"That's it. It is all over.Finished. We've gone!" - Nigel Farage.
So we did it. We have Brexited, and survived. I heard a brief crackling of nearby fireworks as 11pm came and went, but that was it. Now, having marked the occasion in our typically understated British manner, the nation is collectively awakening with the same feelings of trepidation as a young adult coming to in the first morning of their newly rented bedsit: Yes, we're independent at last, free as a bird, it's a new life, but it's all up to us now, and as the cupboard is empty we'd better go to the supermarket and get some shopping done!
I was nine years old when Britain joined the EU in 1973, and this is bringing back some memories. I recall seeing the front page of my father's Daily Mirror at the time, and though I wasn't politically aware back then I felt as if we as a nation had been diminished in some indefinable way; that we'd lost something of ourselves by being subsumed. Now all these years later it seems somehow fitting that having 'slipped quietly into Europe' according to the Guardian of that time, 17,196 days later we've equally calmly slinked back out again.
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A glumly overcast dawn is lightening upon this new Albion, but to be honest it looks and feels just the same as the old one; as I fully expected it to. I didn't anticipate any nationalistic swelling of pride in my chest or loins, nor any newly conferred superpowers; instead I sense something more... anticlimactic really. There's also an endless loop of thoughts running through my mind, We've actually done it! We've Brexited! We're out! I'm no longer an EU citizen! We've actually done it!... as I come to terms with the new reality.
So, what now? For we as a nation the future is a blank page to be written upon; ...ours to build, ours the choice as the song goes (European Superstate, by Killing Joke) For this journal I'm not sure: I started this with the thought that it might metamorphose from a record of factual events to the starting point of a dystopic novel. It may well develop into one yet, but for now I'll pause it and see how events progress in this brave new post-Brexit world. Perhaps a future researcher will stumble upon this chronicle in an obscure digital archive of the by then long-defunct Wattpad and gain a hitherto unpublished perspective as to what one of their ancestors was thinking at such a turbulent time. If so I hope they find it useful. To those very few of you in the present who have followed it this far, I thank you for your interest to date and wish you well. Together we have lived through an astonishing epoch; one in which politics as we knew them were turned upside down. Hopefully our times ahead will be far less interesting.
