Patriotism Watch: Today Feels Weird, Doesn't It?

Who is being patriotic? No one, really, anymore; even Leave voters seem to have given up on viciously loving their country.

How is it being patriotic? I suppose, in a way, the government is being patriotic, by driving the stake of The People’s Will into the heart of itself, a vampire murdering itself and turning into dust, a Titanic slowly crawling into an iceberg it can clearly see. Even though "rendering the country in twain, crumbling the economy and flirting heavily with the possibility of fucking rations" is quite – on balance – an unpatriotic thing to do, (hurting the country for at least a generation is not very pro-country, is it?), the fact that they’re doing it because roughly half of us asked them to two years ago, before really realising what it meant, is a sort of one-note form of patriotic expressionism, I guess.

What’s the deal? January now, and the evenings are unfurling from jet-black darkness at 4PM to something more gauzy, a little lighter: last night, I walked home and serenely listened to a podcast about cults, cut by only a little wind as the sky turned from black-blue to something darker, like a bruise. Then I got home, reheated some dinner, briefly checked Twitter and noted: yes, the government had suffered a historic Commons defeat, the heaviest in almost a hundred years; the Labour opposition had tabled a vote of no confidence, set to be discussed today; the vague knife-like threat of a general election hangs poised in the air; we’re still not really any closer to knowing what’s happening with Brexit. I closed my phone with a bizarrely detached air – we have, in the last two years, seen surely the most instances of "people in hats yelling in the middle of Westminster Square" in history, and I didn’t really need to see it again – then two episodes of The Office, a little Red Dead Redemption, a load of laundry then bed. It’s hard to be moved by the chaos anymore.

That said, this morning feels different, and it’s worth putting a thermometer up the national rectum and taking a temperature check on how we’re feeling today – here, in the aftermath, crunched concrete lying around us in blocks, exposed electrical cables quietly hissing. It feels like we’ve struck on a weird new portmanteau national mood today: a combination of hysteria and disdain, eye-rolling exhaustion and an urgent need to assemble, confused to the point of not knowing, but also very dreadful, a chimera feeling of "bad" and also "unphasedly baffled".

Newspapers have taken to asking Leave and Remain voters what they make of it all, and the two opposing winds – previously "let's leave Europe, Britain is fucking ace" and "let’s stay in Europe, I need European drugs and food supplies in order to live" – have changed to two vague light breezes: "we voted to Leave, not for this bad deal" and "really, now, would a general election even fucking help?" Brexit, for a while now, has been phenomenally embarrassing, but it failing at this late hurdle but still – with grim inevitability – limping towards the finishing line regardless, just makes it even more so. With the Commons defeat and the ensuing no confidence tabling, Theresa May has been issued with history’s biggest ever "shit or get off the pot" notice, but in this case it’s "shit or someone else will get on the pot and have the shit, the shit needs to be had now, I don’t care who has the shit but someone simply must shit; also somehow the shit involves Ireland". If the tail end of last year felt like an endless political limbo, this feels like the same thing, but with stabbing pains: the 29th of March deadline looms, we’re either going to leave Badly or Very Badly, and those are about the only two options I can see at this point, and that’s probably the only ones you can really see, too.

Exactly one year ago the mood was different: this column was initially provoked by the bombastic Daily Mail front page headline "STEEL OF THE NEW IRON LADY", which painted May as a Hollywood-glam Thatcher reboot, who wasn’t about to take any shit from these damned Europeans. That feels… wrong, now, doesn’t it? That closed-eyes hope really does feel like a distant memory from a long-dead past:

It seems that we’ve had something momentous and Brexit-shaped happen in this country once-a-fortnight minimum for a full year now, and still the whole thing creaks and staggers forward. This morning has a tangible "oh fucking hell, what now" texture to it, but it’s also not that much different from other high points in the Brexit timeline: every time May has announced a press conference where it really felt like she’d resign; when that lad in Parliament grabbed the mace; the constant, hollow threat of a second referendum.

How does this morning feel? It feels weird: on one side, snatched hope, like your football team just missed out on Champions League qualification by one point, or you lost out on a job you had three interviews for and really thought you’d got; on the other side, very much nothing at all, a numbness of shock; and in the middle, a high quiet note of doom. Jokes about stockpiling tinned food are genuinely way less funny than they were 24 hours ago. That’s never the best sign, is it?

Patriotism rating: At once both zero and five, so I’m giving the entire day a firm 2.5 Brexits out of Brexit

@joelgolby