In a tired moment, towards the end of the working day, Sacha wondered if her sudden illness could be a manifestation of some kind of worry about the election, which after all was now only days away; but then she remembered that the whole campaign had passed without her ever really having engaged with it. The campaign never seemed to have got started: usually she'd live every minute of it, she could still remember vividly the previous election in 2007, and all the disappointment and excitement and eventual elation of a result which had seemed almost too easy, and which she couldn't have been happier about if she'd actually worked to achieve it herself instead of just casting her vote like everyone else - but this time around there seemed to almost be an anti-campaign, as if both major parties were scared of doing anything that might make them too prominent against the skyline.

She was looking forward to voting. She revelled in the democratic process, futile as it might seem most of the time: she relished the sense of community that came with it, even as she realised that that community was, in the main, not one that she really wanted to be a part of. It was a paradox, she supposed: a happy one.

But if she was going to be sick the election day wouldn't be nearly as enjoyable. She'd be coughing all the way to the polling booth, there'd be some poor vote counter who'd probably catch her germs off the ballot paper. And voting in Melbourne wasn't the same as voting back in Canberra: it'd be the same atmosphere, the same queues outside a school hall, but it wouldn't be the school she'd gone to as a child, it wouldn't be her life-long home come to new life; and besides, it'd be grey, and windy and cold - no wonder there were so few winter elections in Australia. Everyone would have the sniffles.

But she knew that when she woke up she'd revel in it. It was inevitable and unavoidable: she was who she was, and she loved election day. She loved knowing that everyone else in the country was doing the same thing, on the same day - how many other things could that be said about? Not even the Grand Final; just the Melbourne Cup, maybe. But she'd never taken much of an interest in the Melbourne Cup. She'd been raised in the wrong community.

She'd been raised on elections instead.