Brexit — trying to refill the glass

This weekend has had somewhat of the feeling of a horrendous hangover to it — one of the ones where you get memory loss, have a massive dose of the Fear and then realise that actually that thing you think happened really did and you’re going to have to face up to things. Which is probably why I’m writing this accompanied by the comfort blanket of hot chocolate and biscuits (I was supposed to buy cherry tomatoes to snack on, but they came from Thanet and that made me think of Nigel Farage so I couldn’t go there).

Having spent the past 3 days in the same stages of shock, disbelief, anger and sadness as everyone else who was quite fond of that old EU really, I’m determined to now try and find a positive. I don’t want to carry on avoiding the news because my brain can no longer work with how many things are going wrong all at once, I don’t want to spend the tube journey to work in the same way I spent the journey home on Friday (looking around at everyone in the carriage thinking “was it you, did you vote for this?”), and I think it would be difficult to persuade my nearest and dearest to up sticks to Scotland so I should probably give up on that idea.

So I have been looking for positives!

1. Switzerland aren’t in the EU, and they seem to be doing OK. So it’s entirely possible that we won’t become the new Russia.
2. Politics just has to change. It’s entirely acknowledged that this campaign has been fought in a rather horrific manner, and it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the people who won did so by spreading a lot of propaganda which the people who voted for them now know to be untrue — things which just take to the extreme the way many of us feel politicians work anyway. With the two main parties imploding, and the SNP looking like the only ones who a — have a plan and b — are in touch with what the people they represent want, this could be the start of a new style of British politics (or UK politics, or English politics, or wherever we end up as…), which can only be good.
3. People now realise that voting can change things. In this case, potentially for the worse. But the outcome of this could be that more people are politically engaged, want to be more informed and ask more questions.
4. It’s not going to happen overnight. At the moment we are all in panic. And yes, it’s rather shit that no-one really seemed to have a plan for what happens now, but we have at least two years to work things out.
5. I will always feel European — this can’t be changed.