THERE are times in journalism when we are reminded of how lucky we are – and Thursday night was one of those nights.

What a great privilege it was to cover a General Election in Bolton for the second time in my short career.

I was joined on the night by our web editor Julian Thorpe as well as politics correspondent Liam Thorp and crime reporter Jeremy Culley.

There was no crime going on by the way – although there were plenty of police at Bolton Arena keeping a watchful eye on proceedings.

Many of you will have stayed up into the early hours to watch the results come in – and certainly a good deal of our readers followed the action in Bolton on The Bolton News’ live blog.

With three seats to decide in Bolton – including the always closely fought Bolton West – it was always going to be a long night.

We arrived the four of us just before 10pm on Thursday as the count got under way – and left as the sun rose over the Macron at 6am on Friday.

The election count itself is a sight to behold. The press are up on the gantry raised above the tennis courts below, looking down on about 170 volunteers sat side by side in three blocks counting both local and national ballot papers.

Candidates and their aides stand over the counters totting up the votes as they are counted to try to get an idea of how they are doing.

For some it was clear. Indeed, for both David Crausby and Yasmin Qureshi, it was a comfortable night. The Labour candidates both increased their sizable majorities.

But in Bolton West it was a different story. Throughout the count we were told by the people on the ground that it was almost too close to call.

Indeed, on our live blog, we were predicting a narrow Labour victory for a time, until later we got word of a request for a recount from Labour.

Elsewhere, local candidates were watching their votes come in, and telling us of all sorts of anomalies. In one ward, where two councillors were up for election, residents were voting for two different parties.

So rather than voting for two Lib Dem candidates for example, they were voting for one Lib Dem and one Labour. But we were told that every possible conotation was being seen – with individual voters voting for two candidates with polar opposite views, such as Labour and Tory, or UKIP and the Greens.

But I guess that is the joy of democracy – everyone gets a vote no matter how bizarre it might be.

But back to my original point. They could sell tickets to election night – the tension and the drama for me beats anything you can watch on stage.

So how lucky did we feel that we were being paid to be there? And, if you’ll excuse the political wordplay, we had the best seats in the house.