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.