Being a grown-up is fucking tedious. Having to clean your own hair out of your bathplug, laugh at your boss’s jokes, play nicey-nicey with your coworkers, pay your taxes – it often sucks. And when you’re doing all this boring adult stuff, it’s really tempting to put off tedious chores like registering to vote in favour of watching re-runs of The Crystal Maze on YouTube or devoting intellectual resource to figuring out exactly why it is cats freak out so much when confronted with a cucumber (IMO, it’s because they mistake them for snakes).

Failing to register to vote is, however, a dumb idea. We’ve got two set of elections coming up in the UK this year: the local elections on May 5 (if you live in London, this includes the Mayoral election), and the EU referendum on June 23. The deadline for the May 5 elections is next Monday, and while you’ve got a little longer to register for the EU referendum, as you’ve got to do them at the same time you might as well just do them both now. The link is at the bottom of the article. If, like me, you’re lucky enough to be attending Glastonbury, you need to register for a postal vote, as there’s not going to be an electoral station at the festival. Plus, even if there was, you might be too fucked up to find it.

Local elections suffer from incredibly low turnout, but they actually determine a shitload of the stuff that affect young people on a day-to-day basis. Like, whether your favourite club will be closing. Or how much council tax you’re going to have to pay. Or whether your former primary school will be knocked down to create ludicrously overpriced flats with absurd names like Vibe. Meanwhile, the EU elections will affect your right to live and work across the EU. Your sexy Italian housemate who taught you that pasta tastes better when it’s not microwaved? He may be going home.

Pasta aside, there are many reasons why we should register to vote, but really it comes down to just one thing: you’d be an idiot not to. We’ll be engaging with the elections closer to the time – so don’t feel left out. The link to vote is here.