There’s an email from the MEAA in my inbox suggesting there’s a problem with my membership of the journalists’ section. It’s probably because my membership direct debt has collapsed, but it could well because sometimes even I am shocked by a failure in the basics, i.e. turning up.

Thus it was that your correspondent missed the actual dash to Buckingham Palace by Gordon Brown’s motorcade, thanks to a cruelling face-down-on-the-floor hangover, after an Easter Monday of being drunk under the table by an actress who seemed to have some sort of mutant second, vodka-specific liver. What the hell is that, anyway? Is it something they teach at NIDA? Such a petite creature too. She must be all vodka up to about the knees, like one of those old cordial bottles you had to bite the head off to drink.

Anyway, judging by the TV feed, Brown made the visit at about 10.40pm. The whole thing was beyond meta-hyper-simulation, the Queen helicoptering in from her northern estate — Scotland I think it’s called — to come in the back of Buckingham Palace, while Brown came in the front.

The whole procession of the motorcade was itself covered by news copters, offering the prospect that one might crash into the gummint one, and kill the Queen, thus creating an ironic constitutional crisis. This did not happen, to the best of my knowledge, though as I said it’s been a rough day.

First blood was to the Tories who arranged to have some Tory youth stooges along the route, holding up “time for change” signs that could only be seen from the air. Yes, “time for change” — that’s one of the Tories many lame slogans, Obama-lite stuff that sits ill with the very notion of a conservative party.

Anyway after visiting the Queen to dissolve parliament on April 12, and go to the people on May 6 — a date that has been certain for months, coinciding as it does with already-scheduled local elections — Brown returned to Downing Street, from whence he emerged with his team. I mean his whole team, dozens of them. They emerged from the absurd little row house provided for the country’s leader, like clowns emerging impossibly from a jalopy.

Brown’s explicit message — don’t risk the nation’s future with the Conservatives — is a further measure of the confusion attending the whole election, and the confounding of a left/right split. But the implicit pitch with the whole group photo type thing was that this was not simply a pseudo-presidential election, but a party one, the rather desperate implication being that even though you loathe Gordon Brown, you might want to consider gritting your teeth, gripping your ankles and committing to Team Red.

Indeed, despite Brown’s standard remarks that he would be there for the full five years, a distinct part of the labour pitch was that he might consider leaving a couple of years in, to put a generational handover at the centre of Labour’s fourth term, thus helping them to a fifth.

By twoish I was protein-loading at Milkbar, one of the antipodean-style cafes established to teach the English how to make a damn drinkable coffee — and it is a strange damn world where Australians are teaching anyone about gracious living. Dave Cameron was launching the Tory campaign across the river, with parliament in the background — although this had actually occurred before Brown’s clown-car Downing St appearance.

Here, he trotted out the full range of vapid Tory youf generalities: “It’s the most important general election for a generation. It comes down to this. You don’t have to put up with another five years of Gordon Brown … championing the “great ignored” …. “These people — black or white, rich or poor, straight or gay – do the right thing,” and later giving off a sub-Kennedy thing about “not just be asking what can government do for me but what we can all do together to make our society stronger.”

The Tories thing is no better or worse than Labour’s fairly sad and lame fear campaign – it just feels even emptier, which is an achievement of sorts. UK campaigning has become a battle of marginal seats, focus-grouped and polled up the wazoo.

Cameron had had his glowing wife Sam by his side during the launch. Brown had the thoroughly presentable Sarah at his. Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg instead chose to present his with deputy leader Vince Cable by his side, which made it look like he’d picked up some bloke in a bar, which was presumably not the intent, though you never know with the Lib-Dems.

Everytime I looked at this nobbly old man, whose ear hair appeared to be making a break for it down the side of his head, I heard Katy Perry in my brain, God knows why, electrolyte deficiency I presume. The Lib-Dems were content free too, since they have a conservative and a left base to pitch to.

By evening the news websites were falling in line with party choice, reporting on matters of polling etc being even less honest than usual — the right focusing on the most recent poll by Opinium suggesting a 10% Tory lead which would give them a 25+ seat majority overall.

However the poll was done for the notoriously right wing Express papers (a rare stable in that they are owned by a literal rather than figurative degenerate, the p-rnographer Richard Desmond).

A Guardian/ICM poll puts the Tory lead at 4%, within hung parliament territory, and leaving Labour as the largest party. But I don’t trust that one either. Doubtless a couple more polls will show that the average — around 6-8% — is the Tory lead, making a Tory victory entirely dependent on where its majority falls. Cameron’s remark that it is the most important election for a generation applies only to the Tories — if they lose this, they’ve tried everything, and the party will enter a renewed period of civil war, with a real split (around Europe and Cameron’s “big society” approach) not impossible.

But if the Tories are tense, spare a thought — sympathy might be pushing it — for the British National Party. On the event of their possible best showing yet, and a new respectability, senior party figure and lead candidate Mark Collett has been drummed out for plotting to have leader Nick Griffin’s head. Literally. I mean the police are investigating charges that he was plotting to kill Griffin.

Signs and wonders. Once blood flow to all the right parts has resumed, your correspondent will be visiting a series of key electorates, to try and get a picture of events in a society where the division between political elites, media feed and actual mass life is divided to an unprecedented degree. Beneath the hype and helicopters signs and wonders are possible, a Green candidate in Brighton, a child born in Leeds whose beauty marks shadow the great Orion constellation, portending great things for hunters…