The rhetoric with which we are exhorted to vote is grand and sententious: do your civic duty; people died so that you could etc. etc. The rhetoric with which we’re exhorted not to vote is grander and more pretentious still. All of it makes voting sound like something between a chore and a possibly pointless low-level military mission, a matter of long queues and secrecy and mild, pervasive paranoia. In fact, for me at least, voting is a small but reliable pleasure.
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The thing I miss most about my old flat in the middle of Peckham is the polling station that came with it. This was Rye Lane Baptist Chapel, quite the grandest frontage on the street – a columned neoclassical confection dating from the middle of the 19th century, though with a discreet inscription explaining that it was partially demolished by the Luftwaffe in 1943, and thanking God for its reconstruction.
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