Brexitstential Crisis

Interesting times, yes. Throughout the campaign, I only ever glimpsed a part of one 'Vote Leave' ad. As I remember it had a split screen depicting, on one side, 'the NHS in the EU' and on the other side 'the NHS out of the EU'. In the former you saw a crowded waiting room and in the latter a practically deserted one. No explanation was offered about what happened to all those patients in the first scene. Were they deported? Did they die? Can't they afford healthcare anymore?

Well it looks like we're going to find out now.

I didn't watch any of the coverage of the referendum. On Friday morning I was hoping to delay discovering the result for as long as I could manage. But Chris Hawkins on 6 Music gave the game away almost as soon as I turned the radio on. Later, Shaun Keaveny described seeing on his way to work a woman stopping her car and getting out to vomit in the street. He didn't explicitly link this to Brexit but the inference was clear.

Post-Brexit, Brentwood High Street has taken on a malign cast, I noticed on Saturday. For a start it seemed largely deserted, as if everyone had already been deported, or had voluntarily fled the country. Only the army cadets seemed to be out in force, on a recruitment drive – well, yes, we may be needing them now I suppose. Most of the people I saw looked freakish, guilty or psychotic. The front page of the Sun in WH Smith's with its depiction of a triumphant Britain 'freed from its shackles' seemed so out of keeping with my mood of unease that I felt like I was in a totalitarian state being fed hysterical lies.

Mind you, the Sun's front page probably always makes me feel like that. It was just that, on this occasion, I could imagine that nearly half the population might be feeling something similar, which should have made me feel better, yet somehow didn't. The Mail's headline was TAKE A BOW, BRITAIN, as it congratulated its readers, or some of them, for voting the way it had told them to. Curiously, the Mail on Sunday, hedging its bets, had urged its readers to vote Remain – how confusing! - so the headline on Sunday by rights should have been FUCK YOU, BRITAIN but sadly it wasn't.

Meanwhile, that Mr. Farrago seemed to be everywhere crowing about 'taking our country back' – back to the 1950's probably. Given the narrow victory his rhetoric seems hollow indeed. I suspect that the Tories have placed him front and centre as the punchable face of Brexit while they snigger behind his back, and that he will be dispensed with in due course but then I don't know anything, and nobody does. David Cameron has left the building, and it's hard to blame him. It's like half the country threw their toys out of the pram when he told them over and over again not to, and why should he pick them up? Of course there were the rest of us who held on to our toys like good children but they will be confiscated anyway. So unfair!

Nevertheless the fact that this was a decision that wasn't based on short-term economic gain is interesting I suppose, and the plummeting pound should surely have the anti-capitalist in all of us rejoicing. And people voted Leave for all kinds of reasons, not just narrow-minded or unexamined ones. Dennis Skinner was a Brexiteer and so was the half-Romanian, half-Italian taxi driver who drove me to the station the other day.

So nothing is set in stone. This might usher in a new golden age. Or on the other hand the UK might rot amongst its moth-eaten dreams of past glories. Or everything might stay the same. It's your choice!

Or rather, it isn't anymore. Unless there's another referendum. But I think the one thing we've learned from all this is that, unless there's an election, ordinary people should stay out of politics. They only confuse things.

Relocation Relocation Relocation

After so much stalling the long-anticipated move to Basildon came as something of a surprise – the surprise being that it had actually happened. Another surprise is that taking two trains and a bus to work hasn't killed me, though you really know you're in the precariat when you're standing shivering in the Winter winds (of May) waiting for a bus next to a blackboard announcing: 'Ham Roll Only One Pound'.

Wickford is a Place of Signs. Sometimes it seems that you only need to turn your back on a fence or lamppost for a moment and someone has attached a sign to it by the time you've turned round again. The other day it was 'Floor Sanding and Varnishing Services' appearing one morning attached to lampposts everywhere. Of course it's probably a euphemism for sex.

My favourite sign was the one I used to pass (before they changed it) on the bus every day on the Nevendon Road advertising the services of a solicitor: 'Thinking about divorce or separation?' I wonder how many relationships that has doomed as someone, glancing out of the bus or car window, idly decided to end their marriage when they got home.

The office block looks pretty grim on the outside but inside it's a bit like a hotel, though you wouldn't necessarily want to go on holiday there. Many companies live there but you only glimpse the workers from the other offices briefly in the hushed corridors as they scurry to the toilet and back again like foraging wildlife.

The office itself is something of a pleasant surprise. Instead of the gunmetal grey holding cell I had been anticipating, it's all bright white with motivational words on the wall in different colours: 'Innovating', 'Performing'. Initially there were the usual jokes about replacing these with less elevated sentiments ('Irritating', 'Hibernating') but I must admit I quite like the ambience. It almost makes me feel professional.

Not that we haven't brought some of our issues along with us – even the toilet dysfunction which forced us in the last days of Brentwood to trek all round the building for a piss seems to have followed us. Within a month of our being there a mysterious blockage had occurred, putting the toilets just next to our office out of action. I feared that suspicion would fall on us, and that we would be detained until the culprit owned up, as in an Agatha Christie. But it was all sorted out in a couple of days, the blockage located and destroyed in, I like to think, a controlled explosion.

The main thing I was dreading was not having the radio. In fact there is one but you can only get Heart, which is pretty much the same thing as not having a radio at all. Nevertheless, life without Ken Bruce's Popmaster appears to be possible, and as for the Jeremy Vine show, well that was always a mixed blessing. They must be loving the EU debate, since from what I have heard it's all about opinion, not fact – the phones must be ringing off the hook.

I have observed the Daily Mail making no bones about its scepticism regarding the Remain camp's 'Project Fear' – imagine, the Daily Mail accusing other people of scaremongering, when they've been running their own Project Fear for the last century or so. The whole thing is depressingly like a General Election where you can only vote for the Tories – it's either the vaguely sinister Tories, or the really sinister ones who look like they've just crawled out from under a rock. Although which is which now? – I can't remember.

I suppose I am temperamentally more inclined to the Remain camp – after all, I watch quite a few subtitled films – but there's a part of me that simply wants to flip a coin. This seems to be in the spirit of the thing – and any given coin has far more real experience of economic systems than I can muster up.

Not that my vote is going to make much of a difference either way. According to the latest polls, this time next week we will no longer be in Europe. Where will we be then? – up the Limpopo I expect. While over in America, Donald Duck prepares to become President. Interesting times.