I nearly didn’t vote in yon local authority elections. When I say “nearly”, “didn’t”, and indeed “vote”, I am pouring a vat of eggs onto a standard-sized pudding.

But if you poke around the sponge of that first sentence, you may find a raisin of truth.

For a start, the date seemed to be dancing about me elusively.

Fully six weeks earlier, thinking the election was only days away, I’d phoned up the cooncil to complain that I hadn’t yet had a voting card. A kindly bureaucrat told me that, according to her watch, it was still only March and not, as I had alleged, April.

It’s a mistake anyone could make, and we both agreed that perhaps I should increase my vitamin uptake. Having thus got in a panic one month too early, I then couldn’t give a hoot as the actual day approached. It was only when a friend rang on the day to cancel a coffee arrangement, and suggested “Perhaps you could go and vote instead”, that I remembered my democratic duty.

However, I was not enthused. The local candidate of the party I’d normally support was a keen cyclist, a practice I deplore, and all his publicity pictures showed him done up in lycra like a pillock. In the end, I still voted for him and for the Green, who presumably is also keen on causing danger to pedestrians and motorists alike. Such is democracy. In a sense, I was voting for something I detested. But, hey ho, politics is such a complicated business.

I gave my third vote to some socialist loony, as a way of telling myself that I was still young at heart, and there it ended. But it nearly never began. I’m a bit sociophobic and, to me, there’s little difference between a ...

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