Elections

I appreciate politicians -- doing a job I don't want to do -- and I love elections. I could wish they had national ones every year.

There's an amateur core at their heart: a friend of mine was talking about how she and her 4 months pregnant friend, were once struggling to carry a polling booth downstairs ready for a 7:00am start, and then wedging it desperately against chairs to make it stand up. I love the way that we, the governed, get to speak back after four or five years of being spoken to. I'm grateful that I live in a country where leaders come and go because of the silent voice of a million pencil crosses, scratched in draughty village halls and chapels. I love the freedom of standing in that rickety polling booth, and in perfect confidentiality, voting for who the heck I like. 'Surely God was in that place, and we knew it not.'