Let me see now, where were we? Oh, yes, the election.
About 25 years ago - March 1983 to be precise, the start of my second year at University - a bunch of like-minded individuals gathered together around a television set to cheer in the election from opposition of a Labor government for the first time since 1972, when we were too young to know much at all but from which we remembered the words "It's time".
Now, a generation later, another bunch of equally fresh-faced individuals were, presumably, gathered around a television somewhere doing the same. On Saturday night I felt happy for them.
Twenty-five years seems like a long electoral full-circle, but there you go. I wonder how many of those 1983 revellers, well into careers as doctors, lawyers, chartered accountants or merchant bankers, are still fighting the good fight.
Oh. And I am no longer named after the only sitting Prime Minister to lose his seat at a general election. "John Howard Emmerson" will have to wait for the next generation.
