And maybe the election hasn't had much of an impact because the campaign has been deathly dull. Instead of sensible debate on key issues, all we've had is a lot of playground name-calling and an outright refusal by the former government to engage in any kind of public questioning. It may come back to haunt them. I have a funny feeling that we're in for a few "Portillo moments" tomorrow night. The campaign might have been deadly dull, but the results may well not be.

THAT HISTORIC night in 1997 when NuLabour finally became electable seems so long ago, yet eight years isn't exactly a lifetime. But look at some of the things that we now accept as the norm that weren't around back then.

Text-messaging, Big Brother, iPods, Burberry Apes, Jordan, Planet Beckham, DVDs, Harry Potter, footballers roasting kiss-and-tell slappers, mobile phones you can fit in a pocket, the death of smoking, the birth of MRSA, binge drinking, Little Britain, ringtones, ASBOs, mad cow disease, asylum seekers, Changing Rooms, speed cameras … the list is endless.

But Things Can Only Get Better? The jury is still out.

NOW I KNOW that Mr Blah is very, very busy this week. And I quite understand that he can't be expected to memorise every figure and every statistic of a complex and detailed manifesto. But there is one figure that should be engraved upon his heart. And that is the number of British servicemen who have died while serving Queen and Country in Iraq.

He was asked that question this week and didn't know the answer. He thought it might be "between 70 and 80". The correct answer, of Monday morning, is 88. I cannot be the only person who finds such disregard for those sent to do their duty (under whatever political circumstance) to be utterly, utterly despicable.

Things Can Only Get Better? The jury is still out.

SO WHAT else is new since 1997? Thanks to a new statistical analysis of this country published this week, I can reliably inform you that only one school lunch box in 600 contains a salad, that there are 4.5 million more cars on our roads since NuLabour came to power, and that there are three abortions for every ten births (this figure does not include a weighting factor for the legs akimbo ladies of South Wales).

Stepping gingerly into an emotional minefield, I can tell you that there are more children with special educational needs than there are children attending private schools. And let's stop there for a minute. Where have all these "special needs" kids come from? Have we been breeding generations of thickies? Has all that text messaging done something nasty to our reproductive systems?

Of course not. Just as every child now has to go to university, and just as school sports have been outlawed for being "elitist", no-one is allowed to be thick anymore. Remember those kids who used to occupy the C-stream at your school (when they could be bothered turning up) and who used to hang around the toilets smoking and growing facial hair? Well in our day, they were allowed to be thick.

Neither they, nor their parents, had any serious aspirations of academic success so they just ran the dinner ticket racket, burned the school down during the summer holidays and then were packed off to technical college where they learned to be bricklayers and plumbers. And arsonists. And society was better off for their contribution.

These days the workshy, the stupid, and those who like to play with matches are corralled off at an early age and branded as being "special". They then consume a disproportionate amount of teaching time, government money and free cigarettes before being churned out of the end of the sausage machine just as stupid as they were fed in.

Ironically, they don't even go on to tech to learn to be brickies and plumbers these days where they might contribute something to the State that has wasted millions on them. Instead they just lurk around their sink estates wearing Burberry, chewing gum and impregnating passing 14-year-olds. And setting fire to schools.

But I digress. A few more facts. A quarter of people getting divorced have been married for less than five years, countryside petrol stations are replacing the village shop, half the births in London are to mothers born out of Britain and one in 17 households has at least one vegetarian.

Things Can Only Get Better? The jury is still out.

NANNY STATE update: A Union flag (that's the red, white and blue one) has been flying without mishap since 1935 outside the police station in Woodbridge, Suffolk.

But now, because raising the flag involves an intrepid copper, used to dealing with violent criminals on a daily basis, leaning slightly out of a window 15 foot above street level, the health and safety Nazis have ruled its use unsafe.

Now I know that our policemen aren't always wonderful; I know that some of them might have been classed as "special needs" at school; but even they've managed to run the damn Union Jack up and down the flagpost for the past 70 years without either falling out of the window or getting involved in a dangerous lanyard/throat interface.

Meanwhile, a market trader in Derby has been ordered by trading standards officers to attach to the candles he sells on his stall labels reading "Danger. Candles may burn".

Now let's be honest. Even if you're a former special needs policeman from Suffolk, you might just have an inkling that the candle you have just bought, and which you presumably mean to set light to at some point, might burn should it come into contact with unprotected skin. Or a local school. Do you really need a label to tell you that?

Things Can Only Get Better? The jury is still out.

MORE STATISTICS, more abuse of thick schoolkids. It turns out that 75 per cent of 11 to 18-year-olds have no idea what VE Day stands for. Nearly ten per cent of them think it has something to do with the end of the Vietnam War.

Others, and not necessarily special needs kids, thought it had something to do with a music festival or a sexually-transmitted disease.

Things Can Only Get Better? The jury is still out.