Total number of aliens? You couldn't make it up… | David Mitchell

The truth is out there. Only this probably isn't it

The US presidential election night of 2000 is the only one I've ever properly watched on TV. I didn't have much else to do that evening and my middle-aged intoxication with the prospect of an early night was years ahead of me. Also, thinking about it, the lovely general election of 1997 was still a recent memory; I probably fancied another fix of that feeling, basking as I was in the vague late-90s western sense that everything was going to be fine.

Needless to say, I regret staying up. I was tired and hungover the next day and had suffered the worst blow to my sense that everything was going to be fine since discovering that the exhibition at the Millennium Dome was shit. Worse blows were still to come.