Day 1 of my exciting election blog!

(originally posted on myspace here)

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.