Psychoblog

we voted yesterday. the east midlands is one of the areas to have all postal voting and i think it has worked okay here, but it’s blatantly not secure. you had a ballot paper to put your x on and then another bit of paper to sign and get a witness to sign. it said your witness could be “anyone that knows you” so mine was carl. as someone pointed out, if you are going to forge the first signature then you would have no qualms about forging the witness signature and lets face it, no one is going to know or care. i think they should stick to the proper voting booth things and then have postal voting for those people who request it for whatever reason (isn’t that how it happens anyway?). there is something quite cool about slipping into a booth to record your secret vote. it makes you feel a bit more important and involved in the democratic process than stuffing it into an envelope that is quite likely to get lost in the post. and where did they get their envelopes from anyway? that was the ickiest tasting sealy stuff i have experienced in ages.

i found it difficult to decide who to vote for. labour were obviously out straight away. the bnp are just stupid and ukip are a bit too close to bnp territory for my liking. the respect party i don’t know much about, but they like trade unionism. that’s fair enough, but it always seems that trade unions are a bit aggressive and make the everyday people suffer for things that the employers do wrong. probably a gross generalisation, i don’t know enough about it. there were 2 independent people running who didn’t bother sending any information round on who they are and what they believe, so they were out. i briefly considered the green party, but i’m not sure if they really care about anything other than environmental issues.

so really it just left the conservatives and the lib dems. my biggest argument with the conservatives is how they just followed labour on the iraq war, which left us with the lib dems acting as an opposition to ask the questions that really needed answering. the biggest argument i have with the lib dems is that they are so pro-europe. the thing about europe is that it just annoys me sometimes, with the stupid things that come out of it and get forced on people. and the euro annoyed me when we used it in italy. it seemed that as soon as you broke into a note you got left with all this change that was too small to use. i just know that if we were right in europe there would be more annoying things. but then i thought that since the issues were war vs europe annoyance, then europe was obviously the lesser of 2 evils. besides, i think that although we are closer to america in culture (God help us), we are more matched to european countries in ideology. european food and drink is /so/ nice too.

so anyway, that was settled. now i’m looking forward to the start of euro 2004. i put my wallchart up last night on our freezer. it is fixed in place using positive words from our fridge poetry set, like “cup” and “glory”. hopefully the karma of these words will filter through and help us do well. i will be wearing my best england socks on sunday. i have 4 pairs now. should be enough to last between washing days to see me through the tournament.

go england and (in turn) go darius vassell.