About June 2016: And then Brexit

Brexit was the inevitability that nobody (including a number of its high-profile supporters, apparently) saw coming. I was out of the country for most of the run-up so maybe my excuse for missing the surge of contrarian fuck-you that propelled the Leave vote over the line is more plausible than that of those who were supposedly leading the campaign to stay. But I was in London on polling day itself and awoke to the news the following morning that, as I put it at the time: 

...my country, the land of Shakespeare and Churchill and Bez out of the Happy Mondays, is regressing into a 1950s-style suburban dystopia where people run away in terror at the sight of subtitled movies, and are turned to feral rage by the merest sniff of balsamic vinegar. 

I was sad, but not yet angry. What changed that was the contribution of someone who hadn’t voted to leave but clearly thought leaving was a very good idea (even if “clearly”, “thought” and “idea” are concepts that don’t exactly settle easily on him.)

Donald Trump, at that time best known for cosplaying a successful businessman on a reality TV show, arrived in Scotland and tweeted that everyone was delighted after they “took their country back” despite the fact that those north of the border had voted two-to-one to remain. For many people, not just Scots, this explosion of idiocy (mild compared to his later episodes, granted, but we had no idea) just added to the sense of hurt. And we took to Twitter, because in those days that’s what Twitter was for. And I called him a “witless fucking cocksplat”.

And then it all kicked off, to be honest. I was lumped in with something apparently called Scottish Twitter, which was nice because they were even ruder, calling him among other things a “knuckle-brained fart lozenge”, a “degenerate corned beef face syrup wearing wankstain” and a “hamster heedit bampot”. And, for the first and only time in my life I went properly viral and David Tennant read out my tweet on American telly and it was all lovely and Brexit was still a thing but, hey, at at least Trump wasn’t going to become President, was he? I mean, the world couldn’t go *that* mad.

PS: AI airbrushes me from history once again...