write your own adventure

Now that I've dealt with my hangover (cooked breakfast, lashing of tea) and printed a page edition, I can sit and reflect.

Firstly, what they said. And them.

As I've been printing, I've been listening to the excellent Go-Betweens tribute album Write Your Adventures Down, because it fits today so well. Queensland rocks today, and the joyously optimistic yet realistically world-weary lyrics are spot-on.

Here's my two-cents, for what it's worth.

I am so so so excited. It's got nothing to do with whether the next three years will be good or bad. I don't care if small businesses suffer or if everything said last night in the heat of victory was hollow and shallow or deeply enriching and virtuous. I actually don't have any faith in the Labor Party being any better than the Liberals.

What excites me is that we started to write our own adventure. We took a step into the unknown. we made a leap of faith. we used our imagination, even if just a little bit. We took a punt.

If we now live in a less stable universe, isn't it a little bit exciting? The signs were all reading that the next few years is going to be hard economically even with a Liberal government. So why not travel along a while on the edge and see what happens?

I repeat: I'M SO PROUD OF YOU FOR NOT TAKING THE SAFEST ROUTE.


Bernice Balconey emailed me last week and asked if she could visit on election night. She was a frigging bunch of nerves, she said, and whatever happened she wanted to be amongst friends. We all went to Zoe's, and Chez Crazybrave was chockers with people who obviously all felt the same way. The nervousness was palpable, and as the evening went on people started breathing -- and drinking. Then there was kissing, then hugging. You could hear the cheers from the tally room from where we were, barely a kilometre away.

On the way home I thought: there's a lot of sex in the air tonight. If anyone's sober enough to manage it!

I woke up this morning and Best Beloved asked me if it was all a dream. It was fantastic to be able to say 'no, darling, it's all real'. I've been making tight-chested squeaks all day, like a schoolgirl in front of her teen idol. The first squeak was within seconds of waking: a female Deputy Prime Minister! The second was a few seconds after that: a Prime Minister living in the Lodge! And so forth, all through the morning. Little things that make me happy. REMEMBER TO BREATHE.

Bernice got up and walked into Dickson to get the papers. The first person she passed smiled at her, so she smiled back. She tried it on the next person, and got another smile back. Apparently she then started saying 'good morning' and getting good results. She was so high when she returned that she spent some time on my front verandah calling out 'great morning' to anyone wandering past. Love is all around, at least in the inner north of the ACT...

On tv, we watched the news. First the election results. Then a cruise ship had sunk in the Antarctic (Did you know, said Bernice, that thousands of people are cruising the Antarctic every year? They've doing so much damage. This might scare the buggers off a bit...) and then a fire in Malibu, damaging the property of numerous wealthy occupants (What is this? said Bernice gleefully, international Make A Leftie Happy day?)

And now Peter Costello! Can today get any better?

Mind you, as Bernice and I discussed this morning, the mantra is, and shall remain: