No, not at all annoying

Lots of people up and down the country have been spending short amounts of time alone in booths. Then, once carrying out a time-honoured practice involving a small piece of paper, they've been emerging, blinking into the daylight.

And I can see why this is news.

However, there's a related story that's been all over the place. Some people, quite a few in fact, in a city where I don't live, are voting for a mayor. In fact, they seem to be quite keen to replace one man struggling under an amphibian fixation, with someone else who clearly wasn't quite bright enough for the prefect's badge at school.

And this is big news, by all accounts. The Internet, front and centre in the print media, main story on the rolling TV news. On a national basis. In fact, everywhere I turn, I'm being assaulted by this. I can hardly concentrate on the flies that received a sex-swap through mind-control, to be honest.

I'm bored by the ongoing and seemingly never-ending coverage of the US elections. But I do accept that I should, at some level, have some awareness in its outcome, at least, as the winner of that one gets to carry quite an important football. So if my friends in Iowa or Montana make a dodgy decision, significant portions of Western Europe could end up with that Readybrek glow. I can relate to that. I can have an interest in it. But the CrossRail project? Meh.

So why does the 24-hour media assume that I (and 90% of people in the UK) should give an airborne sexual encounter about the outcome of the London Mayoral election? This is, by the way, the same media that spent an entire night - on national TV, I kid you not - bemoaning the withdrawal of the Routemaster bus from the streets of the capital. The same media where the restaurant critic of a national newspaper spent an entire article expressing surprise at Birmingham getting culinary plaudits, then admitting she'd never actually visited the country's second largest city?

So today's blanket coverage is rankling with me a bit. Things that affect me, or my neighbour, don't get column inches. Someone falls out of a club in Hoxton, and it'll be front-page news.

To any readers in London: forgive me for my rant. I'm tired and a little pissed off. I genuinely like your city - I've loved every visit there. Apparently there's a golf sale on. And I hope you get your mayor thing sorted, whether it's the drony one or the funny blond bloke. The accepted wisdom is that the rest of the country is bothered. And yet, if I had a rat's arse, I wouldn't be able to give it.

Perhaps, in the future, the good folks of SW4 can get to read in rapt enchantment the goings-on of the Birmingham City Council transportation committee when deciding upon bus routes through Small Heath?

It's gripping stuff, I tell you.