Twitter off. Facebook off. Adam and Joe's fourmative years, the new trailer for Machete
and all my other little roughneck palette-cleansers OFF. I have
surprised myself at the polling station, knuckled down, buckled under,
and bright as the sun is now shining, in my gut there is at best mist.
And at worst, and as per, rage. So let's get on with this. Focus...
No, focus. Oh but hang on wait, look, the Machete trailer's been
removed and somebody's trying to kill themselves in the comments page. I
hope they live... Shit. Two nights ago a guy called Jim gassed himself
in my girlfriend's block. The police evacuated everyone at one in the
morning and got them to sit in a bus. I don't know what they did with
all the people on the bus.
What show is this I'm about to run off to now? Show 231. Money's
running until September I hear. Breathe.... For those who haven't been,
it ends in a long chamber of opposition benches rowdily, loudly heading
off the rails. And of course a couple of weeks ago it looked as though
this might actually happen, provoking in me a little beat the heart
skipped best expressed in two pieces written by our David Mitchell - this at the beginning of the campaign, and this
two weeks in... or to sum up "We're sick of a system where all a party
leader needs to do to win power is convince us that he's not as bad as
his rival."
I didn't feel this sickness at the time. But I'm
feeling it now. And what happened next was not, as reported, "mass
hysteria", but simply - for me at least - the appearance in front of
Jeremy Paxman of a man who actually wanted to answer questions. This man
then appeared on a stage as unimpressive as the door to Number 10 and
having been shouted down every time he stood up to speak in our Mother
of Parliaments, finally allowed to play to grown-ups, seemed the only
one at home. I'd never really got the fuss about MPs' expenses being a
happy-go-lucky, self-employed scumbag, never really felt
that same rage at that idea of "an out-of-touch gentleman's club" UNTIL I
watched
that debate on ITV, and saw how at sea both Brown but also, gloriously,
Cameron looked when left to fend for themselves outside of the
idea-free, Steve-Wright-in-the-Afternoon atmosphere of that baying
Goonanza, even when stood next to a Nick Clegg... And what happened next
was we all went online and looked not at the polls, but at what people
actually thought. And for the first time ever, we who had never voted
Tory, we who had never voted Labour, read what we were thinking. Man,
that ITV debate was the BEST Kraftwekg gig ever, come on! SKY's was a
dismal sham and the BBC's a reverent, echoey fudge that gave Cameron and
Brown exactly the advantages of deference which ITV's crappy Going for
Gold set had so thrillingly stripped from them. You can't convincingly
call for change in a chapel, it seems rude. But still, how I wish in
that last debate Clegg had played it like a man with nothing to lose,
wish he'd at least mentioned Vince Cable, and made very clear "WITHOUT
US THIS WILL NEVER STOP. THIS WILL NEVER STOP." But he didn't and what
happened next?
Echoes again. Gordon Brown surrounded by admirers,
alive when applauded, like Tinkerbell. John Constantine facing up to
the Conservatives like he did when I was fifteen... Was it John Cleese
lying in a ditch and dressed as a monk who said "It's not the despair
that gets to you. It's the hope." Well no, I liked hope. Hope made
people kinder, it stopped them thinking about just how shit the other
side was for a second.
I live in Dulwich, apparently. When I
walked into the polling booth today I suddenly realised that all hope in
me was dead. There was only fear and the memory of Boris Johnson and
the blue doughnut. It's a safe Labour seat but I made it safer. Nae
cunt's pinning this one me.
And what happens next? Safe scape that guy on the comments page. Lurk. Lurk. Poor Jim.
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