The elderly gent that I had met at the top of my road on Saturday who had been struggling to get polling cards delivered to the right place rang my doorbell this morning. I was surprised to see him. I had mentioned that I hadn't had my polling card and he'd said he'd look into it, but I thought he would prove to be as slapdash as he had been with his deliveries. Or at least if he did find out what was going on he would have told me about it on the day. But here he was 48 hours later. It might have taken him that long to drag his suitcase the hundred metres from the end of the road.
"You said I hadn't delivered your polling card," he told me, "But look at my list..."
He found the number of my house on his list and pointed at a piece of paper with all the houses listed. He was, I realised immediately, pointing at the wrong street. He was in fact pointing at the address of the people whose polling cards he'd erroneously delivered to me. Even now he hadn't got it.
"That's not my road!" I told him as patiently as possible. He corrected himself and pointed at my address and told me that only one card was down on his list. This compounded my fears that when I added my girlfriend's name to the electoral register some mistake of mine (or as likely as not of someone at the council) had led to me having my name removed. I had found the form a little confusing - it wasn't clear if my name was going to stay on if I had to reiterate that I was still here, so to be on the safe side I had listed myself on the form as well as my girlfriend. But if anything that should have got me an extra vote not got mine taken off.
The confused suit case man gave me an out of hours number to ring to try and sort things out, but it turned out to be environmental health and to be a place that I could complain about loud noises or anti-social incidents and in any case no one was picking up the phone. So I emailed an address on the council website.
I got a fairly rapid reply saying that I would be OK if I turned up at the polling station with some ID, so hopefully that means my fears are without foundation. And my guess is the confused suitcase man's list merely tells him how many flats there are in a particular address rather than how many people. I hope so. And I hope whoever might have my actual polling card doesn't get down there first!
Now all I have to decide is who I am going to vote for. I have been a Labour man (with occasional defection to the Green party) for my entire voting life. But I am not sure I can vote for Gordon Brown this time. One of the only near certainties of this campaign is that come Friday Brown will not be leader of the Labour party. Even if a Lib-Lab pact is formed (which seems unlikely enough) then I think one of the conditions will be the resignation of Brown. And he can't be Prime Minister if, as seems likely he comes third in number of votes.
But I think we have to see this election as a way of creating genuine change (rather than the pretend change that the politicians talk about). Your vote is worth something this time, even if your preferred candidate cannot win. It's a chance to show that first passed the post system is outdated and unfair. It seems to me that the Liberal Democrats (who I am inevitably gravitating towards) might get about a third of the votes, but only end up with a handful of seats. And the more we can highlight that unfairness the more difficult it will be for the current system to survive.
It's one of the most important elections of our life-times and I think a hung parliament might be the best thing that can happen to us.
So I hope I can vote.
And hope you will too.
Personally I think it would be awful if Cameron is the Prime Minister, so let's try and stop that. And it would be pretty ridiculous and unbelievable in Brown gets to carry on.
My guess is there might be another election quite soon, but I would like to live in a country that properly embraced democracy, in spite of the dangers and instability that that can lead to and where my vote will count for something regardless of where I live.
Collings came round for
Podcast 109. I don't think we were quite as on form as we had been on Saturday, but we filled up 1 hour, six minutes and 40 seconds (recording on my computer means that we don't have the automatic cut off any more - and we're working on the volume issues too).
Of course we plugged my book, but also
Jim Bob's one, which is well worth a read. In case you missed any of the details of my readings or audio book stuff, you can of course
see it all here.
And congratulations to the magnificent Minstermen who beat Luton for an incredible second time to reach the play off finals. We're 90 minutes away from getting back into the football league. York City are magic!
