As you read this email, you’ll know the official results of the UK general election 2024. I’m typing this on the day of voting, but let’s be clear: we already know who the winner is going to be. Or, perhaps: we know who the loser is going to be.

I don’t mean that there’s any doubt that Keir “My Dad Was a Toolmaker” Starmer is going to walk into Number Ten tomorrow. My point is that it’s unclear who “wins” from this result, because it certainly isn’t the British public.

Living in the UK these past few years has felt almost hedonistic as the gradual erosion and decay of our public services has accelerated. I remember being at Glastonbury back in 2014 when heavy rain briefly shut down the Pyramid stage. Nobody was dressed properly for the storm and after a while we all stopped trying to shelter from it. One bloke took off most of his clothes and began dancing in a muddy corner and soon there were crowds of people joining him, everyone covered in mud and rain and seemingly beginning the descent into oblivion.

I’m not much of a gamer. When I started university in 2005, I took with me my recently-acquired Nintendo Gamecube, which was four years old at that point. It replaced my, er, Sega Mega Drive, which was released in the late 1980s. I like games, but I’m not much interested in keeping up with the current generation.

As a teenager, I remember our household purchasing our first “family computer”, was was not unlike the image below. It came with a CD-ROM sleeve packed full of games and educational software, including the still-classic Star Wars: Rogue Squadron flying game.

One of these CDs didn’t work in our computer, and I still remember taking it to a friend who’d been building PCs since he was in primary school. He inspected it on his own machine and confirmed it had a virus. I still remember him confidently telling me that computer viruses could spread from disc-to-disc, so the stack of bare CD-ROMs I used to carry around on a plastic spindle was putting all of my precious games at risk of contracting the virus. I hurriedly separated them all into plastic sleeves again.

There was a pub we used to drink at when I was on the cusp of 18 (and technically not allowed to be there) called the Old Angel, in the centre of Nottingham. Back then it was a rock/metal pub, though it looks to have rebranded as a microbrewery in the intervening twenty years. We’d finish classes at sixth form and walk over there for a burger, chips and a pint. It was 2004 and it felt like we had all the time in the world, with our baggy jeans and dyed hair.

My teenage band used to play gigs there: it was pay-to-play and we literally handed out paper flyers to likely-looking strangers in Nottingham city centre to try to earn enough door money to pay for the old, grumpy sound guy who’d grudgingly run the PA for the night while we performed, for something like £50 and a couple of Kronenbourgs. The stage was tiny, but incredibly, the venue played host to genuine touring bands as well as small-timers like us, so we were able to say we’d shared a stage with the big-name artists, despite being technically a vanity gig.

The bird shit landed on my outstretched hand, describing a perfect semicircle of recently-airborne faeces around my fingers. At this late stage of the day I actually found myself laughing at, rather than cursing my unseen avian assailant. Shit happens.

It was 6pm this Tuesday and I was late for an event I was supposed to be hosting. Delayed trains and school pickups were my weak excuses, and I walked out of the train station to see my intended tram disappear into the sunset (well, the cloud of noxious fumes surrounding Birmingham New Street). I needed a plan B.

“What about an e-bike?”, I definitely didn’t say out loud. I used to regularly hire one of the green-and-purple cycles dotted around Birmingham when I was doing the nursery dropoff last year. I found a likely-looking bike and held my phone over the contactless docking point.

I pulled the ticket out of my pocket and showed it to the worried-looking official standing outside the auditorium doors. “The support act is on right now”, she told me. “You’ll have to wait by the side till the song finishes”.

I’d forgotten that this was a seated concert. She pulled the heavy doors open for me and I crept inside, only to be quickly intercepted by another concerned official who ushered me to some temporary seating “until the support act finishes”.

I sat and took in my surroundings. The venue was Birmingham Symphony Hall, somewhere I’d been a couple of times for orchestral performances, but never for a folk-rock gig. I was here to see guitar virtuoso Richard Thompson (of Fairport Convention fame). I craned my neck to the stalls to get a sense of where my seat was, and was momentarily blinded by the glare of the stage lights reflecting off the bald heads of six hundred retired folk music blokes.