THE WORLD BENEATH THE WEATHER

I walked to work this morning. The sky was bright and overcast, and everything seemed very quiet. There weren't many cars on the road, nor people on the high street. I wondered whether it had always been like this, whether I was looking at everything with Toronto-goggles, or whether there was a sort of post-election uncertainty in the air.

That would make sense. A lot of people don't know what to make of the poll-astounding result - at least not yet; there is uncertainty and trepidation coursing through social media this morning, at the prospect of a majority Conservative government.

That is though, what we have collectively voted for, and while we might not like democracy's output individually, we have to admit that its mechanism is a much better idea than the alternative.

Unless you'd feel right at home in North Korea.

It might have been my own uncertainty, projected onto my environment, of course. That can happen. We tend to see the world through our unique lenses, shaping and understanding what we see, through the worldview we've already adopted.

The night flight, by the way, was pretty grim. It wasn't exactly the sleep of Endymion - there were no moonbeams lulling me to slumber. Rather, there was the noise of a jet engine, a narrow seat that wouldn't recline and the warm, stuffy discomfort of two hundred other people breathing and exhaling around me. I dozed for a while, then got bounced around by turbulence.

I did see the dawn, creeping over the horizon. It's quite something - it starts as a faint glow in the distance, like streetlamps of a distant city. Then, gradually it spreads into a curved blue-green ribbon, gently illuminating the clouds below. Eventually, the ribbon grows and stretches, a crack of sunlight appears and the brilliant blue fills the sky as the sun rises majestically above the ocean below.

There is no uncertainty about the dawn. It just happens, up there, above the clouds, every day, all the time. In fact, if anything it's under the clouds, in the world beneath the weather, where things are less predictable. I reckon (putting the weather aside for a moment) that that's mostly down to us - our choices, our relationships, our buildings and paperwork, our lifestyle decisions, our finances, our emails, our politics, our technology, and (picking the weather up again) our climate.

I flicked through my emails. There's a two minute silence later - in honour of 70 years since VE Day, the magnificent day on which the war in Europe came to an end. I was suddenly ashamed to have forgotten, or somehow not realised.

For six years, the world was in a state of unprecedented peril at the hands of Nazism and the war we undertook to stop it. It was democracy in the end, which won - the same kind of democracy which gives each of us the right to vote, which makes our leaders (whoever they are) accountable to the people they lead, and which gives us, ordinary people, a voice in uncertain times. I think that you should think that idea to be quite marvellous.

Unless you'd rather live in North Korea, of course.