I like elections - I think of them like birthday presents.

When I got home today there was an electoral roll letter on my doormat. Well, in fact it had missed the doormat and was just lying in the hall, but that's not the point. I opened it, thought, "I suppose I just put this in the envelope and post it" when I looked closer to check. I discovered that if you don't want to change anything you can text them (which I didn't do because it didn't say if it costed, plus texting takes me forever) or you can call them, free. You just dial, press some numbers and that's it.

To be fair, it could have been like that for a while, but I've always had to change it. But I was quite excited about confirming I want to vote by phone. Of course now I have a form I don't know what to do with. I suppose to be on the safe side I should take it into work and shred it (as I'm too cheap to buy my own shredder).

This whole election thingy has been exciting. I stayed up on election night to see who was going to be in charge. So they decided while I was out at Rotaract last night. Which was a very confusing evening because Gordon Brown had previously said he would resign (as PM) if the Conservatives and Lib Dems reached an agreement. So then he resigned before they'd reached an agreement. And interrupted the Queen's viewing of Eastenders while they changed PMs. We had a brief period of anarchy while we were all too far away from Buckingham Palace to be PM. Damn.

I'm excited about the Con/Lib Dem coalition. I was born into a Tory Parliament, which eventually went Labour and it was clearly going to go back to Tory at some point. So I was resigned to it always swinging between the two and the only highlights being that you couldn't say for certain which election it would change at. So this is something different and new and exciting, and involves Lib Dems in the government, which I thought would take a miracle to see.

It's quite cool that when they've been talking about the Cabinet posts on the radio today they've not only said their name and position, as you'd expect, but added in which party they are. And Nick Clegg gets to be PM when David Cameron goes on holiday! I wanted him to be PM at the head of a Labour/Lib Dem coalition, which would have been cool, if highly unlikely.

I'm hoping that the Lib Dem's will tamper down the Tory bad policies a bit and between them they'll end up with something that's better than either of them would have done separately. We'll see. I'm ambivalent about the idea of five year fixed terms because although it'll guarantee me a general election for my birthday every five years, it will mean that the next one that's actually on my birthday won't be until 2050.

Despite having twelve hours sleep last night I'm still tired. It's really hard to type when you're tired, but if I do need to do some things today.

Thursday night I was so tired I went to bed at 9pm and got up at 12.30am. It is a lot harder to get up when it's dark than go to bed when it's light. By the time I went to sleep at 8am the result was still uncertain, which was really exciting because the first election I stayed up for was 1997, so until now Labour's been a pretty foregone conclusion.

I'm amazed that all those BBC people stayed up until 3.45pm! I don't know how they did it. But I did like Jeremy Paxman trying to get straight answers out of politicians at 4am on the basis that it was 4am - it didn't work. And when interviewing them at the count he had to tell them what was going on! In the morning when he spoke to Boris Johnson he basically told him to shut up and go back to running the city. Jeremy Vine's virtual things got sillier and sillier and no more useful. Except I missed Peter Snow, not that his virtual House of Commons told us anything either. Chris Addisons twitters were funny as well.

So, despite only getting five hours of sleep Thursday night - more of which were Thursday night than Friday morning - I enjoyed it. It was exciting. My MP is sadly still Conservative and with 52% of the vote not even PR would have helped me there. But I'm hoping that now interesting things will happen with parties working together. You never know. But since hung parliaments tend to bring another election - my birthday's on a Thursday next year.

So today is the day after my birthday aka election day. I made a slight detour on my way home and stopped off at the polling station. Which seems crazy to me because until now I've always lived less than five minutes walk away from the polling station. But this one is a bit over ten minutes walk away. It is sunny now, but I'm tired and that was a bit much of a walk for me after work.

It was quite exciting - it turns out there is a notice board inside that we could put a Rotaract poster on. It's a pity we couldn't have one up there for election day.

Oh, and I voted too. I didn't think that everywhere would have a short, blunt pencil, but it turns out they do. I got thoroughly confused by the names on the ballot paper being in alphabetic order by surname, but since I wanted to vote for the one at the top, that was fine. He was also the only one who actually lives in this constituency. And the most likely to win against the Tories. And the party I wanted to vote for, so that was handy.

I did get quite confused when I went in, showed the people at my desk my polling card, then they asked my name. At which point I paused, worked out they needed my full name and then gave them that. They were happy, but puzzled. I regularly puzzle people by pausing when asked my name because I have to work out whether they need my full name or whether I can just give them the shortened version.

There are many, many good reasons to vote and that I believe everyone who has the right to vote should vote. I know that often the best option is merely the least worst one, but if you don't vote you don't get to have an opinion about how the country is governed. My biggest reason for voting is that the Tories decided to have a general election four days before my 18th birthday when they could have hung on a few more weeks. I'm still annoyed about and won't vote for them on the basis that they screwed me over. Well, and a lot of other reasons, obviously.

Since this week I'm struggling to keep my eyes open after about 9.30pm, I'll be going to bed for a bit. The polls don't close until 10pm so there won't be any news before midnight. Doubtless I will be around on the internet at stupid o'clock, trying to keep myself awake...