Suddenly the skies opened and torrential rain bucketed down. Long neglected gulleys flooded over, my shoes filling. Nevertheless I dutifully squelched across the way to the polling station. Just go home, I’d thought, and truly if it hadn’t been on my way, I wouldn’t have, since to my mind, the result was a foregone conclusion. Bedraggled I stood in a polling booth and with a short blunted pencil held in damp claw, I’d hovered. Just for a few seconds, but a definite hover. The hover was me recalling Jimmy telling me he was voting Leave because he wanted to ‘put the shit up the EU, who always give us a bad deal.’
‘But Jimmy,’ I’d warned, ‘if we leave, we’re fucked.’
‘’Course,’ said Jimmy cavalierly, ‘but that’s never gonna happen.’
And how I’d agreed! It was a preposterous prospect, so outlandish as to be impossible. I also thought about that other divisive poll taken a year earlier. So, I must admit whilst I was entirely decided on the one hand, Jimmy’s words did run through my mind, but in any case, completely sodden, I finally put my uncertain X in The Right Place.
A few days earlier I had been on holiday in Bavaria. The news was awash with the referendum and the murder of the MP, Jo Cox. The main thing was both sides was stricken about how the tragedy might affect the vote. I’d noticed everyone was talking about ‘Brexit’, rather than ‘Remain’ or ‘the Referendum’, even on German news reports. I’d also noted that the Remain campaign had relied heavily on a roll call of ghastly celebrities in video tribute, hilariously breathless with excitement for the EU. In retrospect these two points are probably quite significant.
That night I went to bed quite unbothered about what might unfold during the night, sleeping fitfully. When I awoke I turned on breakfast TV to confirm the Remain result, imagining myself quickly snapping the TV back off (just like I did with that other divisive poll). Yet Dimbleby was reporting that the result was Leave, the vote split 52/48, and grilling Jeremy Corbyn on his intellectual deficit. The world of Jimmies everywhere must have fallen apart and I reflected on how close I’d come to Making A Big Mistake. My mobile pinged angrily with aghast sentiment, except for a German friend who declared she thought it brilliant (I put that down to her growing up in the GDR). At work too there was jubilation, much to my utter surprise and disgust. We hadn’t discussed at all in the office in the lead up, but now I sat silently vexed at my desk through conversations littered with the instantly classic phrases like ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and the evergreen ‘Will of the People’. Fucking idiots, I thought.
The moment I stopped caring, however, was a couple of years later when my sister very casually implied I had voted for Brexit.
‘But Annie, I voted Remain,’ I said. We’d been over this a million times. I met her and her husband immediately After It Happened and we’d spent literally hours agreeing that Brexit was A Very Bad Thing. Now, however, I was being accused of being On The Other Side. My eight year old nephew, stomped ahead of us, sick of the unending conversation about politics.
A similar thing had happened with a friend over coffee a few weeks before.
‘People like me will have to leave the country,’ says Melinda. She’d lived here for over 25 years and held a Spanish passport.
‘I don’t think it’ll come to that,’ I say, ‘please don’t worry.’
‘Because of people like you,’ she says back, jutting her chin up.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Brexiteers, Leavers,’ she says and scowls.
‘I didn’t bloody vote Leave, Melinda. I’m a Re-Main-Er. I’ve told you this a dozen times. We’ve discussed it a dozen times!’
‘Oh!’ she said, looking round, as if she’d lost something.
‘Don’t you remember? Every time we discuss Brexit, I blame Corbyn for not campaigning hard enough and for wanting to trigger Article 50 about half an hour after the result was in. And you claim to believe that he voted Remain and did his best.’
Melinda would broach no criticism of ‘JC’, as she called him. She had even hugged him once.
‘He’s my man. So warm and cuddly,’ she says, clearly still thinking of the hug she’d snatched.
‘And he voted Leave.’
‘I don’t believe that. He’s such a honest man,’ she opined ‘he would never do that. No, no, no, not my Jeremy,’ she stuck her bottom lip out for effect.
‘Yes he would. He’s on record as hating the EU. And his potty brother.’
Melinda pursed her lips and looked away again, whilst I wondered how many more times we could keep having variations of the same conversation over and over again. Perhaps the friendship was on its last legs?
On the other hand, Jimmy had understandably gone very silent for a very long time, finally hinting he was sick of seeing my constant Twitter posts denigrating his miscalculated gamble and retweeting calls for a new referendum or calls to find some possible way to Turn Time Back.
‘Can’t stand the Remoaners,’ said Jimmy, a little too pointedly, ‘the thing’s happened and we just have to get on with it now.’
I wasn’t quite ready to take his point but I also had to admit I’d noticed the #FBPE lot were getting decidedly more nutty, running polls in all seriousness asking: ‘Who is more trustworthy?’ with Boris Johnson or The Taliban being the two options. Or, the Stop Brexit Man permanently outside Parliament hailed as a hero, rather than an obvious pain in the arse. Then there was the tax barrister, who despite boasting about clubbing a fox to death on Boxing Day in his wife’s kimono, continued to be the FBPE’s darling.
Eventually the Remoaner disappeared from the wilderness to be replaced by the Remainiac. A Remainiac is like a plus-plus Remoaner. They are literally shitting their pants lunatics who pray for the deaths of the elderly and throw ‘gammon’ around like there is no tomorrow. That’s when I stepped back and thought, I’m going to stop going on about A New Referendum and make a little distance between myself and these people. Like Jimmy said, it’s over now, let’s just move on like adults.
So I spent quite a few months luxuriating in indifference from the internecine fights. When people bought it up I literally smiled and nodded. For both sides. ‘Get Brexit Done,’ smile and nod. ‘The queues to Dover will be eight hours long!,’ smile and nod. ‘We went on the march this Saturday calling for a new referendum which thirty thousand people attended,’ smile and nod, thinking, but managing not to say, ‘that’s not even enough to fill Emirates stadium.’
It seemed like other people were taking the same tack. Like there was a growing but unspoken understanding that the conversation had got to that point where all avenues had been exhausted and no one was saying anything new. Just re-treading dirty stagnant water.
And then came the bitterly cold wet March of 2020. I’d attended a social corporate function where there were mega dispensers of alcohol gel at every table, that literally no one was availing themselves of. I barely followed TV news anymore but twigged that their presence were something to do with a virus which had come from a ‘wet market’ in Wuhan, China. Fourteen travellers had been impounded on arrival at Heathrow. I was so estranged from it all, grabbing canapés on the silver dishes circulating around the room without a second thought, standing cheek by jowl amongst the other guests, making ridiculous smalltalk. It turned out to be the last thing I went to for over a year, as a few days later the UK was locked down. Brexit pretty much disappeared overnight from the public’s consciousness but the conversation certainly quickly shifted to how much we hated non-maskers.
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The Lies They Tell 
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