It has been a terrible few years in the UK. Hate crimes have risen. Post-imperial tristesse had become neo-imperial grandiosity . Innocuous words such as “deliver” and “orderly” have been poisoned. The best politicians, or those we thought were good-enough, lack all conviction.
Blake Morrison’s books include the memoirs And When Did You Last See Your Father? and Things My Mother Never Told Me, the poetry collection Shingle Street and, just out in paperback, the novel The Executor.One positive thing for Northern Ireland is that Brexit has actually made it visible. Mostly it feels like a little desert island and we jump up and down trying to get the attention of passing aircraft. Even our bonfires aren’t seen from the lofty heights you look down upon us from.
It’s almost too depressing to try to put into words the sheer political fuck-wittedness of the last couple of years. Everything was both predictable, and predicted: the slowing of the economy, the intractability of the Irish border, the rise in racist words and acts, the incredible waste of time and money, the unravelling of lie after lie about easy trade deals and having cakes and eating them. We’ve seen the Leave campaign revealed as liars, fantasists and Russian stooges.
I shudder at the thought of someone like Brian Cowen representing Ireland. My abiding memory of Cowen on the international stage is the occasion when he was speaking at the White House and discovered that he was reading the wrong speech. In the park, being walked by the dog, we meet staffies, huskies, dachshunds, whippets, lurchers, wolfhounds and, more recently, quite a lot of rescue dogs. The dogs disgrace us, jumping on one another, ploughing into the mud, and landing paws-first on the chests of other people’s children. We talk about how old they are, or where they came from; many of them, their owners are happy to say, imported from Romania and Bulgaria.
Philip Larkin is sometimes suggested as some kind of Brexit laureate. Europe-averse, generationally stuck, self-hating and politically furious at everyone, he could, in Homage to a Government, write: “We want the money for ourselves at home / Instead of working”. But Larkin can seem like a paragon of open-mindedness when set against contemporary debates: he knew “the importance of elsewhere” and wanted more than just “my customs and establishments.
This is quite depressing.
Nostalgic? Aggressive? It is THEY who are clinging to an outmoded 1950s model nascent federal state, with its aggressive expansionist plans.
Just thought of an appropriate dessert for No-Brexit day. An Eton Mess.
DianaHenryFood There's a family rumour my great great grandmother was Irish, I've been to Ireland 6 times & one of my favourite bands is the Saw Doctors. Can I have a passport please?
AmandaFBelfast I don't feel this government is capable of leadership. Senator George Mitchell brought peace to Northern Ireland, with the help of Mo Mowlam, in her dying days. The EU invested in NI & there was great optimism here for the first time ever. Now that's all been put at risk xxx
The notion of Piltdown needs to be revisited
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