May cause drowsiness: day 11

Lon­don has been in uproar. A hung par­lia­ment, news broad­casters’ heli­copters con­stantly buzz­ing over the rooftops, demon­strat­ors with mega­phones protest­ing about every known cause (and some unknown ones) in order to get them­selves on screen, tele­vi­sion journ­al­ists and offi­cials vir­tu­ally com­ing to blows dur­ing inter­views, and politi­cians being fol­lowed by hordes of report­ers as they march from one offi­cial build­ing to another say­ing noth­ing more than “we’ll be mak­ing a state­ment later”. There’s been a vital feel­ing in the air, almost one of revolution.

Sadly, that brief revolu­tion is now at an end, hav­ing fizzled out in a hec­tic hour or so of min­is­terial cars smoothly fer­ry­ing lead­ers across the city in oppos­ite dir­ec­tions. The status quo has unfor­tu­nately been restored. We now have a new Tory Prime Min­is­ter who has gained power with the assist­ance of the Lib­eral Demo­crat leader — a man who many people were loudly ‘agree­ing’ with dur­ing the elec­tion cam­paign because he appeared to be a breath of fresh air in Brit­ish polit­ics, but has over the last few days respon­ded to all those who placed such hope in him by selling them down the river.

That’s it, then. At least I can now stop watch­ing and listen­ing to end­less rolling news cov­er­age; even for a news junkie, I was wor­ried that the addic­tion of the past few days was about to res­ult in a fatal overdose.

But. Before I go and write a ram­bling and weary let­ter to David Cameron, then open a bottle of gin and fire up the gas oven, I should tell you that ‘other’ — the new col­lab­or­at­ive site I wrote about yes­ter­day — has pub­lished my first con­tri­bu­tion: Call It Brit Lit and I’ll Have to Stab You. Yes, that unpleas­antly viol­ent title is sup­posed to get your atten­tion. Yes, I am in an extraordin­ar­ily bad mood. Yes, I am jaded. Shut up.