Knockin’

“Mama, take these chains off-a me,” sang Bob Dylan. “Cause I don’t want them anymore.” While the argument rages on about whether Brexit really means Brexit, with the Remain side’s increasingly unhinged spokespeople claiming to know what was in the very heart of the Leavers as they cast their ballot, the truth is very simple. We want to leave. We don’t want to be like Norway or Iceland, or any other country; that is the whole point. We leave the European Union and there’s an end to it. Free trade? Fine, if it’s on offer but hey, we’re not interested in any continued membership disguised as a trade deal.

“Take the chains off?” they seem to be saying, “What on earth can they mean?” and then they go on to suggest that we should leave the chains on and just, you know, maybe lengthen them a little. Because it’s the chains that keep you safe, you see? They are good chains, they are nice chains. They are beautiful, hand-crafted, shiny, tailor-made chains... what’s not to like about the chains? Our response is simply to repeat the perfectly clear original request, but Mama ain’t listenin’.

Okay, so you say – you saaay – you don’t like the chains. But we don’t think it’s the chains that are the problem. We wear the chains ourselves and we quite like them; maybe you just need to wear them a while longer, until you forget they are there? Would a different colour help? Yes, I know you keep saying you don’t want the chains, we get that. And we know you had a referendum on it and all that but not everybody voted to lose the chains. And in any case, what do you mean by ‘take off the chains’? You don’t seem to have a plan to take them off and according to what we tell ourselves we hear, many of you have changed your mind.

What? Oh no, you can’t just take off the chains, not all by yourselves! You see, this is what happens when you campaign for forty years on a single issue. People actually believed you when you said they were voting to lose the chains; can’t you see how irresponsible that was? People actually thought that the chains were the problem and now they don’t understand why you can’t just remove them. Think again; maybe you should ask them all to vote in a second referendum; you might get a better answer. You know, to clear things up.

Still no? We can see the problem here and it is our fault, really. For the low information voters out there – the ones who voted to lose the chains - we clearly haven’t put enough effort into explaining what is good about the chains. We need to spend some money on an information campaign to explain that they aren’t real chains at all, they are only metaphorical chains. Does that feel any better? We can put it in writing if you like, maybe work up some legislation? Would that help at all?

Chains? What chains?

We have listened to your cry for help and our research tells us that it’s not the chains per se that people are objecting to but the wrong kind of chains. In fact, when we really explained it all to our focus groups they told us that, far from getting rid of the chains, what they really want is more chains. And it’s not freedom of movement that’s the worry, it’s losing the freedom of movement that all those chains actually give you. “They’re getting too damn heavy, and I’m crawling across the floor...” No wonder Dylan had to keep on knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door.

On Autumn

Remember the old adage “Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves?” While we are all distracted, watching the flood of migrants threatening to engulf all of western civilisation we ignore at our peril the smaller ways in which our culture has been progressively dismantled. For instance, have you noticed the quiet removal of the once common Chelsea bun from our supermarket shelves, to be replaced by the bland ubiquity of chocolate chip brioche rolls or the evil mass-produced 'Victory Croissant'?  You haven’t? Well I bloody well have; my search for Chelsea buns has now covered four counties and as many supermarket chains.

Is uniformly inoffensive Euro-fare to eventually erase all traces of parochial identity from the national diet? How long before we lose the Yorkshire pud? And is there a future for the Bakewell tart, Eton mess and Melton Mowbray pies? The evil Margarita Fatcha closed down the once-famous jam butty mines of Knotty Ash and the French have long envied and despised our Stilton cheese. It's all a big conspiracy against differentiation and the nation state, I tells ya!

The world turns on its axis and tilts us away from the sun and before we are aware of it the changes creep in. Each day we lose several minutes of daylight but in our busy lives we only notice it properly after nature has already registered this annual climate change. Last night I went for a short walk and saw fully-formed conkers amid browning leaves, ripe elderberries already producing purple pigeon shit and that great harbinger of middle class autumn – sloes, already fat and purple and dusted with their characteristic yeasty bloom. While the eternally confirmation-biased anthropogenic global warming mob register this as proof of their doom-laden thesis, the rest of us simply recognise the inevitability of the seasons.

Autumn has long been used as a metaphor for ageing; the mellow fruitfulness a simile for the ripening of wisdom atop old shoulders, with the earlier nightfall heralding our own shorter days – have you seen how they fly by once you pass fifty? The rich hedgerow harvest, if you are able to avail yourself of it, is akin to the rewards for making hay while the sun shone, while those long, wet days sat staring from rain-streaked windows is a hint at the helplessness that comes to us all. But the thing about the real autumn, as opposed to an individual’s autumn is that it isn’t the only one; we have a chance to start over again come spring.

Conkers? Bollocks, more like!

And just as I am not yet ready to lie down and accept old age gracefully, nor should the individual nations of Europe accept that their day is done. “Do not go gentle into that good night” wrote Dylan Thomas “Old age should burn and rave at close of day;” While the mature governments of the world seem to accept as inevitable that our cultures must change and the familiar be forever lost – bizarrely ‘diversity’ makes us ever less capable of difference – it is up to the civilised populations of those benighted countries to stand up to their masters and to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”