Out for the Count

The last piece I wrote was just before the Local Elections.  For those of you who have read that piece, you will know that I made no predictions.  For only a fool would predict what the Electorate is likely to do. I won.  I was elected.  I am now a District Councillor.  Not only was I elected, but I was also asked to sit on Cabinet.  Quite the change for someone who was minding their own business at home and only went outside to see what the person holding the leaflet wanted.  I’m sure that there’s a lesson somewhere in there for all of us.

This is why you haven’t heard from me for a while.   I have had rather a lot to get a grip on in the last few months.  The pile of paper, the raft of meetings, the wide range of subject matter, the like of which I have never seen before.   

So now I resurface.  What do I talk about?  What do you want to know about the shenanigans of being a District Councillor?  For there are many shenanigans.  Perhaps I should save the shenanigans for a book. There is a lot to talk about so I am going to start at the beginning; the Count.

The Count was at a leisure centre. Someone has decided that sports halls are ideal places to accommodate large numbers of anxious people.  It just so happened that there were large numbers of anxious people in my district, both Counters and Countees, available on 5 May 2023.  The Counters, because they had organised an entire election in the district and were now counting large numbers of ballot papers.  I would imagine that getting it right is quite stressful in any event, but when faced with a wall of Countees, that adds to your stress substantially.  The Countees were anxious because well, I can only speak for myself, but I was in it to win it.  Countees are allowed a Countee Support Person, so I had chosen Man of the House and Nigel was accompanied by (I am sure he would agree) his long-suffering friend, Jim.

There were two rooms; single member wards were in the large sports hall.  Two member wards (me and Nigel) were in the adjacent room with all of the soft play equipment and some sort of climbing stuff.  Tables were set out so that they were two abreast – thus giving space to the Counters but also distance and allowing the Countees to see, but not touch (do not touch, never touch, a ballot paper).  Us Countees were so close to the wall that in order to move around we had to do a sort of theatre/cinema shuffle past each other (“Sorry, excuse me, excuse me, thank you”), which obviously one had to do when we were trying to see different ballot boxes opened.

First the Counters counted the ballots emptied out of the box in order to ensure that the number on the boxes matched the number tipped out.  At this point the Countees are trying to look at the votes to get an idea of how things have gone.  There were seven candidates in my ward, and everyone had two votes.  Picture the speed with which the papers are opened and placed into piles of ten. Countees are expected to see and note the two votes on each of them to give your team an idea of how things are going.  My idea of how things were going at that point: not a single clue.

After this stage (assuming the number of ballots counted match the number on the box) the counting begins. Double votes (so two votes for the same political party) are separated out and placed into a separate tray; they are then counted.  Single votes (so one for one person, and another for someone else in a different party) are then counted.  It is impossible for me to explain this process in words, one needs to see it to understand it.  Suffice it to say, it is complicated.  It involves grass skirts.  And absolutely no dancing.

Remember, all of this time, the Countees are squeezed up next to each other with the tables on one side, the soft play equipment on the other with cinema-style shuffling in-between. At one point this resulted in one opposing Countee being sandwiched between me and Nigel. I have an evil sense of humour so I joked that he was a thorn between two roses. When we found ourselves back in the same position about an hour later, he retorted that he could, of course, be a rose between two thorns. Touche! Rather better humour than someone who was reported to me as having been overheard calling their co-Countee the c-word when it transpired that they had lost.

On the PA system we could hear announcements of wards as they were declared. No such luck for us in the Grass Skirt and Soft Play Area. A Tale of Two Counts was happening in our room. One one side, Nigel and I stood and watched one box counted and determined that things did not look promising for us. Nigel stomped off to have an angry sandwich washed down with a very grumpy cup of tea. Meanwhile, Man of the House and Jim were getting a very different picture. They were wondering if anyone was likely to vote for anyone else but us. (Those villages know who they are – we love you too). So when all of the double votes were counted, we were ahead but the single votes were still to go. No fat ladies or singing were discernible at any point.

For reasons I will never understand, when this was finally done, I was the only person in the room. Maybe it was because we were the last ward to declare. I presume that one of the Counters had gone to tell the Presiding Officer what the result was, and the rest were heading for their duvets or the bar. Perhaps Jim was coaxing Nigel out of the gents with the promise of a nice cake. I don’t know. But I know that I was on my own. All of the papers were all there with yellow stickies on with the numbers of votes on. All they had to be was added up. So I started adding them up.

At the precise moment I realised that we had won, I looked up from my pad to see our Campaign Manager appear in the doorway.  Not one single word was exchanged between us.  He looked at me and raised his eyebrows in a “weeeellllllll?” kind of a way.  In return I pulled a face that said  “I think so but you are really going to have to double-check I’ve got this right.”  The side of his lip curled in a smile, and he was gone.

I burst into tears with the weirdness of it all.  Ever the man to pick his moment, this was the point at which Nigel decided to re-appear.  Men usually respond in two ways with an upset woman, and Nigel is in the group that leaves as quickly as possible to try and find another woman to deal with the issue.  For future reference for all of you, Jim is in the other group. He immediately grabbed a pad of paper, wafted me with it and directed Man of the House to my person.

I hate attention.  Hate it.  So being dragged onto a stage for the declaration was quite stressful indeed for me and I was already feeling rather overwhelmed.  We knew that we had won, but no one else did until it was announced.  Although we all knew that we had won the Council by this stage. I hope you are all keeping up. 

I gave myself a mental talking to.  “Look here, Natalie.  You have been through considerably more stressful things than this.  What would Adella say if she could see you now?  She would tell you to get a bloody grip.  Lee?  What about him? He’d laugh and probably point as well. And, Natalie, what would your mother say?????”  Unsurprisingly, reminding myself of lost loved ones didn’t help one iota.  Brains are peculiar things.  I decided to focus on the cheer and watch Susan waving in celebration from across the hall.

Then, as we came down the steps, the CEO congratulated me, introduced himself and mispronounced my name as has pretty much everyone I have ever met has ever done my entire life.  I don’t even bother to correct people anymore.  For no conscious reason whatsoever I decided that this was the day to change the approach of the last forty odd years.  My opening gambit? “it’s Gist.  Gist.  With a hard ‘g”.” What a wonderful way to start a working relationship that is going to involve winning friends and influencing people.  Well done Councillor. Well done.