Sheila’s the real deal over Europe
SO, it’s Brexit then. We are on course for uncharted waters; a result that even the now jubilant Nigel Farage did not foresee.
As the polls closed, he was all but admitting defeat but by 5am he was making an utterly distasteful speech about victory being won “without a single bullet being fired”.
I just don’t know what to say with any certainty except that I wish I had bought my holiday money on Wednesday. It is impossible to look forward at this point with so much debris obscuring the view.
The scale of dismantling this political structure we have been part of for more than 40 years is too great to contemplate. On a personal l evel, I don’t know what I am any more.
I’ve grown up thinking of myself as Scottish, British and European. Now, I’ve lost one of those l abels and another looks to be on a shoogly peg.
I can’t help thinki ng back to that Channel Four debate on Wednesday night. It captured the mood of this referendum campaign just perfectly. It was a total car crash – angry, disjointed, a bit bonkers and left you feeling like a deck chair that had been left out overnight in a tornado. At the point I tuned in, Sandie Shaw – yes, the same one who won 1967 Eurovision with Puppet On A String – was being pretty nastily slapped down by an extremely grumpy Jeremy Paxman and I began to panic that one of the kids had spiked my tea with paint stripper. To be fair, I was already a bit fragile because I’d spent two hours the night before resisting having my mind r e programmed by Boris Johnson. Take Back Control. Take Back Control. Ta k e Back Control. To be fair, it did work – I stuck a picture of Boris on the fridge and I haven’t reached for the wine bottle since… I also keep thinking back to Sheila Hancock’s contribution to the Channel Four debate.
I am a huge admirer of Sheila’s and not just as an actress. Once upon a time, she was a Loose Woman and we all hung on her every word. She brought wisdom, humour and a depth of experience to every conversation.
Twitter was abuzz with her on Wednesday night, mostly favourable, but I was poleaxed by one comment.
I’m loathe to repeat it but I will to make a point. It said: “She ( Sheila) started ranting about the war like a senile old grandma.”
Take the time to watch it and I would hope you would see something quite different. Sheila quietly but eloquently explained that she was a war baby and her father had fought against German troops. She didn’t shout or scream or hector or harangue.
She didn’t jab her finger or spit out pithy sound bites.
She just calmly spoke about how it felt to live through a change from the fiercest enmity to peaceful unity and why that led her to support staying in the EU.
Now, whether you agree with her conclusion or not, and clearly the majority did not, surely you are going to listen? That famous quote sprang to mind: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
One day this referendum we have just lived through will be consigned to the history books.
Maybe my young Twitter friend will tell her grandchildren about it.
What lessons will we learn, I wonder?