot papers (one for the General Election, one for the Council elections) whilst the other one rather obsessively found my name on the electoral role and crossed me out, using a ruler to make sure that the line was just so. I went across to the little booths, picked up the ratty piece of pencil and put the relevant X's in the relevant boxes, folded the papers in half and popped them both into the plastic ballot box. The only other voters that I saw during the whole process were actually rather relieved to see me coming in, as they had clearly got lost in the school, and my entrance showed them where the exit was. So I cast my vote, left the building and went to work.

Democracy at work folks.

I had to laugh though. There were six candidates on my ballot for the General Election. All of them bar one had a local address, the other apparently living in Ealing, and not thinking enough of his chances to even bother to pretend to be local. This same chap was also the only candidate on the paper with a party leader arrogant enough to have his name stamped on the bottom of the ballot... Ken Clarke's simply said that he was "The Conservative Party Candidate". He didn't feel the need to have "Party Leader - Michael Howard" printed underneath. Perhaps he's self-confident enough to think that people would vote for him on his own merits, perhaps he was sure that we knew who his party leader was, and didn't feel the need to remind us, in case anyone walked into the polling station and thought, "ooooo. I like that nice Michael Howard, but I don't know the name of his party".

Can you guess which party this guy was representing? Yup. He was the Veritas candidate.

Idiots.

I won't be bothering to stay up anxiously waiting for the results.... what's the point?

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one more work day until holiday

one more work day until holiday

and miles to go before I sleep

and miles to go before I sleep