Well done, Sister Suffragette!

'I’ve thought of a better way than sticking in a pin,’ Grange Girl said, passing me a cup of tea and taking the pin out of my hand. I tend towards the literal when it comes to metaphors, sayings and proverbs. For instance, I do actually grind axes, I tend to put pans to the back burner, and I make goldfish faces when I drink too much.

‘I don’t know anything about any of these candidates,’ I protested, ‘so I need the pin to help make a democratic choice.’

She shook her head, and I said, panicked, ‘I know you’re going to make me read their manifestos or something. If so, give me back the damn pin, and I’ll use it to stab myself.’

‘Do town councillors even have manifestos?’ Grange Girl turned my list round so she could read from it. ‘Look at their names.’ She pointed to the first candidate. ‘Mr Flake, for the Lib Dems. Well, say no more.’

I nodded. ‘I see what you’re doing. But actually the word ‘flake’ for me conjures up, not an unreliable person, but a delicious chocolate bar which, thanks to the power of advertising, is forever associated with a sex act.’

‘This is an art, not a science. If you like the sound of his name, Mr Flake might be your man.’ She moved down the list. ‘Ms Makepeace, for the Greens. Make Peace. That’s nice, isn’t it? And look, here’s another Green, Alexander Fleming. Discovered penicillin, right?’

‘Different chap, I’m guessing, on the grounds of age.’

‘You can tell so much from a name,’ Grange Girl said. 

‘You can’t, though. That’s a proverb you’ve just made up.’

‘Here’s a Labour candidate called Mr Blair.’

‘Well, to be fair to him, he couldn’t really stand for any other party, could he? It would seem like he was trying to avoid his fate: ergo, evasive.’

‘Exactly. And look, another useful-sounding Green: Mr Handy.’

‘Don’t tell me, the Tories are fielding Mr Tickle.’

‘No, they’ve got Ms Orwell, which makes me think of Big Brother and double-think. You know, I think this method does actually work.’

I looked under the table at Grange Girl’s feet. There’s no-one I admire more, but I wasn’t surprised to see that she was wearing clay slippers.

‘Grangey, how is choosing a candidate by their name any less arbitrary than sticking in a pin in?’

‘How is it any more arbitrary?’

‘Fair point. I guess this is the exact sort of random freedom the Suffragettes fought for. So,’ I asked her, ‘You going to use this method for the parliamentary election too?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. She held up my pin. ‘I’m really going to need to keep my eyes closed for that one.’

 Beth Miller, 5th May 2015

Only time will tell if I am right or I am wrong

I’m excited about voting in the AV referendum. I’m aware this puts me into a very small and elite group containing people who are fascinated by electoral reform (technical term: ‘geeks’), such as a young man who was in my politics tutorial group at college. He could turn literally any topic round to proportional representation: politics of course, but also clothes, food, music and dogs. Once I asked him if I could squeeze past his chair (he was sitting rather outside the group, literally as well as metaphorically), and he said, ‘Interesting you ask that as I was just thinking about the limited bloc vote.’ I wonder if he ever got a girlfriend.

Anyway, I am definitely not a geek. It’s another of those irregular verbs: I am interested in the detail; you are slightly obsessed; he is a geek; she is not a geek by dint of gender. There are historical reasons for my excitement about referendums (not referenda, you pedants). For anyone over 36 who has had the good fortune to live in Sussex rather than, say, Scotland, Wales or London, there has been only one other referendum in our lifetimes. It was 1975. I was a slip of a girl, barely old enough to comprehend the Morning Star’s editorials. Two things interested me. The first was that this huge affair, with schools closed for the day and nothing else on the news, all boiled down to ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ The second was that my mother disclosed that she was voting differently from my father. Though we were by no means a patriarchal household, it was always understood that there were separate areas of expertise. My father, who’d been to the LSE, was in charge of politics (e.g. what he and the Missus should vote), economics (bills and mortgage), and philosophy (whether we children would be allowed a flake in our 99s). My mother, who had been to art school, was in charge of history (who actually said what in that argument in Broadstairs in 1968) and fashion (lime green is fine with acid orange, long as it’s properly combined in a polyester trouser suit). So it was revolutionary for my mother to branch out on an independent pre-Beeching line (getting my eras slightly muddled now).

My father had the last laugh, because my mother voted ‘no’ to the Common Market and was resoundingly defeated. But it was very thrilling at the time, trying to decide who to side with (e.g. who was most likely to provide treats in the event of victory), and wondering if this was the first crack in their marriage (it was). It was the first time, I suppose, that I realised that adults could disagree; that they didn’t have all the answers; and that sometimes questions arise that are so big you have to ask the entire nation. So I’m delighted to be asked to join in with this one. But I won’t tell the children how I’m voting. Lesson learned.

Beth Miller, 4th May 2011. Published in VivaLewes.com

I’m on the pavement, thinking ‘bout the government

Not long now till we set off to put that vital X on the ballot paper. Thing One is beyond excited. Since last time we voted in Lewes, for the County Council, or whatever it was, she regards elections with an awe bestowed upon very few other activities. Going To Vote is in the same league as spending an hour in the Build-a-Bear Workshop in Churchill Square, or being allowed an ice cream and a cake at the Grange.

If only it were the spirit of democracy that so fired her imagination. I wish she were enlivened by a deep and historical understanding of the struggles Emmeline Pankhurst and the Monster Raving Loonies went through to bring suffrage to all. But no. I’m afraid the reason for her anticipation is because at the Council election, a kind man at the desk gave her a gobstopper. She’d never seen one before, due to my Lewes parent’s internal checklist, in which gobstoppers are clearly listed as a choking hazard, between ‘gherkins’ and ‘golf balls’.

She reverently took the sweetie and popped it in her mouth. Then I voted, which doesn’t take nearly long enough, by the way. All that fuss, all that campaigning, all that media hype and canvassing, all that listening to commentators sticking the word ‘gate’ on the end of every gaffe, all that watching three white men in different coloured ties arguing on telly, and then it’s just one quick squiggle on a piece of paper. I did a little smiley face next to it, to spin out my time in the booth, and to show that I understood the importance of the thing.

I remember the strength of my conviction, when I cast my first vote as a student in 1987, that my choice would get into power. They were bound to, simply because I was now participating. I was staggered to find this wasn’t the case, and it was a useful life lesson, I guess. One I’ll have to explain to Thing One in twelve years or so.

We left the church hall and I made the mistake of telling Thing One that when I was a kid, and before gobstoppers (and British Bulldog) were banned, they changed colour as you sucked them. She took the sweet out of her mouth to inspect it, and dropped it instantly into some mud. It did change colour, right enough, but only to brown. She was pretty good about it, sobbing for little more than forty minutes.

So that’s why she’s excited about going to the polls. She’s hoping to have another shot at a gobstopper. Something about her optimism reminds me of all us voters, shlepping off to make our mark. Even though we know that whatever we do, the government will still get in. And once they’re in, whoever they are, experience shows us that it won’t be long before the shiny coloured sweetie slips, and falls in the dirt.


Beth Miller, 5th May 2010. Published in VivaLewes.com. Photo by Alex Leith