Green, and Yes

The Local Elections and the AV referendum were tiring, interesting work. To the Polling Station for 6.15, then 27 hours’ work over two days. This being my first time as Presiding Officer, I was nervous, thinking that I might be shamed in at least regional media as the man who sabotaged this year’s elections to Lancaster City Council with a fatal clerical oversight.

Sixteen hours is a long time to spend in the company of someone you’re not getting on with, and I was relieved to have been allocated as Poll Clerks two bright, sensible, pretty, twentysomething women, a civil servant and a livelier and more bohemian Art History MA student. Healthy, moneyed, country girls, chatting to each other about whether the skiing is better in France or Austria. Annabel wore one of those dark blue padded gilets, the incidence of which increases in proportion to the distance from a conurbation; both of them with their blonde hair piled up attractively, held in place by a womanly arrangement of hairclips.

The following morning I was at the count, a bit delerious from lack of sleep, talking volubly to a retired Geography teacher sitting next to me. I was fortunate to be allocated to a team supervised by a twentysomething archaeology graduate, who, I found out, got an Elections Assistant job I applied for two years ago, and who dealt with a demanding administrative and supervisory task with relaxed good humour. I was glad I avoided the team at the next table. They were controlled, suppressed, and quietened by one of those fat, unhappy, tattooed women in leggings who gravitate in such numbers to the Civil Service.

At our breeze-blocked “leisure” centre, about a hundred tellers sat on the inside of a large square of desks, while the local politicians and interested parties could sit and watch us count from the other side. The LibDems were comfortably-off middleaged men in dark jackets, beige trousers, and interview shoes. Green Party men simply cannot dress, overlong magnolia trousers crumpling sadly onto thick-soled boots; the women, willowy types in linen trousers and short grey jackets looking as though they might have a crush on Joan Bakewell. Labour had the highest heels, and a striking woman with dyed pale blonde hair wearing a black and white polka dot dress and wedges. I watched an older female candidate scan her from head to arse as she walked past, and smile. Our useless Conservative MP was surrounded by Toryboys from the University trying subtlely to get noticed by the potentate. The Morecambe Bay Independents have a fearsome looking Councillor who looks like a boxing trainer. Dark and tall, big head, stubble, and pocked skin like a bowl of soggy Weetabix, a man to whom you’d be reluctant to openly deny your vote if you encountered him at your front door.

The LibDems lost all their five seats on the Council, including that of their leader, who gave an ungracious and finger-jabbing valedictory speech which lived up to his soon to be discontinued email address. Someone started heckling, and I was hoping it would degenerate into an unseemly punch-up, yellow ties being used as throttles round Tory necks and a couple of men from the Green Party who always wear cycle helmets ineffectually trying to separate the writhing belligerents, before Weetabix Face waded in with a violent and misdirected blow to the head of a passing Council official, thus sparking a secondary ruckus involving the Deputy Head of Legal Services. Sadly for spectator value, it didn’t get further than some jeering.

But mainly we were counting, tallying, box-ticking and chatting, for hour after hour. Despite much revisiting of the ballot papers, we came to a dead heat in our Ward, so it was given to another team for a re-count. They got the same result. The candidates asked for a third count, on which the Tory got in by one vote. Then the AV Referendum started, a dull exercise to confirm a known conclusion. We were supposed to begin by collating the votes into batches of twenty-five. I twice had to stop myself as I drifted over thirty, lulled into inattention by lack of sleep and the narcotic repetitiveness of the task, thinking instead about what the Director of Flipcharts might look like in white underwear.

Saturday was a hedonistic relief: a couple of drinks in the afternoon led to some Colombian refreshments and meeting someone we’ll call Siobhan. We got on immediately and I enjoyed talking to her. She was well dressed, everything in different shades of grey: jacket, shirt, silk-ish scarf, and a loose shin-length skirt. She told me about her difficulties in effecting a complete break from someone she has decided to leave in that open way that is often easy with people you’re meeting for the first time.

In the evening there was a Northern Soul night in a local pub. I was quite glad I was slightly out of it. Some of the older suburban pubgoers found the sight of men dancing rather discomfiting, but there was a good feeling of it being our culture in these relativistic times.