"Uh huh"
"Oh, hello there - this is
"With a pen and a ballot paper, the usual way"
"Oh - haha - very good, sir. Will you be voting for us?"
"Well, I was going to up until about 5 seconds ago"
"Oh why's that sir?"
"Because some idiot from your party cold-called me at home at 9 o'clock asking me to vote for them"
"Ah"
"Ah indeed. Goodbye."
Of course, I'd had calls or doorstepping from all the main parties. The faintly hunted "rabbit-in-the-headlights-of-a-truck" look of the Labour candidate was the most entertaining. The poor chap, in my part of England I gather there are plans to use such people in place of a fox since foxhunting has now been made illegal. I expect he wakes at night in a cold sweat shouting "The bugles! The bugles!"
I always find politicians faintly disturbing. I don't know why one would want to get involved in one of the major political parties to that level; always having to toe the party line would, I think, get tiring after a while. Perhaps thats why so many of them are so physically unappealing; all that hypocrisy gradually changing them from normal people into bizarre Golum-like mutants. I can imagine Tony Blair sitting alone in the cabinet office:
"But we like George Bush... he's our friend..."
"No he's not. He hates us! He makes us tell lies about the precioussss!"
"Oh the precious, we lovesss the precious, we know the precioussss is somewhere under the sand..."
"We only know that because George sold it to the nasty arab-man. George hates us, he does. The arab-man hatessss us. Everyone hates ussss!"
"But Rupert Murdoch and his pet fox likes ussss..."
...they really are the living embodiment of everything one's mother told us about pulling faces. In this case its "Keep telling lies, and one day the wind will change and you'll end up looking like Tony Blair"
Seriously though, if you've got the right to vote in the UK next week, please do so. Voting is like making love to a beautiful woman - if you don't do it enough, one day you won't be able to do it at all... although you'll probably feel a little dirty a few days afterwards, and downright suicidal 6 months later when the beautiful woman in question turns out to have once been called Kevin and worked as a welder in the shipyard before the Operation.
And having stretched that metaphor beyond its breaking point, I'll sign off. I have to buy a sofa.
