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Last night
5 May 2006
[last night's LJ blog, which I forgot to copy over - apologies to anyone still watching this one, but I'm afraid this may happen more often than just the once. I'm not good at routine.]
One Chaz, one vote. Which went Lib Dem, with a deep reluctance. But it is still true that I do still like voting. In person, in a poll-booth, with a pencil on a string. I always have. It's a surviving shred of community, that one moment where you get to feel more like a citizen than a subject. They tried to take it away from me; ran an all-postal ballot last year, as an experiment. And they did get more people voting, and they did also get a lot more fraud, both of which were utterly predictable. There was a mood amongst the politicians to keep it, just to make the figures look better (depressingly few people vote in local elections these days), but thankfully something changed their minds - possibly the court cases. Anyway, I didn't have to trudge the streets in search of the Phantom Pollbooth. Aw, c'mon, you knew that's where this was heading, didn'tcha?
I have a fabulous new photo, of Barry-the-cat heading up my trouser-leg with his eyes on my throat. Tried to upload it here, just for the fun of sharing, but something went horribly wrong with the process. No matter, the photo survived. As does Barry, on pitifully short commons (he thinks). And tries to eat me, to make up the deficit. I worry about his weight (is he too thin? is he too fat? who can say?), but then I worry about everything. It's his own fault. He is the wild adolescent, which means he has cast me entirely as anxious parent, and I play up to that. He's desperate to get out there and kill things; I am desperately anxious about the main road, the traffic, the dogs... (Every time a dog comes by, he's leaping from window to window, wanting to taste its blood. That's all very well with little yappy things, but a Staffordshire terrier? A German shepherd? A Rottweiler? I don't think so. I explain to him about being outweighed & outclassed, but he just sinks his fangs into my arm and says "y'what?" Metaphorically speaking, of course. He does have a vocabulary, but it's not English. Tho' he spooked me wildly this afternoon; we were out in the back yard, I called his name, and he actually came bounding over. Lord knows what was going on in his little catty head...)
Oh, and I did at least write three pages today. That's a sort of bare minimum, not enough but not catastrophic, a basis to build on. Something of a relief, after the last couple of days and ahead of what will be a very blank weekend; I haven't lost it altogether. Tho' I wish I liked it more, what I've been writing. "Don't get it right, get it written" is a fine motto and will cover a lot of ground, but there's a building pressure inherent in wrongness, in a growing pile of pages that you know will have to be reworked from the ground up. The self-same ground, as it happens.
Now I'm going to watch election results until I fall asleep. Then I'll move upstairs to bed and listen to more election results until I fall asleep again. You can't call it entertainment, exactly, but I'm a slave to input.
© Chaz Brenchley 2006
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.