And now it's all over ...

SNP Manifesto at a glance
Originally uploaded by Ewan McIntosh.

Wow. In the rainy aftermath of the Scottish election there's time to think, to read the papers and the blogs, to realise how different life feels. I hope Ewan's cool with my use of his wordle, because it - and the manifesto it sums up - says it all: it's about Scotland, and it's all positive.

I love an election. I love it when the lampposts bloom with placards and you find George Galloway orating in the middle of Buchanan Street when really you're looking for your lunch. But this election did more, didn't it? And when Kelvin Mackenzie opined on last night's BBC News that the sooner we held a referendum - and let him and his fellow-English off the hook of having to prop us up - the better, I no longer felt the kind of impotent rage that the Thatcher years engendered. Suddenly the people running my country are recognisably the kind of people I know - and I like that feeling.

Things have been looking up for the past eleven years, and this election set the seal on it. Here's to the next five years, and to an exciting future.

Conservative anarchy?

Well what was all that about? David Cameron's launch of the Tory Manifesto left me visualising the kind of mayhem that might result from his notion of handing power to the people. What people, pray? I thought that was what democracy was about - we elect people to do all that stuff for us, pay them to take the time to do it full-time and not fit it in on a night when there's nothing to watch on the telly. What kind of people would be manning the barricades over the local post offices or starting up their own schools?

Ok, I sound scathing about ... well, people. And politicians are people too, but the point is that they do work at it full-time, give it their full attention for the span of a parliament. If they're rubbish, we don't vote them in again, and it looks as if their party gets rid of them if they're caught being naughty. And of course, if they use Twitter unwisely they don't even get the chance. Maybe the Tories want to do without Parliament at all, then? Return to village councils and local barons? Wicked sheriffs? Maybe not.

But it looks like a recipe for anarchy to me.