After almost two years at Homerton, I’m well-accustomed to missing out on various activities. When Cindies is a dangerous drunken stumble from your room, you become blind to the struggles of the Homertonian, who faces a treacherous cycle, taxi ride or trek into town and risks sobriety upon admission.

One thing I never thought I’d miss out on was voting in Cambridge. Homerton falls just outside Cambridge and into South Cambridgeshire, a predicament also shared by our cousin Girton.

All my in-depth knowledge of incumbent Julian Huppert’s hourly schedule, honed from a term of relentless campaign emails to the Varsity News account, is wasted. The speculation, calculations and polls on Cambridge mean nothing to me now, try as I might to get excited about what is one of the most unpredictable elections in years.

Cambridge is a battleground seat in which the Lib Dems, supposedly haemorrhaging 7 out of 10 voters since the coalition, may just hold onto power with Huppert. Lord Ashcroft’s recent poll set Labour’s Daniel Zeichner on a one per cent lead, although it only consulted 19 people between the ages of 18 and 24; the possibility is a huge swing influenced by the inflation of students in term-time, for which Varsity’s election poll is the more useful, and tantalisingly close, survey.

Aside this electoral inferno, infused with the drama of the reigning Huppert battling off the Tories and Labour (who each managed a quarter of the votes in 2010), South Cambridgeshire is like watching paint dry. The Tories have comfortably held the seat since 1997 with an average 47 per cent share.

I have accepted my vote will likely make no difference in South Cambridgeshire. This I can deal with – my home town is a safe Labour seat – but to have a ‘useless’ vote stripped of potential is infuriating when I look past Hills Road to Cambridge’s electoral landscape.

Despite daily cycling into Cambridge and spending most of my time there, my vote is lumped in with disparate, generally affluent villages throughout South Cambridgeshire, most likely full of London commuters.

Hanging out with anyone from CULC or the Cambridge Lib Dems – I’ll admit I’ve burned some bridges on the right-wing side of student politics – is all the more painful when canvassing can make so little difference in a safe seat like this. 

And while safe seats are only one part of a bigger picture, the fact that I can’t make much of a difference is all the more galling when I hear inner-city college people declaring that they “don’t care about politics” or aren’t intending to vote. They have a real choice in who they want to represent them in Parliament.

On the other hand, even if the Tory candidate for South Cambridgeshire was a parrot chanting “long-term economic plan” on the hour, he’d still get almost half of the votes. I don’t have a choice in that.