ON THE ABSENCE OF UNICORNS



Much will be missing in any post-Brexit Britain,  many jobs will be gone, of course, but the cultural landscape will have changed. The confident cosmopolitanism of London will have gone, replaced by a sort of cultural depression, whilst the rest of the country will retreat into an ever more angry and xenophobic siege mentality, as the consequences of Brexit hit home. This made manifest by the lost jobs, shrinking of the economy and as country after country decline to agree on trading terms not weighted against us. In short, people will have to face a clear absence of unicorns.

The Lions, of course,  left long ago, and good riddance, they were trouble makers, and yet when our backs were against the wall they were nowhere to be found. It was left to the people to do the fighting. Some will imagine they see and hear lions still, of course, but this is not difficult as lions do actually exist and under certain circumstances, an angry street cat can sound like a lion. Unicorns, on the other hand, being mythical creatures are much harder to conjure up and their absence will be, well, noticeable.  
 It is a perverse human characteristic that people who have been duped, swindled, conned rarely place the blame for their predicament on those who misled them. For to do so they would have to admit to gullibility and to being a victim, bringing feelings of inadequacy, shame and the risk of ridicule. No, someone else must be to blame, the outsiders, the freeloaders, the ‘other.’

Once the word treachery gets bandied about thoughts of murder is rarely far behind, images of the gallows, the rope, the sniper gun sights, start appearing like dark spring flowers after rain. We see them already,  they will proliferate in the wreckage created by Brexit.

Some people never become fully adult, the intensity of childhood or adolescent success or failure dogs them like an edgy Alsatian. The same is true of countries that are unable to transcend past glories.  They are stuck, not in actual adolescence but in something much more damaging, in a dreamlike state, immersed in nostalgia for things that never were.
When awakening suddenly they perceive themselves to be cheated, that there are no unicorns. The absence of which is apt to lead to thoughts of revenge.   




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