About Last Night
I have eyes like pickled onions today. That's what happens when you go without sleep. I was awake until after six o'clock this morning, listening to ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Scotland's coverage of the election results and the subsequent shambles as it emerged that we live in a country that doesn't know how to count votes.
At the same time my thoughts turned to the students we had sent out to locations across Scotland. They were recording the behind-the-scenes story of the election. Our original idea was to capture enough material to tell a build a simple snapshot of election day. Now, it seems, those students have been privy to a historic farce. One of them, , has already described her own adventure in Glasgow. You can read that . David Lewis is another of our student reporters. He was in Elgin and you can read his report .
And yet, when I arrived back from Glasgow last night and made my way to the polling station in Inverness, everything seemed to be going well. The officials took the time to explain how the ballot forms should be completed and reminded everyone not to fold the forms before slipping them in to the two different ballot boxes.
Then, in the first hour of our election programme, Ruth Davidson was posing many tough questions about the possibility that things might go wrong. Before midnight these fears were being shrugged off....a few hours later I was still awake but the nightmare was well underway.
