Richard Lutz scrapes through the shattered remains of Brexit-land to find any signs of anything …except madness.
True to form, whenever a disaster hits, I take to the only world where I can safely define what is around me. No, not the Good Book nor the innards of seagulls. No, not the I Ching nor an ouija board. No, I take to the TV and to see what films are on. Yessiree, that’s right. They always refine my quest to make sense of this planet – especially here in Blighty where the politico-world has truly gone bananas – or, maybe, always has been.
So, what’s on the crystal flatscreen when it comes prescient films? Check these out over this two day Brexi-fest: Deadly Departure, For Whom The Bell Tolls,The Enemy Below, Terminator: Judgement Day and, I like this one, Hyena.
And those are just a few. I could go on.
It drove me back to my daily diary, a day by day chronology of ink scratchings that I know will be found in fragmentary form on a nuclear scrapheap a billion years from now, when an alien with the skin of a reptile and the head of Mike Pence will slither onto our sterile rock and try to decipher what this ancient life form that was me had to say.
Specifically what I had to say in my headline-busting Brexit Footnote to each day. There are some intriguing snippets, bullet points that seemed at the time outrageously important but now, probably, are words tossed on the rubbish heap of history. Here’s some from the past ten days or so:
Jan 3rd: DUP says no to deal
Jan 5th: Anti Brexiteers called ‘undemocratic..’ (no idea who said it)
Jan 13th: May says Parliament in danger over vote revolt
Jan 14th: May defeat on horizon
And then, of course, there was the vote itself on Tuesday, January 15th and my Brexit bon mot reads: 430 v 200. Deal rejected.
And I added: “This a a 2:1 veto, the worst in British politics since Aethelreid the Lunatic beheaded Hagarth Turniphead at The Round Table AGM. (ed: this needs fact check).”
“May looks resigned, tired, ready to flop down in a comfy chair for a year or two. Opposition leader Corbyn turns as puce as a puce-dyed beetroot calling for a vote of no confidence. His vote will fail. Just like the Brexit campaign. It has been two and a half years of failure. It’s time to untie the horses from the corral and lead them up to the mountain pastures and shoot ‘em. Everyone’s knackered, confused…worried. I will awake tomorrow and feel like a person who has undergone triple root canal to find I’m still in dental agony. This is a disaster. Everything has failed.”
This morning, the streets, the buses, the towns and villages of this country just seem sadly shaded by an Unknown. May is a loser. Corbyn is twisting this way and that with no real direction, the LibDems are dead in the water, the Royal Family are hunting moose in northern Scotland and the media is rabid, exhausted, mad with fervid energy, reporting on a merry go round falling off whatever a merry go round sits on.
This is Britain today. It’s a merry go round gone mad.