Elections write up

What a week it’s been so far…

Wednesday was the funeral of one of my good friends from college, Matt Fearn (known to most of us as “Ferny”), who died a couple of weeks ago in a motorbike accident. Although it was a sad occasion, it was great to see that so many people turned up—the church was more or less full with lots of people having to stand up at the back. Knowing Matt he wouldn’t have wanted a big fuss made, but I was glad that most people had been able to make it. After the service we went to the pub and it was nice to see people from college again who I haven’t spoken to since I left.

Thursday was of course election night. I decided to vote in Manchester Withington rather Bury North, mainly because I couldn’t be bothered making a three hour (minimum) round trip home to vote, especially seeing as I had a lot of work on. I was mobbed by party activists wanting to see my polling card on the way in, and they seemed most upset when I told them they weren’t election officials and so had no right to ask for anything like that. For those of you who don’t know, they use the polling card numbers to see who has voted and if you said you would vote for a particular party when they canvassed you they’ll want to pester you to get out and register your support.

The question is though, who did I vote for in the end? Normally I wouldn’t say anything but seeing as half the Megs found out on Thursday evening and several people keep asking me or making comments assuming I’ve voted one way in particular I suppose I’d better admit it… I voted for the Liberal Democrat, John Leech. I know, I know, I can’t believe it either, but out of all the candidates standing I had only received any election material from the Lib Dems, Labour, Conservatives and UKIP. Labour I refuse to vote for out of principle (they’ve broken too many promises) and UKIP don’t have any policies other than “take us out of Europe”, so it was between the Lib Dems and the Tories. Unfortunately I’ve been gradually demoralised by the Conservative’s lurch further and further right over the past few months and I hate the way they say “we’ll get rid of tuition fees” when actually what they mean is “we’ll charge commercial rates of interest on student loans”. Now I strongly disagree with the Lib Dems on Europe and one or two other issues and I wouldn’t want to see them running the country, but I’m happy to have a Lib Dem MP representing me, so that’s where my vote went. Anyway, I’m unlikely to be in Manchester Withington at the next general election so if this guy turns out to be a waste of time I’ve not really suffered. You know the Tories are in trouble though when someone who has been a loyal member for over three years can’t bring themself to vote for the party.

In the evening I watched the election coverage at Dan Meyer’s house along with Tim, Paul and Gareth from the Megs. It started off fairly predictably, with Sunderland declaring their results in under an hour, going to Labour as expected. The first major swing of the night was in Putney where the Tories took the seat from Labour. Another surprise came part way through when the Lib Dems won Manchester Withington, overturning a 11,000 Labour majority and winning by around 600 votes, although there were at least two recounts. Seems my vote did make a difference there then.

Over the course of the night we saw a few junior ministers lose their seats to the Conservatives and Lib Dems, but none of the major players lost their positions. The Lib Dems also failed miserably in their campaign to “decapitate” high ranking Tories—in fact the threat of them doing so probably made the Tory vote turnout even stronger as Letwin and Howard both more or less doubled their majorities.

All in all it was a fairly predictable night, with everyone claiming some sort of victory. Blair got his third term (not that there was ever really any doubt about that happening), Howard pushed the Tories up to nearly 200 seats, although he has now said he’s going to step down, and Kennedy helped the Lib Dems gain a fair number of seats. I managed to stay up for the whole thing and as a consequence was nearly falling asleep from tiredness in the software engineering lecture on Friday due to going 30+ hours without any sleep.

I was planning to go to Tom’s “leaving do” (i.e. go to FAB and drink probably 🙂 on Friday but I was absolutely shattered when I woke up from having a nap. Unfortunately the Compsoc mail server also chose to go join all the dead calculators in Silicon Heaven, or at least both of the hard disks did, so my evening was spent frantically messing around with sendmail configuration files and DNS zones to switch the mail over to the main login server. Thankfully I managed to pull it off with some help from Lewis and mail that had been piling up at Manchester Computing (who handle all our incoming mail and pass it on to us) started to filter through. At the moment there’s no way to get to mail without logging into the server itself and using one of the command line clients, but at least mail is being delivered so nothing is being lost. I’m just wondering what will go wrong next, everything I touch seems to be breaking at the moment.

The rest of the weekend I’ve spent working on labs, as I have six pieces of work due in next week. Thankfully I’ve nearly finished the final cache lab, I just have to write a one page report on it which is basically waffle and shouldn’t be too difficult. Tomorrow I have algorithms to do but that’s not too hard either and I’ve already done two thirds of the work. Graphics I haven’t really started but I think I can get cracking on it on Monday and Tuesday when I have free time in between lectures and I should be able to get several of the marks just by reading the lab manual. Software engineering doesn’t involve much either, as I think our group has all but given up on it so it’s more a tidying up exercise than anything else, and databases I have until Friday to do (given that the latest of the other deadlines is Wednesday I’ll have plenty of time to work on it).

Overall I’m feeling fairly chirpy despite having all this work to get through. After this Friday I won’t have any labs to worry about and in a month from today I’ll have finished my last exam for the year so I’ll be able to relax (well, actually I won’t because I have loads of stuff planned for the summer, but I’ll at least be able to put my feet up for five minutes). I still have to find somewhere to live for next year but that situation will hopefully improve sometime this week as I’ll have Wednesday afternoon and most of Thursday to go house hunting. Hopefully nothing else unexpected/annoying will crop up in the meantime but seeing as I have nothing interesting planned I can’t see anything being cancelled and at this late stage not much is likely to get sprung on me unexpectedly either.

Anyway, I’m off to bed in a bit, need to get up early tomorrow to continue on labs and hopefully get some serious work done. Night all.