I took great pleasure today in voting – not because I think my ballot paper will have any effect, especially not in the treacly mess of local politics, but because it’s the one time you can feel particularly engaged in the machinations of your country.

There are other civic touch points – paying your council tax, renewing your passport, getting arrested – but none of them have quite the same sense of occasion.

I also hold the mutually exclusive viewpoints that 1) local politicians should be not seen and not heard, and 2) that you really can’t complain about anything if you haven’t voted.

Both are a nonsense of course, but in practice we only ever hear from our tinpot local council members every four years when they deign to shove a pamphlet through the letterbox filled with pictures of them pointing at all the things they’ve not done anything about.

And neither would we find it acceptable for any elected representative to claim that they only represented the people who made it out on polling day and ticked the right boxes. This isn’t America, for goodness’ sake.

And now the calm period before the storm of finding out who’s won what, which parties have had a nightmare and who’s going to be walking round for the next week or two with an unbearably smug smile on their face. Though we mostly know the answers to those questions already, to be fair.