Thread by @jonworth

Today I am calm. Surprisingly calm.

Today feels like the very end of a break up. My break up with the UK.

For me it started in the 2010-2012 period when I was still living in London.

First it was political. I became estranged from the political party - Labour - I’d joined as a teenager. I was worried about a future EU referendum. I wrote this in 2012. jonworth.eu/i-give-up/

I left the UK for Denmark first, in 2013, for personal reasons.

I moved on to Berlin in 2014 and a political move to the German Grüne followed.

I explained that here:
jonworth.eu/why-im-leaving…

The months pre Brexit referendum I concerned myself mostly with getting Brits overseas to register to vote.

An old Labour Party friend who by then was quite senior in the Remain camp told me that there should be no role for me in the campaign. “You believe too strongly in the EU” she wrote on Facebook. “You come across as weird.”

That period now feels like one of those in a relationship where you ask yourself “well, if I’d only done that, then, might it have turned out differently?”

Perhaps.

But looking back I didn’t see the urgency to all this before 23 June 2016. I was complacent.

Next came a period of furious activity that lasted more or less up until October this year where I sought to diagnose the problems - through blog posts and flow diagrams (and no, I don’t flow-diagram my actual relationships!)

While I grew to be pretty good at diagnosing the problems, I nevertheless grew emptier still - I could see what was going wrong, but couldn’t begin to fix it. It was drifting away.

Did I do the right things during this period? I don’t know. Perhaps I was still in denial it could all be saved still.

And then we reach the frantic end. Like that stupid Nickelback song where he’s screaming at her and she’s smashing her suitcase on the ground.

I threw everything I had at the tactical voting effort. The polls didn’t move. Johnson won. And the final hope was extinguished.

So today I have closure.

I can’t have the relationship back. Tears were shed on 24 June 2016. But they weren’t shed today.

This relationship is done. It’s time to move on.

That’s not to say I don’t care. I do. In the same way anyone cares for people with whom they’ve had intimate relationships. But I’m not fighting for it any more.

I won’t be blanking the UK. But nor will I be so furiously obsessing over it either.

/ends