European Son

What will you be doing in this the last week before we are wrenched out the body of Europe like a grumbling appendix granted self-governance and sovereignty, and left to moulder in kidney dish with a smug look on its face? The sick man of Europe finally gets a private room but he can ring the bell as much as he wants - the nurse will never come.

I live in Ireland but it is the Ireland that isn't Ireland so I'm still in the UK. Where I live voted to remain, like Scotland did, but that doesn't matter now because youlostgetoverit. Fine. I am expected to be mature and a good sportsman and slap my brother Brexiters on the back even as they - still unaccountably furious about their succession of victories - rail about their not being able to get at Big Ben and why are there still black people on adverts?

I wasn't actually born into the EU and now, unless I get very clumsy in the next week, it looks like I wont die in the EU. Being properly European was a blip, an aberration in this nation's island history, rather like the National Health Service will prove to be. I rather liked both those things but my views don't matter - I am statistically negligible. I should have children and a job and money and property and live in the real world. But I don't live in the real world and I don't have any of those things and at my age that's quite an achievement.   

I shall miss being European. I love Europe. I love the people. I love the food. I love the films. I love the music. I love the dancing. I love the weather, the different landscapes, the smell of different countries, the different quality of the light. I like the peculiar histories, the folk culture, the architectural strangeness. I like the difference.

Britain wants to be different from difference, to be exceptional, to be its own separate and immutable clod.

A fortress built by nature for bellicose golf club tipplers,
Against infection and the possibility of someone nicking your job,
This unhappy breed of men,
This little Britain,
This damp rock dropped in a puddle, which serves it as fair warning about the weather and the greeting you'll get here,
Against the envy of countries that are looking on utterly bemused,
This benighted plot, this dearth, this ream, this England. And Wales. And Cornwall.

This week I shall mostly be wearing a beret and lederhosen. I shall be eating Italian ice cream, French frog's legs and Swedish meatballs. I shall enjoy the cinema of Truffaut, Bergman and Tinto Brass. I shall read poetry by Valery, Rilke and Levi. I shall read the novels of Calvino, Herge, Huysmans. I shall listen to Berlioz, Brel and Baccara. I shall douse myself in the perfumes of Guerlain and drape myself from head to toe in Agnes B.* I shall get gut-rottingly decadent on Bordeaux, Bessa Valley and Blue Nun**.

I shall be the last European Englishman. Because I am European and I always will be. I choose Europe. Little Britain will eat itself and shit itself out and I'll still be dreaming of Berlin, of Brussels, Of Paris. Of Torremolinos.

*No, I can't afford this.

**I'm still off the pop and doing very well, thank you.