I hope you’ll forgive the slow last few days on CY. Maybe it’s a lull before Thursday: the lines are drawn and there seems little point in rehashing the arguments again. There seems little worth writing about.

Even the ever-desperate Polly Toynbee in the Guardian today with her wilful, lazy, blackmailing misrepresentations (”To wish for a hung parliament is to want to reward Tories for their poisonous campaign”) raised merely a shrug from me rather than the ire of a few weeks ago. I’ll certainly be reading her honeyed words wearing my own nosepeg from now on and I doubt I’m the only one. I suppose we’re all duped by the aristocracy from time to time.

I’m pretty certain who I’m going to vote for (it’s not New Labour). But with the decision made, I can’t escape a sinking feeling. I spoke to my 81 year-old grandmother at the weekend who’ll be voting New Labour with enthusiasm. She’s never been so well off as she is under Blair, never before having £100 a week in her pension. She also told me for the first time that my great grandfather was Labour aristocracy himself, of a sort. A Labour councillor on every local council going, he was made a honorary life member of the Party in 1973. He fought for a bus service from his Cumbrian rural community of Camerton to the nearest town Workington when there was none. On the first day of the service he walked from Camerton to Workington so he could be on the first bus to the village.

It’s a story you hear trotted out by politicians trying to make a point or ivory tower newspaper columnists trying to fill a page. Maybe I’m sentimental, but like I said, there’s a sinking feeling. Separation anxiety?

Jarndyce from Pseudo Magazine said that it’s “time to kiss them goodbye for ever, not for a couple of years” and he’s right. Dropping the “New” won’t restore my faith in the party any more than Gordon Brown’s accession to the throne with his American economic models and his newly-expressed overt approval of the war will. The Labour Party of my great grandfather’s time no longer exists and that’s not my fault.

So - obviously - the various ramifications of the election aren’t going to usher in the Utopia that would shut me up and let me get back to doing some proper work. There’s going to be a lot to rail against (ID cards, maybe more war, new nuclear weapons and more) and argue for (civil liberties, PR, proper reform of the Lords, to name but three).

I can feel my writer’s block wearing off.