requiem

 

My passport is old, and battered.  It's just about to hit the dangerous six-months-to-expiry time period, and early next week, I'll be sending it off together with my application for a new one.  And when it comes back - it won't say "European Union" at the top.  Indeed, it might even have reverted - I know this is the plan - to the old style, the blue cover, like my very first example of the genre.

I was taken aback by my response to Brexit actually happening today.  In some fit of wanting to acknowledge the historic significance of this really dismal moment, I listened to it happening - if a second of time between 10.59 and 11.00 p.m. in the UK - midnight on the continent - 3.00 p.m. on the USA's West Coast - could really be said to be an event happening - on the BBC.  I wasn't quite expecting that I'd dissolve into tears in my office - a dismal and crumpled-at-my-desk heap standing for all that's wrong in the world (insert Trump impeachment trial and the vote against witnesses, etc).  I felt profoundly lonely, and realized that I should have rustled up some other UK citizen with whom to lament the moment.  I've been a European for 47 years: now I'm not one, any more.  And if in practical terms that doesn't mean all that much right at this moment - I wasn't planning on working in France or buying a house in Italy, tempting though such ideas might be in the abstract, and possible though they would still surely be - it's very depressing and disempowering to have a crucial component of one's identity taken away from one by a load of narrow-minded bigots led by people whose ties to big big global business surely means that they'll win out anyway ...