Mother’s Ruin – Brexit, Gin and Boris Johnson

Let’s take stock of the world today, shall we? The President of The United States is Donald Trump. A man I can best describe as the Biff Tannen of American politics. The Prime Minister of Great Britain is Boris Johnson. A man I can only describe as the Boris Johnson of British Politics, purely because I’m seriously scratching my head to think of anyone, or indeed any thing to compare him to. Well, not without getting excessively scatological.

North Korea is cheerfully flinging missiles in Japan’s direction. India and Pakistan – the only two nuclear powers who probably would use their atom bombs on each other – are rattling sabres over Kashmir again. And Britain seems to be hurtling towards that cliff edge that is a no deal Brexit. On Halloween of all days. Nice touch. Seeing as Halloween is said to be the day of the year where the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead is at its thinnest, I’m crossing my fingers that some of our ancestors will tear through that veil, march into 10 Downing street and have a bit of a word. Scare them into pulling the iron out of the fire at the eleventh hour. Not Boris Johnson’s ancestors, obviously. The’ll probably just cheer him on. Maybe Winston Churchill could give it a go. Having a “United States Of Europe” was his idea after all. A fact which Brexiteers who cite patriotism as their motivating factor seem to conveniently forget. And yes, I know that technically speaking, the Halloween deadline is off, but I don’t trust Boris not to try something at the last minute. Not that I’m accusing him of being wily. He has about as much guile and cunning as a half brick casually lobbed by a man wearing a blindfold. He is clever enough to hire people who are cunning though, so keep an eye out until the first of November is what I’m saying.

All of this is a bit of a worry. Every time I switch on the news, the old 1980s comedy “Whoops Apocalypse” keeps popping into my head. That may be a bit of hyperbole on my brain’s part, but the fact remains that whatever happens, the next few years for us Brits are going to be bloody rough. In times such as this, people tend to start stockpiling things. So, what are they stockpiling?

The rich aren’t stockpiling anything, because they already have most of it. The poor and the working class aren’t stockpiling anything either because they can’t afford to. Which just leaves the middle class. What are they stashing aside? Well, unfortunately for me, and fortunately for you, I work in retail, so I can tell you. I can’t tell who I work for, obviously. But I can say this. If you were to meet me outside of work hours and you happened to drop the word “quinoa” into the conversation, there’s a fifty fifty chance that I’d punch you in the face. Especially if you pronounced “quinoa” correctly. This would be purely a reflex action on my part with no malice behind it. Just a sort of exaggerated twitch. With a fist on the end of it.

People are not stockpiling dry goods, loo roll and candles as you might expect. And they’re definitely not stockpiling quinoa. That’s not surprising though, because quinoa is disgusting. They do buy it, but strictly for show because it’s sort of the food equivalent of Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History Of Time”. Both quinoa and that book are for display purposes only and very few people would even consider opening up either item and interacting with their contents in any meaningful way.

No, all the usual stuff that people are expected to buy when they think the balloon’s about to go up are selling pretty much as normal. The sales of one thing, however, are going through the roof. Gin.

Now, gin has had something of a major face lift in recent years. Most gin no longer comes in green bottles that look like they belong on the shelves of a Victorian apothecary and should have a skull and cross bones printed on the back. Most gin no longer tastes like liquid despair. It’s fruity. Botanical. Toffee flavoured even. But they can make it as small batch and artisanal as they like. It’s still fucking gin. It’s still the drink Hogarth had in mind when he etched “Gin Lane”. It’s still revenge on Britain by the Dutch for beating them at colonialism. Back in the day,those cheeky Netherlanders sold us this misery juice while they were sniggering  behind their hands and enjoying the far happier drink that is Advocaat. A drink so smiley and innocuous in nature that we even give a little bit to our kids at Christmas time.

No one in their right mind would give their kids even a thimble full of gin, no matter what the occasion. Gin is a staircase drink. It’s what you knock back when you’re sad and you want to feel even sadder. It’s drunk by women who, by tradition, are often called Karen. Sometimes Linda. But mostly Karen. Though this tradition may well change as the years go by. When I was a kid back in the 70s, I knew one woman called Molly. She was a friend of my mum’s and she was eighty years old if she was a day. Nowadays, every other teenage girl seems to be called Molly. The naming of daughters, like many things in life, has patterns which repeat themselves.

Anyway, to explain what I mean by a staircase drink- in case you haven’t already guessed- let’s picture Karen. Or Linda. Or indeed Molly if you’re feeling modern. Okay, let’s just go with Karen. There she sits at the bottom of her staircase, mobile phone in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other. Very much more gin than tonic. She’s in her late thirties, or possibly her very early forties. It’s half ten at night and she’s still wearing her work clothes. With nylon clad toes, she frets and worries at her shag pile staircase carpet as she weeps and bemoans her latest disastrous relationship to her best friend at the other end of the phone.

Technically speaking, in this era of digital technology, she doesn’t really need to be sitting at the bottom of her staircase. But some sort of ancestral herd memory recalls the days when telephones were kept on little tables in the hallway, so at the foot of the stairs she sits.

“Why does this always happen to me?” wails Karen, all snot and runny mascara. And this is what her best friend probably wants to say to her:

“Well, darling” says the best friend sympathetically, “you will insist on dating flash wankers. And as time has marched on and your looks have declined a bit, these blokes have got a lot less flash and a lot more wanky. I know bad boys are exciting and all that, but most girls get to about 25 and realize that the job isn’t worth the candle. That it’s time to put the toys back in the box and get on with being an adult and not a teenager. Because, guess what? Nice blokes have cocks too, and they’re usually a lot more considerate about how and where they wield them. So why don’t you look through your contacts list and try ringing one of the men you’ve arbitrarily friend zoned on the basis that they are not complete pricks. Try fucking a grown up for a change, rather than messing around with overgrown man babies is what I’m telling you”.

Now, Karen’s best friend may well couch those sentiments in less harsh terms. Go around the houses a bit more and ask a few more questions to get Karen to come to this conclusion on her own. Then again, solely out of frustration, she might well use those exact words. Doesn’t really matter, because Karen isn’t going to remember it in the morning anyway. Due to the gin.

There are many Karens in this world. But older women playing “Weekend At Bernie’s” with their diminishing sexual market values do not explain the colossal increase in the sales of gin in this country.  Back before the Credit Crunch, Brits bought 630 million pounds worth of gin a year. Last year, we bought 2 billion pounds worth of gin. Even taking inflation into account,that’s a fuck of a lot more gin. And quite a large chunk of this increase has occurred since the Brexit referendum in 2016. That’s not a coincidence in my opinion.

The trouble with Brexit is that there really is nothing anyone can do about it. The rich actively want it because it gives them so many more opportunities to rob the poor. There may well be a general election, but we still have a first past the post voting system, so the poor and the working class voting as they always do won’t make much difference. And the middle classes are too busy drowning their sorrows in mother’s ruin to care. Which just leaves your Millennials and your Gen Z’ers.

So, that’s us screwed then. These people don’t have any power. And even if they did, they’re too busy titting about having a good time to use it. Which, to be fair to them, is exactly what you should be doing when you’re young. They simply don’t have the worries that we had at their age. The gig economy means they aren’t expected to hold down full time jobs or have what people of my age would consider to be a career. They will never be sweating over a mortgage because no bank is ever going to grant them one. They are doomed to live forever with mum and dad or in communal houses like perpetual students. So they just weave around towns on their scooters and skateboards, vaping and erecting pop up cereal shops. And inventing new words and phrases when perfectly serviceable one are already in place.

Now, I know humankind has been doing this since the dawn of time. When people accuse words of being “made up”, they often forget that all words are made up. But I’m getting old and if you don’t keep up, it’s like everyone is talking in code. Take the phrase “On Fleek” for example. I haven’t bothered to look it up in Urban Dictionary, but I’ve still got a few of my marbles left, so I think I’ve worked it out from context. “On Fleek” appears to be almost exclusively used in reference to young ladies’ eyebrows. And from what I’ve seen, it would seem to mean the same as that old World War 2 phrase “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition”. Why the young ladies who post photos of their eyebrows being Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition rather after they’ve had them fixed though is, I have to admit, utterly beyond me.

I am joking there, of course. I know exactly what these young ladies think they mean by “On Fleek”. I just don’t like what they’re doing with their eyebrows. Audrey Hepburn tried that “On Fleek” look back in the 1950s and even she couldn’t carry it off.

Still, I’m just an old dinosaur. Fashions of all sorts come and go. The world moves on as it always has. Sadly, British politics does not. There’s nothing we can do about Brexit other than hope that Boris Johnson is cleverer than he looks in is just indulging in a spot of old fashioned brinkmanship. And if you want to do that with a gin and tonic in your hand, I’m sure it won’t do too much harm. As long as you’re not weeping onto your shagpile staircase carpet.

Copyright Michael Grimes 2019