Beyond Selidor

We left the house in the early, sun-drenched hours of the morning to cast our votes when the polls opened at 7am. Our polling station had a queue outside the door, which I hadn't seen in previous elections, and took to be a good sign. I wandered back around 8pm (with two hours remaining before polls closed), and the place was still doing a brisk trade, with a queue, and family groups of voters continuing to arrive on foot (often while walking the dog) or pulling up in cars. As I turned to walk home, I was followed all the way by a middle-aged couple who were talking earnestly about how they'd researched various tactical voting guides online in order to ensure they voted most effectively to remove our useless Conservative MP.

The other good — and hilarious — sign was that, at 10am when I went to buy groceries, Waitrose was already partly sold out of bottles of champagne and other types of sparkling wine. (Possibly the peakest of peak upper middle class sentences ever written.)

In the end, it wasn't even close. The exit poll at 10pm predicted the Labour landslide that all the previous surveys of voters had all anticipated, and I literally burst into tears of relief. And then we sat up, watching the coverage into the early hours of the morning, watching the losses roll in and Labour's lead grow. By the time Jacob Rees-Mogg and Liz Truss (the latter in the most ungracious manner imaginable) lost their seats, I was delirious with exhaustion, but glad I'd stayed up to witness it. We collapsed around 8am and fell asleep at last, just as my sister in Australia was texting me wanting to dissect the vote.

My tasks yesterday were to vote, to clean the bathrooms and toilets in our house, and to put out the garbage for collection.

The metaphors write themselves.

There will be time enough to handwring about the rise of the far right (which, to be clear, has translated into four or five seats and a second-place vote share elsewhere that while worrying, is something that can be neutralised by the new government if they are sufficiently focused and effective in policymaking that has recognisably positive concrete effects on people's lives). There will be time enough to start complaining that the current iteration of Labour is insufficiently left-wing for the tastes of its voting base. Right now, I don't want to hear it, and I particularly don't want to hear any sentiments along the lines of 'the lesser of two evils' or 'they're all the same': anyone who truly believes such things hasn't been living in this country for the past fifteen years.

That toxic sludge of a 'government,' that pack of grasping, petty, vindictive, narcissistic, unserious, malicious incompetents is gone. We have outlived them!

Let us have this moment of cathartic celebration. We voted for it, and we deserve it.