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Jayne Dawson: Let them have it
Only one more sleep to go then. Are you excited? Have I got you all confused? Did you think for a moment there you had fallen into a very big sleep indeed, and woken up to discover it's the night before Christmas?
Nah, I'm talking about that other big event of the year... no, not the World Cup. Come on, work with me.
I mean the other other big event of the year. You know, the one where we choose who runs our country. Are we all on the same page now?
So, the clock is ticking, the countdown has begun, and all that.
Soon it will all be a memory... Sarah's toes, Miriam's demanding job, Samantha's early pregnancy outfits. Apparently, that's what it has all been about, according to some anyway.
Granted, their husbands have been putting themselves about a bit too.
Supermarkets
Gordon has been working himself into the ground: shaking hands with startled shoppers by the biscuit aisle in supermarkets, popping into cafes, factories, offices, anywhere with an unguarded entrance, really.
David has been travelling the length and breadth too, stopping only to pose next to basic food items like loaves of bread and cans of fizzy drink. It's not as random an idea as you might at first think, especially if next time you reach for the bread bin or head for the vending machine, David's face pops into your mind. And he has been telling us all to roll up our sleeves, telling us so often that I'm beginning to wonder if short sleeves mightn't, in fact, be the answer.
Supermarkets have been a big theme throughout. It's been a poor shopping experience over the past four weeks if you have worked your way through your list without being waylaid by a political party leader, plus entourage. You would have been within your rights to feel just a little bit neglected.
Only Nick appears to not have had quite as much time for this as the other two, since his speciality is staring soulfully down a camera lens aiming right for the heart of all who had been previously unaware there is such a thing as a Lib-Dem party.
Probably you're thinking that I'm thinking this is all a waste of everyone's time: a circus, a jamboree for no good purpose whatsoever.
I don't though.
I think these people are doing what they have to do to get elected. I'm guessing they would rather not be pouncing on strangers by the bacon slicer, I'm thinking that gurning and grinning and, yes, even kissing babies is not their favourite thing.
I'm thinking they have probably woken up every day for the last four weeks cringing at what they did yesterday and what they are about to embark on today but that's politics – if you value your dignity, don't become a politician.
But that isn't the only type of campaigning that has been going on over the last four weeks. That type of campaigning is for the media, but for every politician giving a false smile and contriving a photo opportunity there is a small group of very tired volunteers in the background.
And you should pity the volunteers. These are the people who not just for the past four weeks but for months have been spending their days doing their proper jobs and their evenings, weekends and holidays doing the unglamorous slog of politics.
When someone sticks a leaflet though your door, that person will be an unpaid volunteer. They will have walked miles putting hundreds of leaflets through hundreds of doors, and before that they will have spent hours folding those leaflets, putting them into envelopes, sorting them into bundles.
If you have been phoned, chances are it was by a volunteer who rushed straight to the campaign rooms and hasn't had any tea.
And next time you complain that no-one has knocked on your door, remember that there are probably about eight exhausted volunteers trying to get round thousands of homes, braving dogs and rude people and those hostile little messages people leave on their doors telling them not to knock.
To do this part of the job the ability to smile over the custard creams is less important than a pair of really comfy shoes.
Why do they do it? It's a fair question. They do it because they know that government makes a difference, because they have values and a vision of how things should be. They're not like me, with my cynical mutterings about democracy being wasted on the people.
So here's what I think. I think that tomorrow you should go out and vote, to prove that, after all, democracy isn't wasted on us.
Democracy
Let's go to the extremes – if you can't do that the day before an election when can you – and remember that a vote is a precious thing, that democracy is a precious thing, that people have died trying to bring about this system that we take for granted.
Let's remind ourselves that the society we live in didn't shape itself, and that Simon Cowell didn't do it either.
At the last election, just over 60 per cent of the electorate voted, which means that 16 million people didn't bother.
So that's 16 million people who have no right to complain about anything now because they didn't take part.
Don't be one of them this time. It's not such a big ask, is it? No-one is asking you to waylay people in supermarkets, no-one is asking you to knock on doors, or fold leaflets, or brave really nasty dogs. Just vote. Support our wonderful, hard-won democracy. That's it.
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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