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SORRY about last week. You know that feeling of overwhelming, unignorable tiredness, the one that steals up on you from behind and throws a great big furry fuzzling blanket over your head, cutting out all noise and sight and forcing you to fall gently to the floor, submitting like you’re auditioning for 50 Shades of Grey? Yes, that.

Of course, nothing cheers me up like somebody else’s misfortune, so I must thank the hapless lorry driver who got his juggernaut stuck on the way into a delivery yard last week. Those of us waiting to access the yard stood and watched as he huffed and puffed, leaping in and out of his cab to survey and re-survey the situation, adjust and re-adjust his mirrors, until, finally, a man whose day could not get any worse got… worse. Somehow his cab door locked, with him on the outside. To a gentle ripple of applause from the onlookers, he had to climb the north face of the leviathan and hang his whole body weight from the slightly-open driver’s window until it sank low enough for him to reach inside. Oh, I did feel better.

I even cheered up enough to turn on the news, but that didn’t last long.

The extent to which the mainstream media is playing the two-party tune is nothing short of scandalous. Here is a general election campaign in which everybody tells us the political landscape is shifting. Not on the ten o’clock news it isn’t: they still obsess on Labour and their morally bankrupt Tory opponents as a nation cries out to hear more from the alternatives.

It’s extraordinary, really: up until the election campaign started you couldn’t turn on your television without being confronted by the ghastly Farage visage: he was on Question Time more than David Bloody Dimbleby.

Now? Now it seems Farage is condemned to a sort of sideshow usually reserved only for politicians who have the temerity to be…. whisper it…. Women.

Yes, women.

For those of you who have voted for David Cameron and his rich but oh-so-dim Etonian public schoolboy chums to sit around the cabinet table comparing anecdotes about which particular talentless ingrate inherited the most from his – always his – doting, indulgent parents, I should perhaps explain about women.

They comprise half the human race; they have exactly the same attributes as men but you can always spot the difference by asking them their salary or whether they stand a chance of a fair share of the TV news.

Women are the part of the human race that give birth, yes, even to Conservatives, though there has to be doubt surrounding the origins of the likes of Grant Shapps and the lying liar Iain Duncan Smith.

Those who vote Conservative tend to be of the age, or if not age then definitely mindset, that has forgotten just how much fun it can be to discover that other half of the human race; I suppose when only money and status get you misty with passion, you tend to forget.

Anyway. Everybody agreed the women in the leaders’ debates were much more interesting than the dull men of the status quo; everybody agreed that whenever people get a chance to hear socially progressive arguments such as those delivered by Natalie Bennett, Leanne Wood and Nicola Sturgeon unclouded by media bias, they are interested and even converted; it was obvious that Sturgeon in particular had done well because the Daily Mail immediately launched a lie-filled hate campaign against her. But none of this would have come across in the news reports. Shamefully, Bennett of the Greens didn’t even get a soundbite from the BBC.

I suspect the establishment will defend itself successfully yet again and the same old story will take our society on down this rocky road, lined by billboards showing the price of everything and the value of nothing, hiding ghettos blown by litter with ill-educated tattooed thugs towing pit bull terriers to the soshe, hiding playgrounds filled with dull-eyed children hectored into becoming either obedient little zero-hours-contract wage slaves or ill-educated tattooed thugs towing pit bull terriers to the soshe on decisions taken when they’re seven by obediently suited Ofsted bureaucrats. The system howls ‘know your place’ just as much as an Edwardian toff on his way to the whorehouse.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  But given the might of the media and the vacuity of the national argument – yes, Britain’s Got Talent is back to anaesthetise you –  I rather suspect we shall continue to be a nation of lorry drivers hanging grimly to our partly closed windows in the hope that a door will open, just once, for little us.