No Future

How long before interesting times get boring? Boris Johnson appeared to reassure the country that Project Fear was now over, shortly before fleeing towards the horizon, screaming his head off. Well who needs Project Fear now that we have the real thing?

Oh wait, wasn't he 'knifed in the back' by Michael Gove? Or was that just a narrative to distract the populace and allow Boris to come back later when everything's a bit less confusing and stressful? Well who knows anymore? 'The truth' is just one of a number of proliferating narratives.

Never mind though, I glimpsed a report in the Mail on Sunday about some trawlermen rejoicing that they would no longer have to observe EU quotas. So we'll definitely have fish, which there was always such a shortage of before – why, I can hardly remember the last time I even saw fish, must have been about 40 years ago I suppose. Now we'll be able to over-fish. We'll have so many fish they'll be lying rotting in the streets.

As for those 'shackles' that the Sun talked about, it seems that some people feel that their removal from the country has freed them to be openly racist. How very refreshing! Perhaps shackles was the wrong metaphor, maybe it's more like a big rock has been removed from atop the land to reveal the maggots squirming beneath. How would that have looked on the Sun's front page I wonder?

This Saturday's headline was LOVE VILE LAND, a rather obscure phrase suggesting that a Brexit-inspired collective psychosis had struck the editorial team. Although on closer examination, the story was about ITV2 reality show Love Island, the complexities of Brexit presumably having been judged too challenging for the reader.

Prior to the referendum Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday, anticipating a Leave victory, spoke about England awaking from a long slumber, a metaphor which, though rather (ahem) tired, does seem quite pertinent: I mean, we're certainly awake now. The Remain side have woken up to the fact that things can't go on quite like this anymore, and the Leave side have woken up to the fact that the old England they thought they'd lost and could now 'take back' actually isn't there: there's just a void, which could conceivably be filled by almost anything.

But, as an eminent Englishman once said, there's no future in England's dreaming.