Over the past couple of years, I’ve taken advantage of the excellent choice on offer at the Amnesty International Bookshop in Marchmont, a shortish step from our gaff, to catch up on some classics I’ve never got around to reading. Some have been disappointing – and on the basis of my adoption of the mantra of moving fast and breaking things, I’ve not persisted with them. Back to Amnesty they go half-read.

On the other hand, some have been well worth the admission fee, as it were. I knew I liked Hemingway, having read The Sun Also Rises and For Whom The Bell Tolls years ago. Nevertheless, I was unprepared for how much I loved The Old Man and the Sea. I’ll maybe write separately about Hemingway, toxic masculinity and the artist and their human failings some other time. Suffice to say I’m a fan, despite him being a bit of a plonker in many ways.

Another classic I read for the first time recently was Virginia Woolf”s To The Lighthouse.

Dorothy Parker may have famously commented that the Bloomsbury Group, of whom Woolf was a member, ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles,’ but boy, could she write!

I’ve just finished reading Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 for the first time, a shocking admission for a supposedly well-read type who bears no similarity to a spring chicken. If, like me, you haven’t read it yet, really, do. Unlike some other literary classics that are harder to digest than fondue cheese, it’s a brilliantly told, yet brilliantly strange, story. More than that, it has the plot twists and turns of a thriller.

Set in a future heavily influenced by the novel’s 1950s birth, it tells of a man whose job it is to burn books who suffers a crisis of conscience. The parallels with our modern world, with its digital bread and circuses, are quite chilling at times. It deserves its place alongside Brave New World and 1984 as dystopian futures that cast light, not just on the era they were written in, but on our own.

But there’s another reason it resonated with me, and it’s nothing to do with Ray Bradbury really. It relates to a part of my job at the Council, back in the day, when an election of some kind was on.

Elections in Scotland take different forms. Westminster sticks stubbornly to a first past the post system, with all counting done by hand. I could count the ways I consider this a ridiculous way to elect our top politicians, but I’ll spare you. The Scottish Parliament and Scottish local government elections both involve a form of proportional representation, and a degree of mechanisation when it comes to vote counting. However, all three types of election involve common tasks, one of which is interpreting what the voter meant when they put down a mark other than the one they were told to put down in the instructions.

This is not always down to the stupidity or bloody-mindedness of the electorate. Sometimes these elections are combined, so that folk have to cope with different formats at

the same time. In the Westminster election it’s a simple X in the box; in the others, it’s a matter of listing your first, second third and so on preference in number order. The SP and LG ballot papers will look similar but not the same!

To be honest, there’s something vaguely heroic to me about people who will look out their polling card, make the effort of a journey to the polling station, take their ballot paper, go into the booth and write THEY ARE ALL BASTARDS down the boxes – in case you’re in any doubt, doing so will not be taken as a good vote for any of the bastards. Of course, increasingly these days you might have a postal vote to do it with, but even so you have the intricacies of Envelope A and Envelope B to contend with.

Other common ‘dubious’ papers contain artwork which, frankly, does little to vindicate the teaching standard in that particular subject in Scottish schools. The overriding principle in deciding whether a mark is a ‘good’ vote for a particular candidate is whether the voter’s intention is clear. To be clear, then, drawing a cock and balls in one particular candidate’s box will not be taken to be a good vote for them. You’ll have wasted your vote so far as the electoral process goes, but if it gave you a bit of a glow inside, well done.

The process of determining what is, and isn’t, a good vote takes place after the initial count gets under way: doubtful ballot papers are passed – either physically or electronically – to bods like I used to be, often council lawyers, but not exclusively so. They then follow a set of guiding principles issued by the Electoral Commission to decide whether the doubtful paper can be taken as a good vote for any one candidate (or, in the case of SP and LG elections, more than one sometimes).

This is actually a bit of light relief, not just for those of us adjudicating, but for the candidates and their agents who are entitled to observe the process taking place. Ultimately the decision is the Returning Officer’s, but inevitably it tends to be a bit discursive. In fact, it’s often more than a bit performative, with the adjudicators and the agents sharing a laugh over some of the mental things people put on ballot papers. There’s a kind of unspoken understanding that, as long as we’re applying the rules consistently, every party will win some and lose some.

Which takes me back to Ray Bradbury’s classic. The Electoral Commission’s equivalent of the Official Secrets Act probably precludes me, even now, from disclosing which election I’m talking about here. But let’s just say it was a close contest, fought in a constituency that has a University in it. And let’s just say that it was such a close contest that more than one recount was required. And to be clear, when there’s a recount, the process of adjudicating the doubtful votes is done all over again.

And, just for the sake of argument, let’s say there was a ballot paper with three random numbers written in one candidate’s box, which a certain adjudicator decided was not a good vote. Which was greeted with pursed lips the first time round, but with increasingly strongly expressed vocal opposition from said candidate’s agent at 2 a.m., 4.30 a.m., and 5.15 a.m. every time it turned up again like the bad penny.

And it was only when I read Bradbury for the first time that the penny finally dropped: that random sequence of numbers, I’m fairly sure now at a distance of a few years, was, you guessed it, 451. Some smart-alec student, presumably, making what they no doubt thought was a terribly clever post-structuralist comment on the state of politics.

Well, whoever you are, thanks a whole bunch. You made an already hard shift just that little bit harder with your smart-aleckery. And no, for the avoidance of doubt, it wasn’t counted as a good vote, after I got the Returning Officer in to back me up. So there.

Next time, maybe stick to the cock and balls? That never gets old, no matter how many times we see it.