I’ll never last the night

It’s been an inter­est­ing even­ing of elec­tion cov­er­age so far. Less than three minutes after David Dimbleby announced the res­ults of the exit poll, the couple in the flat next door reached orgasm extremely loudly. Groan­ing was involved. Which was nice. I’m not sure whether the two events — the polit­ical and the car­nal — were linked, but if they were than I assume that my neigh­bours were simply over­come with sheer delight at the pre­dic­tion that Labour would be returned to power with a hugely reduced majority.

If this news­flash had that much of an effect on them, just ima­gine what it was doing to Ann Wid­de­combe as she sat in the BBC stu­dio being lightly grilled by Jeremy Pax­man (“Oh, come on!! How can you call that a resound­ing suc­cess?”). Did any­one notice if she had her legs crossed?

Sorry, that’s a hor­rible thought. I shall cease and desist.

How­ever, now I’ve piqued your curi­os­ity, I sense that I’m going to have to explain the above. Well, you see, it’s all to do with the way in which the rooms in the neigh­bour­ing flat were rearranged when the place was com­pletely gut­ted and rebuilt. Noise drift­ing through the walls has been a prob­lem for a while, but now the ten­ant obvi­ously has a new girl­friend and — and — well, they’re get­ting to know each other. Quite fre­quently. Quite loudly, too. And no, before you ask, I don’t hold a glass against the wall. I don’t need to — that’s the whole issue. In fact, being typ­ic­ally Brit­ish, when I hear those unmis­take­able sounds, I invari­ably find myself feel­ing incred­ibly embar­rassed even about being in the pri­vacy of my own flat. I go so far as to avert my eyes, although I’m not actu­ally star­ing at any­thing in the first place.

I’ve wondered about put­ting a note through their front door, but it’s a del­ic­ate sub­ject to raise, and I just wouldn’t know where to start:

Dear neigh­bours in Flat 3,

It is with no sense of rel­ish and, indeed, more of a sense of slight dis­taste that I have to inform you that I can clearly hear your ecstatic moans when you, well, y’know … I would be extremely grate­ful if you could try and keep the noise down in future, as it doesn’t add much to the gen­eral ambi­ence when I wake up to the sounds of cop­u­lat­ing on what should be a peace­ful and relax­ing Sunday morn­ing. Fur­ther­more, I think you’re scar­ing the neigh­bour­hood cats away.

Yours sin­cerely,
Neigh­bour at Flat 3 next door

Besides, I’m so infuri­at­ingly nice and con­sid­er­ate that I’d prob­ably end up feel­ing guilty for for­cing them into hav­ing sex rather more quietly, when it’s obvi­ous that under­state­ment isn’t really their idea of a good time when they’re, er, con­sumed by the moment. As it were.

Oh, wait a minute. I’m sup­posed to be writ­ing about the elec­tion cov­er­age, aren’t I?

So, yes, when my elec­tion view­ing was inter­rup­ted by the sounds of fero­cious shag­ging, I reluct­antly decamped from my bed­room into the living-room. It was at that point that I real­ised two things:

1. The years when I could make it through an entire elec­tion night without a wink of sleep are long gone;
2. The early res­ults come in very slowly. Very slowly indeed.

I don’t know how Sun­der­land South man­ages to get its votes coun­ted so quickly at each elec­tion, but I wish some of the other con­stitu­en­cies would learn a thing or two from their effi­ciency, because I need to get to bed at a decent time and get at least six hours of sleep. But before I do I want mean­ing­ful res­ults — and I want them now.

Inwardly, I was shout­ing at the TV screen, “Count faster, you bas­tards. Give me res­ults. I crave res­ults. How can I get a decent indic­a­tion of the final out­come when only nine or ten safe Labour seats have declared. I’ve got work tomor­row, so I need to get to bed, damn you!”

Obvi­ously, of course, I didn’t shout this out loud, because I might have dis­turbed the neigh­bours as they pro­gressed lust­ily towards the heights of pas­sion. That would never do.

Plus, there’s the unavoid­able fact that although Peter Snow has undoubtedly found him­self a per­man­ent place in the nation’s heart as a sort of affable mad pro­fessor of elec­tions, his swin­gometer routines are utterly point­less when you’ve got an exit poll that few people trust and only a hand­ful of res­ults to go on. All the swings just turn out to be so many round­abouts (if you’ll par­don the pain­fully awful pun; it is very late, and the thread of whatever I was try­ing to say deser­ted me long ago).

So those of you who were hop­ing that I might join the merry band of ded­ic­ated blog­gers who are going to sit in front of their PCs until dawn, pum­mel­ling their key­boards with minute-by-minute updates of Labour losses, Con­ser­vat­ive gains and Lib­eral Demo­crat no-shows (which is the way the night is shap­ing up at the moment, accord­ing to the pun­dits) are going to be dis­ap­poin­ted. It’s a shame, because I was so hop­ing to see Oliver Letwin get dumped.

It’s 1.27am, Labour are on 69, the Tor­ies — oops, I mean the Con­ser­vat­ives — on 4 and the Lib­eral Demo­crats on 3. There are still 568 seats to go, but that’s 568 too many for me. As I said before, they just need to count ‘em faster …