It’s exciting to pencil an X in a box. Whenever I vote I usually feel a good swing of momentum before. I like to look up the candidates and unintentionally scoff at the SDP’s ‘Stand Up to Woke’ campaign and then chuckle along to the anti-ULEZ and anti-LTN proposals from Howard at Reform UK. Consistently I vote the same way; Labour and Green. When I was younger, my sister told me that it was pointless to vote Green and I didn’t understand why. But now I see that one red sock in the white wash won’t turn everything crimson, just a milky pink, so I see her point. 

I went to vote during my lunch break at the primary school around the corner. Living in central London, I hypothesised that it was essential to go at the earliest possible time in my break. I reasoned I could be in the queue all hour. However, to my surprise, the place was empty. The hallways were moments away from growing tumbleweeds. ‘Maybe I’m in the wrong place’ I thought, but there were instructions to ‘vote this way’ and a big sign outside reading ‘POLLING STATION’ so undeniably I was in the right place. I went to the desk, gave my name, my ID, and then I went to the cubicle and drew three spindly crosses with my mechanical pencil that I brought from home. I slipped the papers through the slots and then was free to go. Duty done, democratic right exercised, people power been and gone. It felt anti-climactic. I’ve always had to queue before. Nothing major but ten to fifteen minutes of standing in line while intermittently poking my head out like a fray in a rope in an attempt to gauge how long until it’s my turn.  I’d been worried about the queue this time but when there was none it felt deflating. When you wait in line it feels like everyone has been thinking about this all week. It feels like the ballot paper is something akin to a ticket to the Eras Tour. It feels like you are participating in a group activity where each cross is a small part of a play that makes up the farce of the UK. My X would be ‘villager 700’ and the person’s X next to me would be ‘villager 701’ and then the person’s X next to them could be ‘doorknob 6’ or something just as granular as that. It felt lonely and unimportant when I went; I know it’s not unimportant, it just felt that way. 

When I was at school we once had a class about the importance of voting. In this lesson, we were given slips of paper detailing all the different reasons why people should vote. I remember one said ‘Because women fought and died for our right to vote and we have to honour them’.  I read it and chucked it down to the bottom; who cares about some old hag in the past? Other than voting to push Tories out, this sacrifice reason has become one of my main grounds for voting. While voting is an act that asks you to hopefully look forward into the future, for me it’s become more of a duty to women in the past who struggled and died for my right to have a say. I would be in agony to see someone disregard something I fought kicking and screaming for, so I won’t do it. 

No doubt many of you received the ‘My Vote Does Count’ brochure through your letterbox and what a thing of entertainment it is. I actually really like the campaign with the pencilled ‘X’ over ‘doesn’t’- very clever. I thoroughly enjoyed Sadiq’s little word cloud answering ‘What has Sadiq delivered for London?’ All in caps and brightly coloured it looks like someone spilled a bag of Skittles on the page. The word ‘FREE’ in the phrase ‘free school meals’ is so large it practically swallows your whole attention and my eyes use the large lettering as a restful landing place from the rest of the rainbow chaos. But still, it’s an eye-catching graphic, the text makes a compelling case. One of the ads I’ve been ironically enjoying the most is for ‘Vote Britain First Nick Scanlon’. His photo looks like it was taken with the front camera of his iPhone set down on a table rather than held at eye level. From his grainy downward stare, he tells voters that ‘London is fast becoming a Third World cesspit’. Nick obviously didn’t get the memo about ‘Third World’ not being an acceptable term to use anymore. But I don’t think he cares about that, he’s just getting started. He continues to warn us of the ‘rampant and radical Islamist extremists’ that ‘dominate the streets!’. Dominate the streets. It’s hard to read something like that and believe that this man is not joking. Being an Islamaphobe is so two decades ago Nick, it wasn’t okay then and it remains not okay now. ‘Britain First – No To Immigration!’ he cries at the end. On the right-hand side of the page is a column of white people with quotations where they drag ULEZ, immigration, wokeism, etc. It’s horrifying that this person gets a double-page spread or really any air time at all. 

I hope you all voted. I know that no queues are a great thing because queuing can be a barrier and voting should be as easy as possible with the least friction as possible. I look forward with nervous apprehension to the results. By the time this blog has been posted they will be out … eek. To occupy my mind while we wait I will eat sweet treats. Which leads me seamlessly onto . . .

This week I had this aragostine with a lemon filling. It was delicious, tart, and creamy. The lemon was very fresh. The pastry was crunchy like a shell. The texture reminded me of a spring roll. Delicious! I got it from a bakery on the side of the river, it was horribly expensive but we were in Westminster so what do you expect? Maybe if Labour or Green wins they will bring down the price of pastries, that would be nice. 

Goodbye for now.