For me, the election war is over

“For you, Tommy, ze war is over!” The Germans always said this to captured British soldiers in the war films that were such a staple of my childhood.

Of course they were completely wrong, as Tommy invariably joined an escape committee and made an ingenious exit from his prison camp a couple of reels later.

But for me the General Election certainly is over, because I cast my vote on Saturday.

It feels wrong, just sticking an envelope in a post box rather than making a cross with a stubby pencil in a rickety plywood booth, after joshing with the party canvassers outside, and being ticked off the register by an official.

Not that there were many canvassers to be found outside the long demolished Callaly Women’s Institute hut, where I cast my last vote in person in Northumberland.

The election after that I was away on business so I asked for a postal vote, expecting it to be a one-off, but it turned out to be a permanent arrangement.

Now, I can see in theory that voting 12 days before the polls open is completely wrong. One should hear all the arguments before taking a view on any debate.

But leave it too long and you start to worry about your vote missing the count due to postal delays. And you end up, as I did in 2010, driving to the nearest polling station to hand over your postal vote in person. Which seems frankly ridiculous.

In any case, personal acquaintance with one candidate, and the conviction that she will be an excellent constituency MP, made her my absolutely obvious choice. I’d like to think I would still have voted for her if she had not been standing for the party to which I owe well over 40 years of tribal loyalty.

Naturally I’m going to feel pretty sick if, in the last week of the campaign, someone uncovers a secret off-manifesto commitment to slay all first-born sons, ban the wearing of ties or make forehead identity tattoos compulsory.

However, the chances of this seem slight. And now that I have become a mere observer of the various campaigns, rather than a potential voter, I can watch the contenders slug it out with the same sort of relaxed detachment with which I always approach the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. (Because, although I went to Cambridge, I have absolutely no interest in rowing.)

This election bears some similarities to that race with its two evenly matched teams slogging hard for the finish line. Though for the comparison to work fully we would have to add an SNP speedboat weaving back and forth across the course, threatening to upset the Conservative and Labour eights in its wash.

Plus a UKIP cabin cruiser, well stocked with gin, a Green pedalo, a Welsh Nationalist coracle and a Lib Dem submarine (actually a sunken coxless four).

The one and only time I went to watch the boat race, because I lived in London and could think of no excuse, it did not happen because Cambridge sank before the event had even started.

At least there is no chance of being denied a fascinating and unpredictable spectacle on the night of May 7th/8th, for which I will lay in Champagne either to celebrate or to drown my sorrows.

I have sat up for every election since 1970, when I enjoyed my first “Portillo moment” as the outgoing Labour foreign secretary George Brown lost his seat at Belper. That was an election the Conservatives were not expected to win; I can vividly remember the BBC bringing on a signwriter to paint some more digits on the Tory side of their swingometer.

The election of 1992 was also a pleasant surprise for those of a Conservative persuasion, though I don’t suppose there is any hope of Ed Miliband holding a triumphalist rally in Sheffield and repeatedly yelling “We’re all right!” to repel wavering voters.

Still, once every couple of decades the pundits seem to get it wrong. Let’s see if the pattern holds next week, with an unexpectedly decisive result for either would-be Prime Minister.

As I always say at weddings, may the best man win.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Am I the only one cheering for the iceberg during ITV's Titanic?

How different it might all have been if Sir Matthew Pinsent had been born a century earlier, so that he could have served as a lookout on the Titanic.

One of his timely cries of “there’s something in the water” might surely have made all the difference, as they did to that witless protester’s chances of survival in the Thames on Saturday afternoon.

Though the greatest risk was not that impressionable children might witness a well-deserved decapitation on live TV, but that the contest might be spoiled by one of the rowers breaking an oar in the process. As it was, that catastrophe was luckily averted, and … oh yeah.

Until this Easter weekend I had never taken the slightest interest in the boat race, even though I grew up in a household where it was religiously observed on our tiny black and white TV. It was one of those annual events that my parents considered simply unmissable, like the Grand National (the only horse race on which they ever placed a bet).

Yet the only thing I can remember from my childhood is some grainy footage of the 1951 Oxford boat sinking, endlessly recycled on compilations of great sporting disasters along with that bloke being pipped at the post of the 1948 Olympic marathon and the Queen Mother’s horse Devon Loch landing flat on its stomach at Aintree in 1956.

Cambridge 1978, not Oxford 1951, but you get the picture

Then came this Holy Saturday, when I was so desperate for a break from the sound of three small children wrecking my garden that I pulled the “I must support my old university” card from my pocket and settled down in blissful peace and quiet in front of the TV. It was certainly a memorable experience. And, what’s more, I only had to see it once.

Unlike Julian Fellowes’ take on Titanic, which is apparently stuck in an endless loop where the same characters do much the same things to each other every week. The big surprise comes right at the end, when the ship sinks. Who could have seen that coming? Surely I am not alone in spending my recent Sunday evenings shouting “Come on, you iceberg!” at the TV?

For variety, next week I think I shall treat myself to a download of the classic 1980 box office flop “Raise the Titanic”, of which Lew Grade memorably observed “It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic Ocean.”

It is strange how Titanic has retained its hold on the popular imagination, despite the subsequent and infinitely greater human tragedies of the First World War. I do not recall any similar fuss being made on, say, the centenary of the Tay Bridge disaster in 1979.

Come on Fellowes, it had first class passengers, too. Anyone for the memorial crossing?

What we can say with certainty is that no one would currently be paying almost £6,000 for a cruise to retrace Titanic’s maiden voyage if it had ended safely in New York. Just as few would remember Donald Campbell’s achievement if he had broken the world water speed record on Coniston in 1967, instead of becoming fatally airborne in Bluebird.

Similarly, how many of NASA’s 135 space shuttle launches have lodged in the memory, apart from the Challenger disaster of 1986?

Call me superstitious, but I would not wish to step aboard a Titanic memorial cruise at any price. Though a century of progress in marine engineering meant that MS Balmoral had to leave Southampton two days earlier than Titanic because it cannot match its speed. This presumably reduces the chances of adverse consequences from any unanticipated encounters with sea ice.

For added authenticity, they have ditched three quarters of the lifeboats

And if by some quirk history should repeat itself, at least the participants will never be forgotten.

Just as the sore losers in the 2012 boat race may console themselves with the thought that they have come as close as any of us ever will to immortality. Because winners soon fade from memory, but people will surely be replaying footage of their tribulations on YouTube for decades if not centuries to come.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.