This is the last post I will make on this blog until, probably, Saturday. This is because I will be *busy*.
In a couple of hours, I will be making a two-bus journey to a target ward. There I shall deliver a couple of hundred leaflets, to go with the 500 I’ve already delivered this week. I will then come home and, if I’m lucky, get three hours sleep before getting up at 4AM to go out leafletting again. I shall then spend an entire day delivering leaflets, knocking on doors and tallying at polling stations. This will finish at 10PM, at which point I shall make my way to the Town Hall, to try to help supervise the council election count until maybe 3AM. At which point I shall go home and get some sleep before going out to the actual referendum count.

This is how I spend my holiday time from work.

And I would like not to have to do this any more. I’m not a natural campaigner – I simply don’t have the energy for it – and yet I’ve spent a huge chunk of my spare time in the last five years doing this kind of stuff. In the last year I’ve helped out at twenty Yes street stalls as well, lugging a huge table and big boxes full of heavy leaflets on buses. (And before that I helped out regularly at No2ID street stalls until we won that one).

And I’ve been doing this because we have an unfair voting system. The party I support needs to get far more votes per MP than the Tories or Labour – we have to make a Herculean effort to get the same results they get *without even bothering*. That means that if I want my vote to count the same as a Tory or Labour voter, I have to persuade another four or five people who otherwise weren’t going to vote, to vote the same way I do. And I have to do this even though I’m burned out.

I’m not a campaigner at heart. I just want to live in a world where I’m not raised to a blood-boiling fury by the government and totally impotent to get them out. If we can get AV in I might well help out a bit when I’ve got time, but I won’t feel the need to take election weeks off out of my small holiday entitlement and spend them doing heavy physical work, because we’ll have – not a totally fair system, but one where *my vote matters*.

Otherwise… well, there’s council elections next year, the Euro elections the year after that, more council elections the year after *that* and a General election in 2015. I’d better get that ‘holiday’ time booked when I get back to work on Monday, hadn’t I?

More Seven Soldiers posts on Saturday.