"Follow Danny Dyer's advice" I tweeted this morning, "And put your ex in a box." With super topical cross referencing like this it is astonishing that I no longer work for "Weekending". The fact it's been off-air for over a decade shouldn't be a factor.
I had got up early to appear on "The Wright Stuff", but I was home by 10.30 and immediately headed up the road to see if I could vote.
If I was still on the role, I had pretty much decided now that I was going to have to try to keep the Tories out of Hammersmith and vote for Labour and Andy Slaughter, who at least had "laughter" in his name. So as long as you ignore the "S" then everything would be fine. Right?
There were no queues to contend with at this time of the day and all my fears proved unfounded as I could see that my name was next to my girlfriend's on the polling station list. Which still means that in the polling card delivery to my house alone there were five mistakes (four cards for other people and no cards for me), and along with the polling card envelope that I saw in the street I would be astonished if all those mistakes happened to me, but not to anyone else, whatever Hammersmith and Fulham Council might claim.
I didn't feel great about supporting the government, but as it turned out I wasn't the only one who bottled out of using this election as an opportunity to let parliament know that proper change was required, as exit polls later on seemed to show that the Liberals were set to lose rather than gain seats. Had they just lost the impetus or had the other parties managed to scare us all into the wrong thing? I can't help thinking that Clegg could have made more of the vote being a mandate to fight sleaze and reform parliament. It might still be that of course, but by the end of the day I was already feeling that an opportunity had been lost. But ultimately I knew I had had to vote against the Tories rather than show support for this less solid idea.
But my main feeling was relief to find out I hadn't been accidentally disenfranchised. Even if I had had my hand forced and was voting for someone I didn't wholeheartedly support.
I decided to make up for my slight sell out by voting for the liberals in the council election, but was halfway through doing so before I remembered that it was stories of the awful local Tory council that had made me reconsider my choice, so I ticked two Liberals and one Labour candidate. And I voted based on which names were higher up the list because I knew nothing about any of them. I wonder if anyone has done a study to find out if having a surname with a first letter closer to the start of the alphabet makes you more likely to succeed than one whose name begins with a Z. It felt rather arbitrary and I was annoyed with myself for not giving it more thought. But the general election had been the big one for me and I hadn't even thought about the local one until I was in my little booth.
Ah democracy! Carry on as you are. Nothing wrong here!
But it was all so exciting that I almost forgot that today was the official launch date of my book. Would most people be reading it under a Tory government?
But even more exciting than either of these things was the news that
Neanderthal genes survive in modern day humans. That's right. Your great, great, great, great grandad fucked a monkey - unless you come from entirely African stock because the monkey fucking probably only began once we'd left the motherland behind. Sorry Nick Griffin, only the Africans are pure, unadulterated homo sapiens and as I suspected you are probably about 5% ape-man. Maybe more in your case. Unless you think interbreeding with apes is the best way to purity. In which case go out and fuck a monkey, before the British public tells you to go fuck yourself.
I went to bed with Labour winning 3-0-0 with all the winners being women thus far. I projected that this would lead to an all women, all Labour House of Commons. That's just maths. I went to bed feeling happy about what my vote had helped achieve. Though felt sorry for Andy Slaughter given that he was going to have to slaughter his own genitals to take his place amongst the chosen.
