So, the votes have been cast.  For the umpteenth successive election I have voted for someone who was not elected, but at least I got to vote, which is perhaps as, if not more, important.  I'm not sure what to make of the events in some English cities where people were turned away after allegedly queuing for 'hours.'  It is easy to blame the returning officers, and maybe they did make errors of judgement.  At the same time if people chose to arrive at 21:30 then they knew, surely, there was some element of risk involved?

I'm always fascinated to watch the Sunderland dash.  Clearly a compact set of constituencies and a committed infrastructure set on a fast turn around.  Must be nice for the candidates to be away by midnight.  And how times have changed that we no longer have to wait for daylight to count in Northern Ireland or a week for ballot boxes to arrive from the outermost islands.

So, as the clearing up happens, as candidates fall into an exhausted sleep, as party leaders head to London to decide 'what next', we have a parliament in which no one has an overall majority.  Might people just begin to work together for the common good rather than squabbling?  Might we discover that a 'balanced' (nicer word than 'hung') parliament can be strong and effective?  Or will we be back at the polls in a few months to do it all again?  Only time will tell.

There is a temptation to see this as 'job done' and revert to life as usual, but actually the challenge is to continue to engage with the issues and be interested in the life of this nation.  My younger brother used to say that democracy was the freedom to choose our dictators.  Perhaps we need to grasp that, whilst we get the government we choose (within the constraints of the process we use), we don't then abdicate responsibility for influencing what it does.