Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

As the crisis meanders onwards, a peculiar time dilation becomes evident. At first, everything seemed to be happening all at once. Everything was in the present tense, be it past, future or actual present. It’s tempting to blame my initial drinking for this, but I’ve now been sober for days and it seems like several weeks have passed. They haven’t. It’s been a fortnight.

There is a claim that people are able to see their entire lives flash past them near a moment of sudden death. We don’t, as a country, see the past, but a strangely elongated present. The political parties continue to have their leadership campaigns at the speed of Twitter. Tory candidates have come and gone within the course of an afternoon. The US police have executed several black people. By gun, and in a gruesome new domestic use of battlefield technology, by a bomb-wielding killer robot. The Chilcot Report about Tony Blair’s role in the Iraq War has come out. Everything is happening at once.

Meanwhile, like a person who has just stepped off a cliff, distracted by visions, reality is still lingering at the edges of our perception. The pound continues to fall. Investment firms are leaving. The consequences of Brexit and the memory of the campaign is pushed out of our consciousness, but the mechanics set into motion – the conversion from potential to kinetic energy – has not ceased.

A few days ago, I managed to have my first conversation that did not mention Brexit. More have come since.

Today was a Rally for Europe across from Downing Street. As the shock dies off, so too apparently the crowds. By normal standards, it was a good protest turnout, but I worry this is not enough. To make a change, we really must turn out week after week. The speakers emphasised even this is not enough. ‘Don’t go home and feel proud of yourselves’ he said. We need to build a movement and organise.

The speakers talked about racism and lead us in several chants with uncertain rhythm. No instruction was given as to how one might organise. Perhaps this is something to google now that I’ve gotten home.

From the rally, we marched over to Green Park. Or perhaps we wandered. There was no more chanting or megaphones. There, we joined some sort of Picnic for Europe event. There were a lot of groups of friends sharing lunch. No speakers. Few signs. Some of us had flags. I was uncertain of the purpose of it.

The speaker at the earlier rally said we need to convince people to change their minds about Europe over the next 15 months or so. ‘Maybe’, he nearly whispered, ‘Article 50 won’t get invoked.’ If we can change people’s minds. If 60% of people come to decide the EU is a force for good.

While this neatly elides the question of democracy, I’m at a loss of how this might happen. The Tories will pick the next Prime Minister. The leading candidates right now are someone who wants to scrap Human rights legislation vs someone who is apparently unaware such legislation exists at all. If the next PM will blithely risk the British union- Good Friday Agreement be damned- then what hope for leading us back towards the EU? The slow-seeming financial catastrophe may not turn people left.

Indeed, I turn to the left and I see nothing. The problems with Keynesian economics that became clear in the 80s have never been solved. Neoliberalism so ubiquitous, it largely goes unnamed. We call it ‘reality’ and the left ‘dreamers’. But what are we dreaming of? The glory days of the post war consensus; of making socialism great again, like an inverse Donald Trump? Some are campaigning for a universal basic income, but I’m suspicious of some of the backers. A totalitarian pleasure regime is an improvement, sure; but shouldn’t we can aim for a utopia rather than merely a less hungry dystopia?

It’s possible something is going on and I’m missing it. I don’t know how to organise and I don’t know what to do.

At the rally, when I held my EU flag up over my heads, a European tourist couple attracted my attention. The woman expressed solidarity and gave some words of encouragement. She was glad to see this push back happening. I thanked her. But it’s not enough. I expect to turn out week after week for the next few months. It’s the minimum required, but it won’t be enough.

Things continue to settle down to seeming-normalcy. There’s no longer the foregrounded sense of shock and danger. Time seems less fully gathered in one spot. Or perhaps this is because I’m finally sobering up from the semi-heavy drinking I’ve been doing since the crisis started. Predictably, lack of sleep coupled with much higher than normal alcohol consumption has left me with a cold, which is enough to get me to slow down at least.

On Saturday, I went to the March for Europe. I met friends and one of them immediately began talking about redundancies in his former work place. His wife is an EU Migrant. She is applying for permanent residency here, but has no enthusiasm for it.

We stood at the back of a queue of people and waited ages to step off. We assumed things were running late. Only much later, on an incline did we get a sense of the largeness of the march. It seemed small from where we were. It was impossible to get any perspective.

The march moved slowly, a pace that seemed exhausting. People cheered or chanted occasionally. Once in a while, a song rose up. 80’s pop songs about love figured prominently, but were always short. Nobody knew any of the words aside from the refrain. For a while, we marched next to somebody with a battery amp, playing the full Rick Astley song, which became ‘Never going to give EU up.’ Once a trumpet player suddenly started playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. This is the EU hymn. A cheer went up, but nobody knew any words, so we could only hum along.

The slowness of the march created a funereal air. I heard people talking about how marching was ‘important’. Angrier people talked how it was undemocratic to strip people of citizenship. The police are largely unseen, a stark contrast to the student marches of the coalition. It seems we don’t need policing. ‘Put things back how they were a fortnight ago’ is hardly a call to revolution.

As at all British protests, the signs were clever and pun-filled. ‘Yes to fromage; no to Farage’ ‘I will always love EU’ ‘Gove uck yourself’ ‘I want to be inside EU’. One sign was just a chart of the value of the pound over the last fortnight.

As we got to Downing Street, there was the only visible police presence. We turned to look at the street with bad feeling. One man yelled ‘wanker!’ and a chorus of boos went up. We trudged on to Parliament square, which was full of people. More marchers continued to pour in behind us. At the front was a projection screen and a speaker array. I could barely see the screen. The voices of speakers echoed around the square, but were unintelligible from where we were standing. Only an occasional phrase would come through. The space in front of us was packed with protesters. Behind us were even more people, many of whom were dancing to 80’s torch songs.

Near the end of the rally, they started playing Abba’s SOS. People on stage swayed with signs. People in front of us sang along. Then the rally was over.

Afterwards, we went to the park and had tea. It was a lovely sunny afternoon. I left and went to a barbecue. About half the people there were Americans. Most of the conversations were about Brexit or Trump. I wasn’t drinking because of a cold, but most people had been going for hours. A lot of discussion retreated to the safer, more familiar area of the future of the Labour Party. A temporary problem with a temporary solution. Something a lot easier to hold in mind.

Today, I went to the stone setting for my wife’s grandmother. It’s a year since she died. There was a short ceremony and we went to breakfast. Most of the family are a generation older at least. One relation confessed that they’d voted leave. They said it like they were asking for forgiveness – they probably were. It was a protest vote. They didn’t expect to win – don’t know why they’d voted that way. They said they need to have a period of self-reflection to understand why they voted as they had. It was my first time meeting anyone with ‘Bregret.’ I got a bit snippy. I don’t know how to react to this. They were horrified by the results. They were grossly misinformed of what their vote even meant.

If everyone who feels regret writes their MP, could that make a difference? This is democracy without information. How can it be meaningful to have a vote when no one knows what they’re voting for?

One well-attended march is not enough to stave off leaving. And the uncertainty is also bad. It is impossible to plan under these circumstances. There is a rumour of another march next weekend.

One sign at the march said, ‘Britain is not an island.’ Perhaps it’s a ship, drifting rudderless along the sea.

For some days, the news cycle stretched to 24 hours. Things kept happening through the night. Stepping away for a moment meant missing something. But at some point, exhaustion must have stepped in. Nothing happens overnight now.

The days, however, are still moving rapidly. A joke goes around, ‘it’s the most astonishing day in British politics since yesterday.’ An American newspaper responds to speculation about the country breaking up with a portmanteau for a new country made up of just England and Wales: ‘Wangland’. It seems apt. Perhaps citizens could be called ‘wangkers’.

On Wednesday, a piece of music I’ve written is in a concert at a conference. I go despite not having signed up. The piece crashes, but it’s not my fault. One of the performers is stressed by it and tells me later that he was unable to regain his composure. The music is the kind of fast, chaotic, noisy music I usually like and it’s very well played, but I have trouble concentrating on it. The non-stressed performer is pleased by how everything went. Some people have taken good pictures of her playing and she wants to post them to facebook. She looks at everything else going by and feels guilty. ‘How can I post about my good concert when the world is burning?’

We go to the pub. I’ve been trying to cease drinking entirely, but I order a pint anyway. It’s not very good. I bicycle for half an hour to meet my wife in Brighton. We go to the Vegetarian Shoes shop. I had been planning to get new trainers, but I also get steel capped boots. I say I may need them. My wife thinks I am being silly. I don’t know.

One of the PM candidates is a long-standing opponent of both immigration and human rights. I feel like a time may be coming shortly where I have very little to lose. I can’t tell if I’m being overly dramatic. Things are starting to feel quotidian again, as if Real Life has returned, but of course it hasn’t. I don’t have permanent residency in this country.

My wife and I go to the beach to stare out across the water towards France, but neither of us is able to put our phones down. My wife is instagramming the weather and I hit update on Twitter over and over. She seems unconcerned. I find her optimism unnerving in it’s rootlessness.

A decade ago, the day I learned my mother was dying, I assured her things would be ‘OK’. I felt it strongly as I said it, despite being unable to know what I meant. When I’m feeling uncharitable towards myself, I think I must have meant that things would be ok for me. She would die, but I would carry on. Now I wonder if it was the certainty that I found so reassuring.