Saturday 25 June 2016

How do you feel?


Day two of our new, exclusive diet of baked beans straight from the can, and I can honestly say that I cannot notice any appreciable difference as I look out of the window. The sun still shines as much as it ever does during a British Summer, and I am still getting cold-calls from Indians who think I have something worth stealing.

Yes, it is only day two, but already the triumphant (marginal) voters of 'LEAVE' are telling the (marginal) losing voters of 'REMAIN' to stop moaning and generally shut up about it. That's what I call ungracious, and I would have thought that they would at least allow us a week of bitching before getting bored with it. It's day two, for Christ's sake.

In the pub last night, a group of elderly voters got together to talk about it - not for long, but not to even mention it would have been an elephant in the room so large, that there would not have been enough room left for ordinary customers. It was, after all, only day one.

"How do you feel?" one women voter asked me, and I had to say that I felt strangely depressed - not suicidal, just a bit cold and lonely.

"How do you feel?" I asked one elderly, male, self-confessed UKIP voter. Strangely - especially to him - he admitted to feeling uneasy and uncomfortable about the outcome which he had helped to bring about - something verging on a feeling of guilt.

After a while, we all began to notice that no matter which way we had voted, the outcome of the referendum affected us all in the same way, and had left us with a nagging feeling of uneasiness, as if we really had wantonly broken that toy and thrown it out of the pram.

Someone else observed that even those of us who had remained undecided until the last moment, were experiencing the exact same feelings, and this was a phenomena which none of us had ever witnessed before.

I had an email from my Hamburg friend yesterday, and he told me that all Germans felt like the bride who had been left, jilted, at the altar. They are even talking about the exit arrangements in terms of 'divorce proceedings', so it could be a bad case of polygamy.

Now why should this be? If it were just a case of walking away from global financiers or career bureaucrats, then we would not feel so sheepish.

Maybe the notion of a European family of ordinary people coming together for the common good had a tiny little bit of truth to it, even if it was only in our imagination?

You see - prior to yesterday, I would not have dreamt that these words would come out of my mouth.

29 comments:

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    1. I felt a bit strange and OMG about it in bed on Friday morning.

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    2. In the 1980s, the fashion was for Euro street furniture. It all had to be vandal proof when placed in public spaces, and it was all ugly and ubiquitous. Everything else felt just as foreign.

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  2. That 'feeling' had me in its grips too. I wonder how long it will last.

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  3. That is a beautiful metaphor about the toy thrown from the pram.

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    1. There is a more accurate one, but I found it too depressing to include here today.

      It is about the child who kills another living creature just to see how it feels, then is filled with remorse and sorrow for this act which cannot be undone. It happens.

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    2. The toy metaphor is embarrassing, but the creature one is tragic.

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    3. I read the creature metaphor to my friend Tim at work yesterday. He's been following the brexit issue closely and was impressed with you for coming up with such an apt way to describe the feelings of so many "out" voters.

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    4. Psychopaths who murder have usually killed animals when they were children. We come across disturbed children torturing and killing animals in my job and I find the metaphor very un-funny.

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    5. It wasn't supposed to be funny. It was based on personal experience. I took a casual pot-shot at a distant sparrow with an air-rifle when I was a kid, never dreaming I would hit it. I did hit it, and it took another 6 or 7 shots to finish it off as its mate flew around it in distress and confusion. I became a vegetarian that day, and I still almost cannot bear to think about what I did even now. I did not turn into a psychopath. Psychopaths show no remorse whatsoever.

      There has been a massive infiltration of people into the world's governments who show marked psychopathic tendencies in the last 30 or so years.

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  4. You must have given my number to those Indians. That made me laugh. You'll just have to remember Alexander Pope's Essay On Man, one of my favorites, with his theory 'what is, is right." It will work out in the end, but then he also posits that "we are all part of the chain, whereby one part is broken, the whole will fall," which is thought provoking.

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    1. Yes, but not necessarily during Cro's lifetime.

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    2. There is a comedian/satirist on HBO in the States named Bill Mahr. People love him or hate him; for me, when he says what I think, I like him, other times well... Anyway, his take on Brexit was "Pride and Prejudice won out over Sense And Sensibility. It might be too soon to joke about it, so please forgive me if it is too early for that. I am legend for putting foot in mouth.

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    3. That's a good one - especially for someone who lives in Bath.

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    4. I read a poignant piece from a blogger I follow that was very moving for the stay contingent. Hope I wrote it down right.
      lapouyette-unddiedingedeslebens.blogspot.com

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    5. I've just read it (at least I think it was the right one) and have joined the site as a follower.

      Lots of people have commented that I have spent too much time harping on about WW2 here, but if they read Lapouyette's post, they may appreciate how the old saying, 'those who do not remember the past...' applies more now than it ever has since WW2.

      It is the young who have no real reason to dwell on WW2 OR WW1, and it was the young who could have made the difference in the outcome of the EU referendum, if only half of them could have been bothered to vote. It is, after all, their future.

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  5. Shot yourselves in the foot big time.
    A home orchestrated conspiracy pact, I feel both numb and shocked actually.

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    1. It must make a nice change from being numbed and shocked by my foul language.

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  6. 'The notion of a European family..' paragraph at the end just made me a little teary eyed Tom.

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  7. The EU is just a step towards Globalization. Globalization is a step towards The Federation of Planets.

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    1. I always thought you were an alien invader. Now I know.

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    2. I'm calling you 'Davros' from now on.

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  8. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  9. Sorry, Tom, I deleted because I broke two rules of mine: I don't comment on politics; and I don't write about family.
    In August I'll be in London - hope to see you maybe, Brexit or not.

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    1. We have ways of making you talk. Yes - hope to see you in August, if they'll let you in.

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  10. I feel betrayed, ashamed, fearful. It's not at all nice.
    Now that the Brexit leaders have revealed that the main issues they persuaded people to vote on were all a scam, a ploy that the leave people could see through, I feel even worse. Now that they say they have no plan, I feel worse still.

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