Today, just like the past 1,872 Sunday mornings, I opened my eyes in my own bed. ‘Don’t turn on your phone,’ I told myself. Then I got up, washed and dressed, selecting my outfit with care—my new habit, painstakingly established over the past six months, is to go crazy buying second-hand clothes online, strike a pose in front of the mirror and take a photo to upload on social media. To lose myself in the superficial world of aesthetics is the only way I can try to forget the shame I feel when I close my eyes. This, however, was an entirely ordinary, in-no-way-unusual Sunday morning, I said to myself. I’ll go shopping, visit the outlying islands and take a stroll.

You learn from a Facebook push notification that the Election Committee Subsector elections are on today. Out of Hong Kong’s seven million people, fewer than 5,000 can vote for a representative, and this representative will elect the chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. A seventy-year-old grandmother had been looking for a polling station for some time on a hot day, only to learn that the election had nothing to do with her. ‘Sorry, you can’t enter the polling station. You aren’t registered.’ The grandmother said she had seen on TV that there was an election, so she came to vote. That’s how it always was before, but now she wasn’t allowed to. ‘Only a few people are eligible to vote.’ And you, like most Hongkongers, are not among them.

• Tags: Hong Kong, Issue 25, Lok Man Law