Despite all the hoops I jumped through to get registered, my postal vote has not arrived here in Malmö.

Whether the blame for that is to be laid at the feet of Royal Mail or of Postnord, or on some combination of both, is uncertain. Based simply on proximity and recent experience, I’m tempted to point the finger at Postnord, who have also been sitting on a parcel someone sent me from the Netherlands for over five weeks now, and are steadfastly refusing even to answer enquiries about it.

What really grates is less the ineptitude than the impunity. After all, what can you do—choose a different national mail services provider? One of the most fascinating and depressing books I read during my doctoral studies was a bound copy of the report that prompted and informed the nationalisation of the British railway system: fascinating because it was like a laundry list of the inevitable failures of natural monopoly systems (a category which is essentially transpositional with the category of logistical infrastructures, of which railways are arguably the Platonic ideal); depressing because, a century later, we have actively chosen to forget and even traduce those lessons, so hard-won and hard fought-for, seduced by the siren song of Number Go Up.

Given the alignment of the constituency I lived in before leaving the UK, my vote would likely have made little difference, regardless of who I’d chosen to vote for. In many ways that serves to reinforce the sense that the UK is still very much stuck in the “lesser of two evils” mode of democratic contestation that is an inevitable outcome of an FPTP electoral system; this has been the case for pretty much my entire lifetime, and certainly for as long as I’ve been eligible to vote. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to know the Tories are in for a kicking—but one is reminded very strongly of the answer Thatcher gave in an interview, late in life, when asked about her greatest achievement in government: “Tony Blair,” she replied.

Starmer isn’t even a Blair: he has all of the compromise, and none of the charisma. He’s writing socioeconomic cheques that his market-friendly centrism can’t cash. He’s the answer to a question one had to hope would never be asked, namely “what if pasokification, but devoid of any jouissance or hopeful affect while also oddly triumphalist, like someone who knows they’re about to be awarded Regional Manager of the Year at an unloved but nonetheless necessary chain of supermarkets?”

Selah. By this time next year I should be eligible to apply for Swedish citizenship, and hence to vote both here and in the EU—though the part of me that has always been an anarchist continues to believe that it makes very little difference in the long run. Voting is mostly a way of tallying the affect and “animal spirits” of the time, which is why so much effort is expended upon stirring up those spirits ahead of elections: it’s less a matter of convincing people to vote one way or another, and more about making them angry and confused, and hence pliable and susceptible to reductive binary thinking. There is no winning that game on the territory where it is now being played: to even gain entry means gathering an amount of money whose acquisition will expose you to malign influence and corruption.

The US situation is a tragedy, in the struct sense of that term: a story whose ending was obvious and implicit in its very beginning. The UK, by contrast, is a farce. The gift of living in Sweden is not at all a happy confidence in Scandinavian social democracy—it doesn’t take long to disabuse yourself of that particular fantasy—so much as sufficient ignorance of both the language and of current affairs that the effort of keeping up on the day-to-day stuff is incompatible with doing my actual work.

Ignorance is not bliss, to be clear! But it has considerable tactical virtues in my current circumstances. For reasons infrastructural as much as electoral, I literally can’t do anything to influence any of this stuff at present.

So the best thing to do—indeed the only thing to do—is to keep my own shit on the rails.