Woke up this morning stiff, rattling and exhausted. How many desperate conversations, how many sessions of leaflet waving and door-knocking, how many brain-cells battering against the algorithms trying to send the message where other messages cannot reach? How much? How long? How far? How, how, how?

Felt close to death. Felt it was not so long ago my daughter was born, and the Gulf War was on the TV, and we were worrying whether the world would survive long enough for her to live in it. Felt like only a snatch-moment ago I joined the Green Party, staying for a brief, angry spell because the BBC said there were not enough Greens to justify television time. The Greens think we all forgot about the environment and left. We didn’t, we just changed our minds about where the lever was.

Felt it was only a minute or two ago I joined the Labour Party, started learning to do politics, found myself in an officer’s role, and some nutcase called an election. Felt like the start of this mad-cap election was so long ago that everything that was my life before then has crumbled and disappeared. Feels like if we don’t get the Tories out, I’ll never manage to remember my life, let alone pick up the pieces.

Felt like the dried-up frame that was my body was a colour-map. The big, vital bits are blue and red, but there’s a lot of green and a fair bit of purple. There’s yellow, and other colours, and little rainbow dots buzzing around here and there. Blue are the bits that are desperate, desperate to hang onto the property and power that keep them safe. Purple are the ones boiling with the same fears and desires, and knowing that if only they could get their hands on some property and power, they’d bloody sort it all out. Red ones are forging ahead to save the world, but with bits of themselves trailing along in terror, shouting “stop, stop, you’ll BREAK it!” The green bits, wedded to mother earth, know they know better, except where they don’t and the yellow – well, everyone has bits of themselves they’ll never understand without a year or so of counselling. Yellow offers a home to those who just want to make the last year not have happened, whatever it was that happened, and to make people not be as complicated and dangerous as they are. The fizzy bits – there are some great independent and outlying bits – from the parasites to the symbiocites to the flora that we can’t live without.

And it feels like when all this is over, we have got to understand that we are all everyone, and we have to go on with the struggle until we all understand, and accept that. We are the 99% – but the 1% are not really something else either. Just a bit of the colour map that’s got a strange disease, and needs to be brought back into a state that works for the whole.

Maybe it’ll happen. Off to the telling and the knocking up now, and then the waiting to see.

Good luck everyone – go vote, go help, go ker-nocking up – you do have some energy left, you DO!

*The image at the top is from a postcard by @djbrass and@lucky_budgie, bastardised in a desperate attempt to ensure it wasn’t wearing any party colours.