You Can Thank Brexit for That Abstract Dread You're Feeling

Ah, sorry to say this, but "Brexit". I know, I know. Me too, me too. But, look, listen: you’re going to have to talk about it with some member of your family or other over Christmas, so you may as well face it now. A satellite uncle or cousin, or something, someone who comes in from smoking outside the kitchen window (your mum is going spare about the butts, big "not in the plant pots!" energy), rubbing their hands from the cold and saying, "What about Brexit, uh?" Your dad, six snowballs deep, "just wants to play devil’s advocate" over Scrabble. Some paper-thin elderly lad your grandma won't admit is her boyfriend even though they’ve been co-habiting for eight years stirs from his usual dinner table silence to say, "It's about identity."

And you will sit there, raging about the whole thing – the freedom to travel Europe freely robbed away from you, the injustice of the proposed immigration policy, the sheer archaic olde worlde backwardsness of it, this strange nationwide hard-on we apparently have for "that time we were really good at navy" – and you want to shout them down, to win every argument, to march them all back to the polling stations to rub out their vote. But instead you sit there and say nothing. Instead, you sit there and go: well, hmm. I mean, what the fuck actually is Brexit?

Nobody knows, and this is the frustration of it. Brexit is as large and unknowable and shapeless as God. The Bible for this is a million-page document currently being gone through with a pencil by someone the Daily Mail hates called "Jean-Claude Juncker". There is no further information. Call Theresa May up, right now. Call her up and hold the line until she comes to the phone. "Terry, it’s me: what’s Brexit?" And Theresa May fumbles and leans forward like a crooked old rake and goes: "Oh, gosh. I— well, of course Brexit is— the will of the peop—"

The Will of the People has got us into this mess, and we can see the mess like ketchup on the floor (if you are searching for mess: just look at the pound, the pound is never good), but we cannot see the cause of it, what actually tipped the bottle. Brexit hasn’t even happened yet, it has just threatened to, an ominous grey cloud looming before a storm. Consider that: that Brexit has not even happened yet, and yet [gestures, generally, out the window and at the air all around]. Consider we are still three months away from one of the most embarrassing displays of celebration in human history: on the 29th of March, everyone who voted Leave who is still alive enough to do it will wave a little Union flag and clap, Nigel Farage will gurn his lizard lips around a horrid brown pint and Sky News will focus on a old man in a flag-patterned tuxedo, single tear, quiet proud sobbing. And that, remember, is when the mess will really happen. Right now, it’s just shapeless, formless pre-mess, and we are still being jerked around by forces and shapes unknowable. Think what the explosions will be like when we bother to drop the bomb.

It’s hard, then, to pin down exactly what this indistinct feeling of hopelessness we’re all feeling is. Right? We’re all feeling this, right? I am not just going berserk: consider the small space between your ribs and your stomach, where the anxious feelings most often rise from, and acknowledge that sort of mild, gentle, low hum of dread that sings there. It’s not sharp dread, or immediate dread, but something more nagging: like knowing you haven’t been to the dentist recently enough, or remembering you really have to pass an exam that’s scheduled next year. Abstract dread, like calculating the likelihood that – somewhere, right now – someone is being mean about you in a WhatsApp thread you’re not a part of. For something that still doesn’t exist yet, Brexit has a remarkable ability to make it feel like the world is going to explode underneath us in a way that makes our knees buckle into the scorching rubble beneath. And the Leave lot still seem to have this detached, cheerful feeling of hope about it, despite the fact I'm pretty sure the main reason they voted out was they had the thought, 'Huh: you don’t see white dog shit around much anymore, do you?' on the exact same day the NHS bus rolled past their house.

In short: Brexit has put us in a purgatory of feeling and we must spend Christmas explaining to aunties that, while hopeful for heaven, we feel condemned to hell.

The politics of chaos we have all been subjected to recently does not exactly help unmuddy the puddle. Infighting reigns: last week, Theresa May faced a No Confidence vote from within her own party, and inexplicably won (the threat if she didn’t win was: much more, much worse, chaos. Our best scenario right now is "not that much chaos"); a week later, she fended off a half-hearted attempt at the same thing being called across the Commons by Corbyn. The Brexit Deal announced earlier this month seemed to piss off everyone alive, Remain or Leave, and the Meaningful Vote on it has been delayed until January, squealing up against the final Brexit deadline of March. Every seemingly massive in-Parliament calamity intensifies the nagging anxious feeling but also cements the dreadful inevitability of it all: we won’t get a second referendum, we won’t get a No Deal, we’ll get a very rubbish deal and that’s about it. We’ve not just shot ourselves in the foot: we’ve yelled "LOOK, EUROPE!", got everyone’s eyes on us, held their gaze for two straight years while pulling insane faces, and then shot ourselves in the foot. And as we bleed out, quietly sobbing about fishing quotas and the Backstop, 51.89 percent of us will cheer the wound.

Do I particularly know what I'm talking about? No: Brexit is still the intangible terror. We discuss Brexit every day in our morning editorial meeting – "What’s Brexit, then?" normally, then everyone turns to look at our politics editor, Simon, who just sort of shrugs – and we still don’t know much more than just the fact it’s there, looming, waiting, a formless shapeless thing that is about to ruin every Christmas dinner table conversation and then, in quick succession, most of our lives. Is this how we’re going to feel forever? Lost in a sort of dreamlike fog of news, hoping that, at some point, a real adult will stand up and say, "Can we just admit we fucked it and not do Brexit?"? Will the carnage make more sense on the 30th of March, when we know the true size of it? Impossible to know, but easy to predict: no, probably not, we’ve fucked it and we’ve fucked it forever, I still don’t know what Brexit is but I hate it with my life, it will not leave this country alone. But until then, enjoy the formless feeling of nervousness you have about it. You’re not the only one who’s worried about something they can’t define.

@joelgolby