I spent the night refreshing a results page, and the page spent the night refreshing me right back.
ORLANDO, Florida – Gerald the car refused to start at five o’clock, so the group chat’s results night moved to my flat, where the only thing that works reliably is the kettle.
Refresh one: The snacks
There were four of us, which is the exact number of the Notebook Wolves, so the guest list was never in doubt. Marguerite brought crisps. Tobias brought a bag of oranges the size of cricket balls from his uncle’s tree. Ngozi brought a laptop, a spare charger and a rule.
The rule was this: nobody was allowed to speak in percentages before nine. By ten past eight we had broken it twice, and Tobias had to put a coin in a jar labelled “the poetry fund”, which is a jar that currently contains eleven coins and an ancient button.
My neighbour upstairs, Mr. Abernathy, thumped the ceiling at the first cheer. I went up with a plate of crisps as a peace offering. He took the crisps, told me the cheering was not the problem but the “tone of the cheering”, and shut the door. I have thought about that phrase all day.
Refresh two: The page that would not settle
We watched the Florida results on the ClickOrlando results page for the U.S. Senate and House races, and at about ninety-nine percent of precincts counted it showed the Associated Press calling the Senate race for the incumbent, Republican Ashley Moody, with 51 percent against Democrat Angie Nixon’s 48.
That was the quiet part. The noisy part was lower down, where two House races looked like a pair of cats balanced on a fence. In District 7, the page showed Republican Ryan Elijah on 161,300 votes to Democrat Bale Dalton’s 159,669, and a sidebar headline wondered about a recount. In District 9, Democrat Darren Soto was ahead of Republican Dan Green Jr. by 143,311 to 141,804. Those figures are from the screen as I saw it, with a little under all the precincts in, so please do not quote me at a dinner party.
What I will say is that a margin that thin is the political equivalent of two people reaching for the last biscuit and agreeing to share it, except neither person agrees and the biscuit is a seat in Congress.
Refresh three: Bigger than Orlando
By the small hours the national picture was still being sorted. The Euronews live results page carried the maps and charts, and it reminded us of the scale of the night: all 435 House seats and 35 of the 100 Senate seats were up for election. It also set out what a change of control would mean for a party, namely the power to block legislation, launch investigations and block or delay appointments. I am not going to tell you who ended up where, because I could not honestly read it off a screen at that hour.
I do not intend to cheer or sulk. I only want to note that both parties’ television graphics looked exactly the same to me at two in the morning: a lot of coloured rectangles, one anxious man with a touchscreen, and a map that changes its mind faster than I do about hot sauce.
Ngozi, who has opinions that she keeps in a locked drawer, said the single wisest thing of the night. “Whatever happens next, it will be announced as the most important thing that has ever happened, and then it will be Thursday.”
Refresh four: The rural bit
Because I am the sort of person who reads the whole internet before bed, I wandered over to farm.FM and found a headline about socialists offering rural voters a reason to keep farming. I have not read it closely enough to take a side, and I would not dare. I merely observe that every party in the world is now offering someone a reason to keep doing the thing they were already doing, which is a very polite form of persuasion.
Tobias said the oranges were the only candidate he trusted. Ngozi said the oranges were not on the ballot. Tobias said that was their problem.
Refresh five: The hour of the long spoons
Around three, the conversation turned to the thing nobody warns you about on results night, which is the long flat hour after the exciting part. The map has stopped moving. The commentators have started describing the weather. Marguerite fell asleep on the sofa mid-sentence, holding a crisp like a candle, and Tobias covered her with the good blanket and then rather ruined the gesture by taking a photograph for the chat.
Ngozi and I washed up in the half-dark. She dried, I stacked, and we agreed that if the news must be loud, the washing-up at least can be quiet. It is the only part of the night I would happily repeat.
Morning: What the notebook says
At six, with the kettle on its fourth round and the sun coming up the colour of a cheap peach, the others went home and I wrote a poem. It has three lines. I do not intend to show it to anyone, but it mentions a coin jar, a recount and a neighbour with a ceiling.
Later today I have a column to file to Bohiney Magazine about how a night of refreshing a page does not make the page any faster, and I have promised Mr. Abernathy a lemon cake in exchange for the “tone”. For more of the same, the British news pages at The London Prat are a fair place to see how a different country shouts about its own politics, and you can find more of my daily notes at The London Prat in the usual place.
Gerald started on the first try this morning. I did not thank him, because I do not want it to go to his head.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/