Tag Archives: Brexit

Babbo, bambina

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She could still remember how frightened she had been. She had been thirteen years old, her first time in Milan, a late birthday present from her parents. The stadium tour at the San Siro seemed to be more of a present for Papa but, later, he had followed them first round the shops and then the Duomo without complaint so they had all visited their own cathedrals. The trouble had started as they spilled out into the piazza.

There was a crowd of protesters gathering in the square, maybe three hundred or so people, dressed in a dazzling rainbow array of colours. Hoisted placards for Sinistra Italiana and Giustizia e Liberta jostled for attention and various chants and songs broke out, stalled, and eventually settled on a repeated call for freedom. Liberta, liberta, liberta. Leah’s parents exchanged a glance and her father pointed over to the other side of the square where a similarly sized group was beginning to form. Similar in size but immediately different in tone; scarves pulled up over the bottom of faces, balaclavas, flags, a few signs proclaiming for Lega Nord, some other banners Leah didn’t fully understand. Someone lit a flare, it fizzed into a red, steaming light, and launched it into the middle of the square.

Her parents pulled her across the square as quickly as they could as the groups converged. For years her father berated himself for not thinking, they should have just turned and gone back into the cathedral, waited it out. More flares were thrown and then, unseen by Leah until now, groups of Carabinieri armed with riot shields and batons charged the freedom group. They didn’t bother to disguise their allegiance and the square descended into panic as the ragtag representatives of the left were either beaten or chased away by the police and a mob. Her father wore a small lapel button in support of Sinistra Italiana. It was something he’d taken to wearing since they’d returned from Britain, his small gesture of defiance against what he saw as his country sliding, lurching to the right in the confusion after the outbreaks. As the Carabinieri passed them one lifted a baton as if to strike him. Papa! Babbo! She had shouted and tried to put herself in the way. Another policeman stopped, gestured at the Inter shirt he was still wearing under his jacket, and they exchanged a few words before opting to leave him alone. She heard them repeating ‘Babbo’ and laughing.

Her father had left Britain, taken them all back ‘home’, after the Brexit vote. Leah had never noticed anything really change but she didn’t have an accent, nothing changed in the playground, nobody told her it wasn’t her country. When Italy left the EU in ’23 her father seemed to retreat in to himself, as if he wanted to turn his back on all of it, bunker them down in their little corner of Lake Como and pretend that none of it affected them. And mostly it didn’t, not really, day to day. The lockdown protocols became stricter, the border controls tightened, they got used to curfews, sometimes understandable, sometimes seemingly arbitrary, and they got used to wearing a health tracking bracelet. But virtually the whole world got used to that. Italy wasn’t so special.

For her it had all seemed the other way round. She’d grown up in the Italy that he grew to despise but without any of the memories of how it’d been before. It was hard not to love the mountains around the great lake but all of the rose-tinted nostalgia she had was for her earlier childhood in Britain and she knew that was partly why she’d wanted to come back. It had broken his heart but it was breaking hers to stay.

The experience with Aps and the police station had shaken her more than she was prepared to admit to the others. Too many memories. She read the news, heard the stories, so she wasn’t sure why she’d been so shocked. Everyone knew you couldn’t be out without your Medlet, everyone knew the gist, if not the detail, of the Viral Health Act and the extensions to the Criminal Justice Bill. For her generation it had been like one of those sets of terms and conditions you get when you download an app, something you trusted was okay and clicked ‘accept’. For the greater good. Even when the health services were built back up after the neglect in the early ’00s and contact tracing was sorted out they never seemed to row back the changes in the legislation. She’d just gotten used to it like they all had as they cycled through the repeated outbreaks of the last nine years.

Leah picked up her phone and placed a video call home. Her mum picked up and they talked quietly, just like they usually did. She knew that Papa would appear briefly at some point, wave and then pretend that he had something that he was in the middle of. She’d never called him Babbo since that day in the square, it had felt like that day was her line between childhood and adolescence. It felt baby-ish. Bambina. She’d told him to stop calling her that.

He appeared over her mother’s shoulder, bent down and waved into the camera, almost immediately turning to move away.

“Babbo,” she called, almost without thinking. He stopped, half turned, and looked back at the screen. Leah was crying, the phone shaking slightly in her hand. Softly, over and over, she said ‘babbo’.

He put his hand on her mother’s shoulder, something in his grip must have signalled to her to move as she relinquished the chair so that he could sit and face into the computer screen they had set up on the kitchen table. The one where Leah had sat poring over her homework.

“Bambino,” he said. “Sono qui. I am here. I am here.”

Leah

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Her father didn’t understand and his English was good enough that it wasn’t the language barrier that separated them on her decision. He will come around. Her mother had tried to bridge the divide, like she always did, but perhaps she felt like this one was all her fault. Leah didn’t blame her but she didn’t want to stay either. She loved them but it wasn’t enough.

The ferry was back running after the temporary lock-down and she wanted to ride the loop around the lake one last time before she left. Ciao Lia. Andrea was running the boat today and smiled at her as she embarked, waving away her offer the fare. Gratuito. She touched her fingers to her lips by way of thanks. She’d helped out last summer, it had been a good season uninterrupted by any significant outbreak. There’d been a stretch of two months that had almost felt like the kind of summers that her father had told her about; the ones he’d been chasing after when he dragged them back from England. The town had needed the visitors. The subsidies weren’t enough.

The boat was almost empty so she slipped through the door at the stern. Pooled diesel spills on the surface caught refracted rainbows and she stared at them, lost in thought, until they abruptly disappeared in a surge of spray as Andrea gunned the throttle. She inhaled, wanting to hold that smell, rust and oil and the dirty water around the dock, in her memory. It reminded her of when they’d first arrived. An eight year old girl, bouncing in excitement, one hand on the rail, the other clutching her father’s hand as they watched the picture-perfect rows of yellow and orange houses loom larger and larger as they approached their new home. She remembered the mountains framing the town and asking if they were living in a fairytale. Am I the princess, papa? He had ruffled her hair and laughed. Sempre. Sempre. She hadn’t realised he had meant it quite so literally. She rode the ferry across to Varenna, on to Bellagio, and then back.

When she’d told him she thought that her choice of University might soften the blow. He knew Bristol, it was where him and mum had met, they’d even settled there a couple of years after she’d been born. He’d worked as chef whilst mum had juggled looking after her and studying for an accountancy qualification she never finished. They’d always wanted for him to open his own restaurant – I will show them the real Italian food – but it was tough to save in those early years. After the vote in 2016 something changed. Leah never understood why he stopped learning English, why she spent so many evenings lying on her bed listening to raised voices downstairs, or why, one day, her parents sat her down and told her they were going to move. We’re going home. She’d always thought that was an odd thing for her mum to say: she was from Clevedon.

At first it’d been everything her father had promised. He’d taken back on running the family pizzeria, making good on his boast to show off the authentic cooking of his homeland, mostly to tourists but respected enough locally to generate a steady flow of covers even in the off seasons. Leah had gotten used to everyone spelling her name Lia and had quickly picked up Italian. In some ways those first couple of years were the closest her and dad ever were, their conversations running faster and faster as she raced ahead of her mum in her understanding. She even learned to swear in Italian before English, listening to him with his brothers watching Inter on the TV, shouting words she only deciphered by sharing them in the playground to delighted laughter and then explanation. It was the sort of explanation that involved graphic mimes with fingers poked between a circle made with the other hand which, eventually, had meant that her mum had needed to explain a number of other things to her. It was also the end of her being allowed to watch I Nerazzurri. Or, at least, to watch them with her father’s commentary.

It was only after the outbreaks that things changed. The first lockdown in ’20 had hurt the community – they lost friends, the visitors stopped coming, businesses closed – but they’d all assumed it would end. That things would return to normal. The town would bear a scar, they’d always remember, but eventually they would settle back into being the bustling summer hub on the banks of the Como that they’d been before. But then the mutated strains began to appear, each time they thought they’d dampened down the embers there’d be a fresh fire. It was years before the region even settled down into what they now understood as their regular rhythms: open for business, temporary lockdown, open for business, lockdown. At least we are healthy. Her parents put a brave face on it and, somehow, the three of them never fell ill, physically at least, but the staccato patterns of their new existence took its toll on them all.

Leah had decided to leave after the lockdown in ’27. It had been strain 31 or 32, she had given up keeping track, and she’d resolved to take up a place at University in England. In the end she’d deferred for another year, thinking that the promise of helping out in the restaurant and on the boats for one more season might placate her father. It just seemed to make her eventual departure harder, as if he’d read her postponement as a cancellation and felt twice as betrayed when she followed through on her plan to go.

Back from her farewell ferry trip she packed and prepared to leave. He was out and she didn’t expect him back before she had to get the train to Milan. Mum would walk her to the station. The last thing she packed was an old photo of the three of them, taken just after they’d first arrived, down at the front with the lake shimmering behind them. Mum and dad flanked her on either side, the three of them holding hands, smiles radiating in the late summer sun. She kissed the picture and, instead of placing it in her case, she flipped it over, grabbed a pen from her old desk, and wrote on the back of it.

Perdonami, papa. Your princess. Sempre.

 

Leaving

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When they ask what you were doing that day you can say you were commenting on the new Samsung Galaxy S8. You know ? The one that kept catching fire. That was considered an unhelpful feature in a device designed to be held in a hand or carried in a pocket. If it’d been marketed as a device that might, at random, come in helpful on a camping trip when you had a bunch of twigs but no lighter nor the desire to rub sticks together for a long time – and believe me you have to do it for a long time – then things might have worked out okay for the South Korean tech giants but it wasn’t marketed as that. It was marketed as a phone. Hey, good to hear from you baby. Just hearing your voice makes me feel warm. Wait a minute. Really warm. Like, shit, my hand is on fucking fire. Nobody wanted that. So now they’re giving it a three month unconditional refund and everyone wants to talk about that. Everyone, that is, that doesn’t want to talk about the film version of Stephen King’s “It”, or the twentieth anniversary of Buffy, or John Legend playing a piano in St Pancras station or Coca-Cola. Slow news day, right ? Nothing going on.

When did we get so stupid ? So bovine ? If there’s anyone left to study History when we become history – assuming of course that we haven’t Goved our way out of studying any History that isn’t some painstaking, chronological recitation of Anglo-centric dates and “facts” rather than any attempt to understand the lessons the past has to teach us – then what will they say of us ? Will they draw out the underlying fractures in our society, the fissures created by a model of capitalism and globalisation that widens the economic divisions between people ? Will they nod sagely at our instincts to look for scapegoats and people that might appear a bit different ? Note that we failed to learn the nationalist lessons of the twentieth century and took for granted the 70 unprecedented years of peace in Western Europe ? Or will they laugh and wonder at how we gave up on thinking, learned to distrust debate, and came to value invective over information ? Maybe they’ll be researching all of this on some future Samsung device that also catches fire and they’ll do none of these things: they’ll just die in some school disaster as an inflammatory piece of technology bursts into flames as they try to get to grips with an inflammatory time.

I reckon the exact moment we got so stupid was emojis. LOL. What’s that you’re carving up there on that cave wall, Grunt ? Go with it, okay ? I know Grunt is a highly stereotyped name to give our imaginary caveman and it’s intensely patriarchal for us to make him a man but just go with it. These are stupid times so let’s get involved. What’s that you’re carving ? A pictoral representation of a hunting scene ? Oh, I get that. It’s a means of communicating some of the things that we do, so that we might learn and take pride in that time that you guys (and it would have been the guys) brought down that giant fucking mammoth or whatever it was they hunted. I’m not that au fait with anything that that happened pre… well, pre 1649 to be honest. Chopping the head off a King got my attention. So it’s a picture that produces a permanent record of something we should remember. Hey, Grunt, as we learn to, well, to grunt at each other and those grunts become recognisable sounds that are different to each other and attached to specific objects maybe we could learn to somehow write those grunts down. We could describe that picture. We could call it language. Eventually we could have a rich and varied way of articulating ideas and emotions and facts and we could have a means of communicating with each other that opened up the beauty and full extent of human interaction. We could have sentences with too many “ands” in them. We could self refer in text. It would all be meta and it will all be wonderful. Hey, you could even use some of that language to critique what I’ve just written. It was rubbish. I can see what it was trying to do but it lost me back up in the Samsung phone section to be honest. We could do all of that or we could send each other little smiley faces. Or sad faces. Or that really annoying crying face which I think is supposed to be laughing-so-hard-that-I’m-crying. It’s so annoying that we need an annoying face that we could use to respond to it. We have one ? It’s red and frowning with some steam coming off it ? Got ya.

I’m not saying emojis are the only thing to blame for Brexit. Maybe they’re not even part of the slow march to stupidity. What’s left of our language is so abused that we “trigger” articles. How do you trigger an article ? I know it can be a verb. “To cause to function” right ? So, yes, you could cause an article to function I guess but it’s so clumsy. But I suppose it’s helpful given the connotations when you consider the word as a noun. You only really pull a trigger on a gun. The real question is who’s on the other end. Maybe we’re pointing it at our own face ? So we trigger articles and we “reach out” to someone at work when we mean that we’re either trying to talk to or e-mail someone. And we are forever “going forward”. And we “touch base” without ever playing baseball or rounders or softball. As an aside how did we end up with three variants of a game where someone throws a ball at someone who tries to hit it out of a diamond marked at its four points by fielders, where the principal variant between them is either the size of the bat or the ball or the velocity at which the ball can be thrown ? We don’t need three versions of that surely ? Maybe that was when we got so stupid. Either then or when Rugby figured that the world needed slightly different versions of people running into each other with an ovoid ball. Don’t even get me started on American Football. At least they throw it forwards. Whilst wearing armour. I could buy a version of baseball / rounders / softball where they wear armour or there’s a spike pit between second and third base or something. Shake things up a bit.

I’m rambling. I get like this recently. I want to say that I feel like Don Quixote tilting at windmills but if I’m honest I don’t remember why he was doing that, if indeed I ever knew. So I’d just be borrowing it as some kind of badge of intelligence, hoping you wouldn’t call me on it. Which would be stupid. Perhaps that’s the first step. Admitting to our own stupidity and then we can go from there. Gather round some digital cave wall, someone can add some emojis, and the rest of us can grunt at them for a while until the noises start to make sense. We could call it language, have a conversation, start a debate, learn to co-operate, and then see where that takes us.

 

This is a sort of spiritual successor to Moonshot which I wrote last year. Just a stream of consciousness vomit inspired entirely by the list of trending conversations on my Facebook page today. Charitably you might call it an exercise in “voice”. I think March 29th will be an ignominious day in British history. I hope I’m wrong.

Riffs and variations on loss and friendship featuring onion rings, Nick Cave, tinnitus, and Brexit

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“Don’t ask me about sex, okay ?”

“It’s okay Pete. I’ve had the talk. My mum drew the short straw and told me what goes where and how babies are made and how to stop babies being made and how to fake an orgasm. All that stuff.”

“How to what now ?”

“Alright, alright. Just kidding. She only told me the important stuff. You know the faking it bit and how to stop babies being made,” laughed Jen.

“This explains a lot. Remind me never to meet your mother. Or, indeed, sleep with her.”

“At least it wasn’t my dad, right ? And did you just turn down my mum ? You shouldn’t be so choosy. She’s pretty hot for her age.”

Pete exhaled loudly, deliberately. “Weird now. I knew I shouldn’t have raised sex, it always gets weird. All I was saying was don’t ask me about whether I’ve had any recently.”

“Given the request I think I can fill in the blanks. Don’t worry anyway, I wasn’t calling to check up on that. I’ve learned my lesson. We’ll just end up talking about Eeyore having phone sex with Sufjan Stevens again.”

“That’s not quite how I remember it.”

“I was paraphrasing.” Jen put on her best TV voice over voice: “Previously on conversations between Pete and Jen…”

“That’d never make it past the pilot episode,” Pete countered.

“Hey, it might. Maybe they’d get someone more famous in to replace you for the actual series but I reckon I’d be snapped up to continue playing the role of myself.”

“I’d forgotten just how much your calls cheer me up Jen…”

“Quit it sarcasm boy. I know the only reason you won’t let me Skype you is that you wouldn’t be able to hide the smiling.”

“No, it’s because I don’t want you to see the state of the flat to be honest.”

“Still living out of pizza boxes ?” asked Jen, concerned.

“Something like that. More like I’m living in a pizza box. Apparently some people get a compulsion to clean and tidy as a side order to go with their grief but I didn’t seem to.”

“Like the world’s worst meal deal ?”

“Yeah. An Unhappy Meal,” said Pete. “I’ll take mine extra large.”

“What are the fries in this analogy ?”

“I don’t think that’s the most important part of what I’m saying Jen.”

“Mmm, I know. I just really like fries. I think they’re probably the onion rings or something. Georgie loved those Burger King onion rings, you know ?”

“Yeah, she did,” said Pete. “Do you remember coming back from The Chemical Brothers in Brixton ? She must have had four bags of them before we got to Victoria. I think she had the munchies from all that secondary smoke.”

“She never could handle her secondary smoke.”

“Handled everything else though,” said Pete quietly.

“Yes, she did Pete,” Jen answered, equally quietly. “She was… She was… Fuck. There’s nothing I can say that isn’t fucking trite and pointless. She was Georgie and she was my friend. That’s it. It’s as simple as that. I miss her. I miss her so fucking much.”

“I thought it’d get easier, you know ?” said Pete. “Those first months I was just numb to everything, like my brain had decided to self administer a huge dose of anaesthetic. I knew there was something horribly wrong but it was all sort of detached, like I was watching it happen to someone else. But these past few weeks the anaesthetic’s wearing off and outside of the numbness there’s just pain. There’s just nothing but pain.”

“I’m supposed to say it’ll take time, right ?” said Jen gently.

“You’re hurting too Jen. It’ll take time for all of us. I don’t know, the talking helps but the actual words… the actual words just all feel empty.”

“That’s why I call and talk… talk stupid. All that vapid nonsense is just a way to not say what we’re supposed to say. If the words are all empty then why not make them really, properly empty ? I miss her so hard Pete and I know that it’s not fair to call you and say that.”

“It’s okay. None of it’s fair but I don’t have exclusive rights on missing Georgie. She loved you. You were her best friend.”

“Apart from you. We were her best friends. Christ, I can’t believe it’s been three and a half years.”

“Want to hear something stupid ?” said Pete, suddenly.

“Always. Especially now,” replied Jen.

“I got into an argument today with some bloke in Sainsbury’s. I think I’d been spoiling for a fight for the last few weeks, I just didn’t expect it to be over a deli counter in a supermarket. I keep thinking I’m through the angry phase but then I just find myself back in it again. Anyway, we were waiting to get served – it was one of those counters where you take a ticket and wait for your number to come up – when this guy suddenly pushed in front of the woman in front of him. She says something, strong Eastern European accent, and then he turns round and tells her that he doesn’t have to wait in line behind people like her anymore. That she can go get her cheese in her own country.”

“Her own cheese ?”

“Seriously. You couldn’t make it up. He started ranting about taking our country back and how she wasn’t welcome, coming over here buying up all the foreign cheese. I think she was Polish…”

“Renowned cheese makers that they are…”

“Well, quite,” Pete continued. “Anyway, everyone was standing around not knowing what to do and this poor woman started to look really quite scared so I asked him to get back to his place in the queue and calm down a bit.

“You asked him to calm down ?”

“Yeah. Turns out telling frothing bigots to calm down doesn’t really calm them down,” said Pete.

“What were the chances ?”

“Easy in hindsight. He starts yelling at me that I’m a traitor to my country and that I need to learn what democracy means and how his grandparents had liberated Europe from the Nazi’s…”

“So he started doing irony ?”

“Not intentionally, no. I think he offered me outside but by then the security guy had appeared and threatened to throw us both out if we didn’t cool down. My new friend Mosley or Nigel or whatever his name was turns back to the counter and places his order. Only goes and orders pierogi and kabanos.”

“No fucking way.”

“No, he didn’t really. Slab of Cheddar and some Red Leicester.”

There was a pause as Pete laughed at his own joke before Jen asked, “How’d we get in this mess ?”

“Elastic bands,” answered Pete. “Hear me out, I’ve got this theory. I didn’t vote leave but I get why some people did. They’re not all like that idiot. It’s just that we’ve gotten too stretched…”

“Keep going Chomsky.”

“It’s good, you’ll like it. The elastic band is society and then imagine the people at the top of society are one end of the elastic band and the people at the bottom are opposite them. The more distance there is between them the more tension there is in the band, until the band either snaps back together again or…”

“Or it breaks,” Jen finished.

“Or it breaks.” Pete started singing softly: “I got those elastic band post-Brexit blues.”

“Ha, sounds like it should be a Nick Cave song.”

“You heard Skeleton Tree ?”

“Of course I’ve heard it Pete. When you were telling me about that Sufjan Stevens record a couple of months ago I couldn’t get my head round it. I couldn’t understand why you’d want to listen to something that was so nakedly carved out of someone else’s grief. But then I heard the Cave record and I’m like a moth banging its head against a light bulb. There’s no shelter in it, no comfort but it just shows you so much pain that it kind of matches your own. I’m not making any sense…

“No, I get it. You ever have tinnitus ?”

“That ear ringing thing ? No, not really. I mean only after a gig or something, nothing permanent,” said Jen.

“I have it a bit. Like static in my left ear all the time. It’s always there but one of the things they tell you to do to mask it is to match it up with something on the same frequency. So I might listen to some tuned out radio white noise and then I don’t hear it. I think the Nick Cave record’s like that. Only something that intense, that raw, can match up to what we’re feeling and give some release to the pain. Maybe not release. Give some sensation to the pain might be a better way of describing it. It short cuts that anaesthetic.”

“Why’d we want to do that ?”

“Because the anaesthetic’s not real,” sighed Pete. “She’s gone Jen and she’s not coming back.”

The line was silent for five, ten seconds. Eventually Jen asked the same question she’d asked every week or so for the past five months.

“I gotta go now Pete, early start tomorrow, but are you alright ?” There was the same pause he always left before answering and then the same answer before the line went dead.

“No. Not today Jen. But ask me again tomorrow. What about you ?”

“No. Me neither Pete. But ask me too.”

 

……

This is story 40 in a series of 42 to raise money and awareness for the mental health charity Mind. My fundraising page is here and all donations, however small, are really welcome: http://www.justgiving.com/42shorts

This is a direct sequel to story 14 (https://42at42.wordpress.com/2015/04/04/riffs-and-variations-on-loss-and-friendship-featuring-balloons-aa-milne-sufjan-stevens-and-phone-sex/) and shares its structure: I just really wanted to hear Pete and Jen talking to each other again. It also directly lifts its title (or the basis for its title) from the similarly named Sufjan Stevens song.

We are taking names

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We are taking names. Smith. Williams. Brown. Roberts. Patel. Jackson. Cooper.

Hold up. What was that one ?

Cooper ?

Not that one, back up a bit.

Cooper, Jackson, Patel.

Stop. That one. Check that one. Come on, quickly now, we have no time to waste when we’re taking names.

Third generation, parents born in Uxbridge, impeccable national insurance contributions.

Okay. Let’s keep going.

Harris. Green. Clark. Moore. Hussain. Campbell.

Stop. Check that one.

Campbell ? I didn’t think we were checking Scots ?

Not yet, no. Not that one. The one before. Hussain, wasn’t it ?

Yes, Hussain. Second generation. Egyptian grandparents. Been here a few decades and barely even travels back to Africa anymore. The odd holiday by the looks of it.

Hold it for now. Let’s see what the numbers look like at the end. Keep going.

Mason. May. Rudd. Hunt. Johnson. Tysoe.

Wait, what ?

Tysoe. It’s unusual but it checks out. Might be French. There’s a village with that name in Warwickshire. Goes back centuries.

Okay. Best to be sure though. Doesn’t sound right, you know ?

I know. Maybe get to it next time.

Maybe. Keep going.

Dixon. Harvey. Andrews. Ford. Bomberg. O’Leary.

Woah, woah. Too fast. There were two there. Right there. Jewish. Irish. Gotta check them both.

Sorry, there’s just so many.

It’s okay. That’s why we’re here. To take the names. We are the Department For Taking Names.

The Jew checks out. Here before World War Two. Father fought for us, landed at Normandy. Better hold the Irish though. Came over less than fifteen years ago, probably an economic migrant. They had all that trouble, didn’t they ?

Yeah. Put him on the list.

It’s a she, actually, Couple of kids by the looks of it.

Fine. She then. Put her on the list. Kids too. Presume they’re at one of our schools ?

They are.

Well we’ll see about that. Keep going.

Kowalski. Another Smith. Robinson.

Kowalski ?

I already checked it. Been here since the 50s. Fled the Soviets, bought a shop in the 60s, worked it until retirement. Contributions check out. Married a Jones. Kids in jobs. Nothing else on record. No police or hospital admission or benefits or anything. Nothing to see here.

I don’t like it. Doesn’t look good. Won’t play well to the 52. Or the Mail.

The list ?

Yeah, put him on the list. The list of names. Let’s keep going. We are taking names.

 

……

This is story 37 in a series of 42 to raise money and awareness for the mental health charity Mind. My fundraising page is here and all donations, however small, are really welcome: http://www.justgiving.com/42shorts

It’s not exactly Orwell I admit but it would feel remiss to write nothing given the current state of affairs in the UK. My surname is Tysoe in case you’re wondering where that section came from. I’ve been here my whole life but have scarcely felt less interested in being British.