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Because I feel depressed about Brexit, here's an attempt to accentuate the positive: we, as a country, have been debating a problem - exhaustingly, carnivorously, but ultimately democratically - that every country around the world faces.
Globalisation brings huge advantages - so many, in fact, that it seems insane to those who benefit from them to want to put them in reverse. But it also imposes huge strains. The obligation to be a global citizen can inspire a yearning for the opposite: a turn to the local.
The resulting pressures are expressing themselves around the world, ironically, in highly distinctive ways. In France, they riot. In Turkey, they turn to memories of the Ottoman Empire. In the US, it's America First. In the UK, it's wrangles about parliamentary procedure.
It's easy to despair about the Brexit imbroglio. But rather parliamentary politics red in teeth and claw, democracy in the raw, than some of the other ways that the tension between global and local is being expressed. Odd though it seems, our parliamentary democracy is working.
As I say, I'm trying to cheer myself up...
And how better to cheer oneself up than with a good book?
