Woke today, groggy, to a hung parliament. Stayed up until after midnight last night watching the BBC, hoping to go to bed to a new governmental situation. Needless to say, we didn't.

Yesterday was a fairly eventful day. We had decided to hold an election party and invite various Brits, plus interested Europeans round for a barbecue and to watch the elections via iplayer plugged into the TV. At 12 noon, we arrived home from a provisions shop to find a note stuck in our front door informing us that our electricity had been switched off because we had apparently failed to pay our bill (n.b the backwardness of the situation here means that even if you make an online bank transfer, it doesn't go straight through - instead, the bank sends a physical cheque to the intended recipient for them to pay in. It's not exactly a swift process). Cue a long, frustrating telephone call involving not being able to speak to a human being and having to hand over my credit card details to an automaton. The Major took over the situation, and eventually managed to make human contact. Would our electricity be switched back on today? Only if they could manage to get someone out, he was told. This was unlikely, and we would probably have to wait until tomorrow afternoon (i.e. today). 17 people coming for dinner and no electricity. Mon dieu.

Luckily, I am married to a quick-thinking man who spun them a story involving untruths I won't detail here. At 4.45pm, someone turned up and switched it back on. Ad hour later, the first of our guests arrived.

We were hoping, as I said, to be able to watch the whole thing and toddle off to bed. But when, by 12.30am, no definitive result had been made, we gave up.

This morning I am feeling a) exhausted and b) increasingly irritated that I am apparently one of the many overseas voters 'denied' their vote. I sent off for my ballot paper weeks ago - a fact I wrote about here - but didn't get any sort of communication through until the end of last week - far too late to get my vote in on time.

If the powers that be want a genuinely democratic government, they're going to have to get a bit more organised. Be prepared for queues, for one thing, and organise some sort of system for Brits abroad that doesn't involve relying on the vagaries of international postal systems. We have secure online banking, surely there must be some way of setting up online voting? It might help at home too - the so-called apathetic youth of today might simply find it too complicated to take half a day - or an entire day - off work to go and queue at their local polling station. Open to fraud yes, but at least everyone with an internet connection could vote, and the wonks would have to think of some way round the fraud aspect.

Most Americans round here seem to be oblivious of the furore currently going on in the UK. They're more concerned that the Dow dropped almost 1000 points yesterday because of the Greek fiasco. Interesting times.