You have until midnight tonight to register to vote…

James Robert Faulkner has beautifully spoken the lines to a little thing about REGISTERING TO VOTE – with less than 10 hours left! https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote'I can’t understand why you wouldn’t want to register to vote. The glitz and glamour of filling in your details online. That gov.uk website is rather nifty, filled with the same anxiety of a tax return. Then they send you that card, with your name on and the address of the delightful primary school, St. Cheesebum, you’ve never heard of it. ‘Didn’t Gladys’ grandson go to that one, the teacher had that ingrowing toe-nail’ So then the day arrives. And you toddle down. All the signs are out. The Greens, The Reds, The Blues, The Monster Raving Loony Party. You pass through the arch, past the bust of Sir Wally Butz, and into the hall, the smell of pummel horses and rope-burns. You see the allotted street printed out on an HP Packard printer that the ink has run down on. An elderly lady with the same sense of importance as Napoleon asks for your card ‘I DON’T NEED IT!’ You scream in your mind, before you present it, they find your name on the list, sometimes with a 30 cm see-through shatter proof ruler if you’re lucky, scanning, scanning scanning. THEN out comes the highlighter pen! You’re handed your ballot paper, with names you’ve never heard of, and you go to the booth, you have the pencil on the little bit of rope in your secret wooden cubicle. And you see Billy Bob and Minty Mindy and The Frigolo party. But you cast your graphite x, you fold over the paper. You go and you slip it into that slitted plastic box with the bungee wires on it. And then, after you’ve done your bit, the vans come to collect, to the bigger leisure centre halls with you, on long wallpaper pasting tables in big piles, where retired magistrates in moth-eaten cardigans count and count… And it leads to this… To this… And this…. To governments and leaders, to the way your schools and hospitals work, to how clean the streets are, how healthy the planet is. All because of that graphite mark, that smelly school hall and a moth eaten cardigan. And you only have a few hours left. SO register to vote!'

Posted by Simon Jay on Tuesday, 26 November 2019