It is two months after the election which saw Ed Miliband and Alex Salmond seize power. The deal struck was a ‘confidence and supply arrangement’, whereby Salmond provided the confidence and supply which the electorate denied the Labour leader. Salmond evidently moderated his terms given the tiny proportion of votes he garnered: he merely wanted to help write the Budget, oh, and to rid the UK of Trident. Small beer.

The alarm clock rings. It is 8am. I stir and move towards the bathroom before deciding to skip a shower. The hot water is off – as a result of Miliband freezing energy prices at a record high, hygiene has now become a dispensable affair.

I can’t exactly complain about being in fuel poverty. It would be futile - now that I live in a ‘mansion’, in the eyes of the tax collector, I’m not exactly going to elicit much sympathy. Every morning, I wake up and put some pennies (well, several hundreds of pound coins) in the piggy bank. Better to have no hot water than be turfed out of my house.

Home being no longer particularly hospitable, I decide to breakfast in town. I’ve become used to the bagpipes playing on the streets; a fraction of the UK population has given the SNP a commanding voice in government. Perhaps, as a result, Scottish nationalists no longer wish to leave the Union. Incidentally, the SNP now vociferously opposes electoral reform. It seems that the painful sounds of the bagpipes, so closely mimicking my state of despair, are here to stay. These tunes beg the question in my mind as to why the English independence campaign remains so lacklustre.

Desperate for peace and quiet, I plunge into my nearest café. Awaiting my scrambled eggs on toast, I rest my head on the table. My melancholic state, and my increased invocation of the British sigh, which, again, Salmond wants to legislate to make the preserve of the Scots, has not eluded the notice of all present. One man, Vince Cable, who has now finally usurped control of the rump grouping of Lib Dems, enquires as to the cause of my sadness. I tell him about the lack of hot water in my ‘mansion’ and, surprisingly, he is sympathetic.

Good old Vince, pious as ever, tells me that hope is not to be found in God’s salvation (for, after all, I live in a ‘mansion’ and I was formerly an investment banker), but rather in playing the system. “The idea of the tax was initially mine”, pointed out Vince. He went on, “the trick is, my friend, to make sure that instead of having one house, you accumulate several under the £2m threshold”. He conceded this may not be ideal: “If you can’t be bothered with the fuss of countless estate agents, buy a yacht or two instead – they escape the tax”.

Stunned by his prescience, I nevertheless see some problems with the peripatetic lifestyle which he espouses. “If I buy up multiple properties of lower value, will that not exacerbate the current housing crisis, hurting the poor more than the rich?” Vince was quick to retort, “the ‘mansion tax’ was not designed to help the poor. No, it is much more sophisticated than that. It is meant to bash the rich, and publicly”.

Puzzled, I wander back home afterwards and decide to return to bed. Given the misery of my conscious state, I decide not to set my alarm.

Entering the realms of sub-consciousness, however, is no more pleasant. Things aren’t quite what they should be. Well some things are – David Cameron, now in his second term as PM, still has his baby face when I turn on the TV. But punch-wielding Jeremy Clarkson is standing by his side as Foreign Secretary. Unsurprisingly, all diplomatic relations with Argentina have ceased. However, the appointment of Clarkson is much to the delight of Cameron’s children who had lamented his dismissal from Top Gear. I am less impressed but concede that every government needs its own Prescott.

But who is that boisterous man behind them, pint in hand? Nigel Farage? I quickly turn the TV off and decide to go to my local haunt, the nearby café. It is closed but has a helpful sign on the front: ‘Workers needed’. I thought, how strange – there used to be several lovely staff. Oh, they were Polish.

I return home to boil the kettle. ‘At least I can afford to do that now’, I think to myself. The phone rings: a thoroughly English accent informs me that “your operation has been cancelled due to the deportation of our staff”. I ask when it will be rearranged. She quickly refers me to the helpline of some private company, ‘Farage & Co.’

I awake. Who knew sleep could be so troublesome? Trying to muster the strength to persevere, I can no longer turn to the image of the ever-suffering Nick Clegg. For he has fallen, trounced in the last election. That’s when I know I’m in trouble.