The Politics of ...

The Politics of ...

Monday 20 June 2016

More Than A Feeling

You are 14. You have just met the most fantastic boy/girl. Inside 24 hours you are in love; smitten and wrapped in a warm fuzzy sensation no drug can really truly replicate. When you profess your love for this other new and brilliant person in your life, you are looked at in the same way you were looked at when you were six and farted at the dinner table. "It's how I feel!" You plead with your mum, who knows, all too well, what you are experiencing.

You are 21. It's Grand National weekend and you like a flutter on the Grand National. It's a national pastime, innit? You saw the runners and riders a week ago and you had this sneaky feeling about Bold Future. You think it is going to win. It's 25/1. All week you convince yourself that the odd feeling - that may well have been wind - when you first saw the horses' names is the feeling; the one that is lined with gold.

You are in your 50s - not quite in the baby boomer generation, but old enough to remember the world of three TV channels, ringing telephones that were simply just ... telephones and men with leather patches on their elbows and shoulders of their brown corduroy jackets. You have been 'a European' for 4/5ths of your life and the other fifth you were so young you had no real comprehension of the world around you. Contrary to popular belief most kids that wander around the world up to the age of about 10 do so with an awe-inspired open-mouthed acceptance. You are influenced by what you hear more than what you see because people don't have a tendency to shove pictures in people's faces to continually emphasise a point the way they do with words. Words stick, just ask the mum who inadvertently mutters the word 'fuck' almost under her breath and now has a child running around the house shouting FUCK at the top of its voice.

You are in your 50s and that means you're not too far away from something that seems almost ridiculous - retirement. What you are looking at is your pension, your security and your family (not necessarily in that order, but politics has a tendency to re-prioritise peoples lives) and whether or not you're going to get NHS treatment in the future, because if you haven't started going wrong, it's sitting around the corner waiting to pounce. For the first time in your life you are actually actively thinking about the future, because you've flushed 50-odd years down the toilet and you ain't got that much time left to replay it all again. Tell a 16-year-old he should stop smoking because they will suffer for it when they're 50, they will, almost quite rightly, point out that that's over 30 years away and you didn't listen to the people who told you the same thing.

You might be younger and be reading this thinking carpe diem or death and glory, but trust me, it's like death and taxes, it is something you will do and when you do it's usually with worst case scenarios just to ratchet up the fear factor. You will slow down. You will see time pass without real comprehension.

Now, I'm gobsmacked that we've had 16 years of the 21st Century already. I mean, where did that go? It's like my world has been encased in a select bubble that because it is ageing with me I'm only aware of the numbers. So with that in mind you realise without ever realising it while it is happening that your life becomes reasonably ordered and steady and staid and even a bit boring, but usually it is comfortable and bollocks to going clubbing this weekend, my legs are aching from doing the gardening... It. Just. Happens.

Therefore what you want from the future is that unconscious security you've been experiencing since whenever it started. At least that is my feeling. I'd like that unconscious security to be in Wigtownshire and involve as little work as possible and I'm sure everyone else also has their idyll knocking around in their heads. I'd like to make one last adventure in a life that, compared to my father, has been relatively conservative (SMALL C) despite my belief that it's been more cosmopolitan than many people I've met. I feel that a move will be the best thing I can do with whatever life I have left; the idea of something new doesn't, in the slightest, fill me with dread, but an electric current-like frisson of possibilities and positives.

But, you know, I have COPD, which isn't going away and a history of back and shoulder problems and no private pension to speak of. The wife has family she needs to be around because of her mum's ill health and moving to Scotland would be a massive movement of everything away from everything we know. Still, it's a feeling I think needs to be tried, even if it goes extraordinarily tits up.

What I've just been talking about is what an enormous amount of people I have met on my travels think about the EU Referendum. Obviously not that exactly, but because it is a feeling they have and it doesn't matter how much you can prove to them that the most sensible thing is to RemaIN/Leave, they have a feeling, goddammit! You can't argue with feelings. Look what happens when you question feelings: "Boss, having spoken to that Jimmy Savile fella I've got a nasty feeling he's a wrong'un." And feelings, especially when they've been precognitive, tend to stick in your mind. The 50,000 other feelings that were so wide of the mark they're exiting the known universe next week are always forgotten about. Benign feelings tend to mutate into rose-tinted nostalgia.  Feelings are what are likely to drive even the most responsible of people and of course if everyone with feelings were exempt from voting that would leave the psychopaths...

It doesn't matter what you see that suggests what you do is going to essentially butt-fuck you for the rest of your life, because if you remember that girl/boy you fell in love with when you were 14, you know that you would have walked 30 miles over broken glass in bare feet just to put matchsticks in her shit and that is what this is like. Yes, so I sank my life savings on Bold Future and it broke its neck at the first, I have the rest of my life in front of me. I feel that voting out is the best thing and even if that means my life will become one long continuous nightmare of poverty, alienation and hate...

The 14 year old boy/girl is now 54; he/she is 100lbs overweight, has umpteen children, varicose veins and piles. She/he lives in a housing association shed and thinks having the new iphone is more important than feeding the kids healthily. The words 'sausages', 'Mersey' and 'tunnel' are often used in connection with her. Do I need to carry on?

Ask yourself this, especially if you have a feeling about this referendum. Are you really prepared to risk everything you have and everything your kids might have on the basis of feeling it might be the right thing to do?

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