Categories: uncategorized
Date: 04 May 2007 06:32:21
So it's all over bar the results, which get counted later this morning.
I want to be at the count but my GCSE's only have 2 lessons with me before their exams - so there is no way it is practical. So it is that I will miss the celebratary hugging, the consoling back slapping and shocked silences.
Last night was strange and I missed home. It was election night so when we all moved from our various telling stations to the bar it was fun, but it wasn't like it used to be, back home. Back then the count would be going on in a hall upstairs and us Lib Dems (being a small, poor party at that point locally) would sit with the Independant candidates in the public bar, watching results coming in on a small tv when we weren't upstairs monitoring proceedings and trying to assertain how long it would be until the result was called. The Labour Party would have the large room next to the bar and the Conservatives would have their room somewhere else in the building, away from the rest of us.
'97 of course was the best election night; I think the moment when Portillo went will be forever emblazened on my mind. When that happened the noise level was unbelievable, just like if Ipswich had won the premiership in front of a home crowd, and the leader of the local Labour Party came and got a round in for us Lib Dems to celebrate their success with before we all floated home on a mixture of alcohol and euphoria.
Ten years is a long time; I wonder if we had known then what we know now if we would have reacted in the same way? Actually I suspect so, I was still in infant school when the Tories had come to power in '79, I was 25 and married with a child by the time they left.