I felt a bit guilty for not doing more this elections cycle. Oxford gets one year in four without elections, and I’ve really enjoyed doing other things like getting stuck into my new job, going on holiday, and trying to be a good local councillor. Still, last time we had a year without elections in 2003, I went to Reading, and after a long day I enjoyed a fantastic night at the count where, two months after the invasion of Iraq, we lost not a single seat. Seeking to repeat the experience a few years later, I jumped on a train south on Wednesday evening.

There is something about campaigning in a city not your own that’s really quite fun - other people do the thinking, and you can just go where you’re sent. I was in Church ward for the early leaflet, and spent the rest of the day in Park ward, doing a bit of delivery, a bit of telling and a lot of knocking-up (less amusingly otherwise known as Get Out the Vote).

I enjoyed meeting real Tories - we don’t have any in Oxford - though disapppointingly I wasn’t telling with a red-in-tooth-and-claw Thatcherite or with Cameroon-groupie, but a lovely older lady with a very upper-crust accent called Eunice, for whom I fetched a chair after it became clear that she wouldn’t last out her stint standing. Reading also has a developing Green problem, and the literature they put around to Reading residents hilariously talks about the difference a Green group on Oxford city council makes. Yet their variety of Greens want to end alternate weekly rubbish collections which would reduce recycling at a stroke, and, given that they have plenty of Tories already you wouldn’t have thought they’d be much room for an individualistic NIMBYist middle-class tax-cutting parade, but hey. Their race analysis is also slightly less advanced than that of our Greens in Oxford - one of their activists commented to one of ours that he didn’t realise there were so many “coloureds” in Park ward. I tried to wind up the Green who was on the gate with me, but disappointingly he didn’t appear to have any political opinions, nodding amiably no matter how outlandish and calculated-to-irritate-the-type-of-Green-I’m-used-to my statements became. It’s really upsetting when one’s foes don’t take the bait, don’t you find? I admit that I was in a pretty strong position, what with our telling constantly interrupted by building noise from the new nursery being built thanks to a Labour government and Labour council, and being able to point at that and the thousands like it all over the country when asked what a Labour government is good for, but I still thought it was a poor show from the Green. No Liberals anywhere in Park, though - very refreshing, though there were some borrowed OULD students in Church ward: I know because their reaction when teased affectionately about whether they needed to shave yet was to declare indignantly that they were at Oxford University, didn’t we know!

The telling was but a brief interlude in the constant trudge of election day. Up and down the Wokingham Road, back and forth between the committee rooms in Liverpool Road and College Road, over to the London Road for a change of scenery. Not having had weeks and months of trudging preparation, my feet didn’t last out as well as usual, and I had to go and buy extra plasters and insoles at teatime ready for the last push. I was really ready for that first pint at five past ten last night.

Unfortunately the Reading election officials had made an incomprehensible decision to postpone the count until today, so there wasn’t to be a repeat of 2003’s fabulous night at the leisure centre. There wasn’t to be a repeat in terms of the results, either: Tony Short, who I had worked hard for all day, lost by seven votes to a Tory. Labour lost seven seats; we’re still in overall control, but it’s not a happy day. One is always convinced, in such tight races, that one should have just knocked on that extra door or tried harder with that potential voter reluctant to go to the polls at 9pm…