Oh, here we go. Finally.

“The Brexiteers” are loading up the Mayflower and the Golden Hind with trinkets and beads to offer the natives of far-flung undiscovered countries in return for trade deals.

Experts and economic forecasters are piling up sandbags around their offices as the UK economy teeters on the brink of a collapse more final and more terrible than anything the world has ever known. On the stroke of 2300 tonight – markets will be open somewhere in the world – Sterling will become worthless and the UK’s stock will plummet.

Or so we’re told.

Over there on the left are the sunlit uplands of the road not travelled – we’re richer over there, because we voted to Remain in the EU. We’re happier, the sun shines, the Ode to Joy plays in the background, and the landscapes have that clean-cut look of architects’ models.

But we’re leaving. It’s too late.

“Now you’ll be sorry,” the editorials tell us.

It’s a good thing Labour won the argument at the General Election last year. If Labour had lost the argument as well as, er, the election itself, we’d be in real trouble. But no – Jeremy did a fine job, say the candidates to replace him, and we had just the right manifesto. We won the argument.

Where’s Brecht when you need him? “Would it not in that case be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?” Brecht wrote, in his 1953 poem Die Lösung (The Solution).

Yes, and it’s a good thing nothing else is going on in the world. Australia is still on fire and that virus out of China sounds more than ever like something out of World War Z (the 2006 book by Max Brooks, not the movie; Brooks’ “zombie plague” originates in remote China), but apart from all that – and the ongoing impeachment of “the leader of the free world,” as the media call him – we’re free to get on with our own little local difficulty.

Kind of appropriate that this is the week in which the government set out to make the trains run on time. Nationalising Northern Rail – I mean, you’d almost think they had Northern voters to consider.

Oh, and did I hear that there’s a plan to reverse some of the Beeching cuts to the rail network? Bet that’ll go faster than HS2. Maybe the Chinese will give us 5G broadband for the many, not the few.

My most memorable experience of the 2019 general election – I wrote about this at the time – was the stream of barely credible mostly fake news pushed onto my screen from the left. Yes, other varieties of invective are available. But. Have the Tories sold the NHS to the Americans yet? What is the political opposite of #torylies?

I’m not a Tory. I’m not anything*. I follow politics as a fascinating human drama, but I struggle to believe that the election to power of one person (party) or another, one philosophy or another, will be any more likely to transform my life than, say, surveillance capitalism.

The saving grace of human nature, whether you’re talking about shopping or political campaigning, is incompetence. No political party, newly in office, successfully does what it promised it would do or what its detractors threatened it would do. Despite all the personal data at its disposal, Big Tech doesn’t seem to have found a way to offer me what I want to buy when I want to buy it.

Here in the non-fake world, in politics as in everything else, all consequences are at least partly unintended. The future seems to take a contrarian delight in defying forecasters’ best efforts.  Tomorrow remains stubbornly unknowable.

What I notice about Brexit is not that it’s right or wrong, good or bad, because we can’t know that yet (or perhaps ever, given that there really isn’t a road not travelled for comparison). What I notice is that Brexit has provoked a sudden outpouring of certainty – certainty so strong that even truth can be sacrificed to it.

In Brexit as in the general election, my side was right and yours was wrong – in black and white, not shades of grey. How is it rational to use lies – fake news – as evidence in support of what we believe to be true? I got lies from the left in the election and lies from Remain since the referendum; no doubt other postcodes got lies from the right/Leave.

How come we’re all so stupid as to believe that (a) we know best and (b) that we can impose our “truth” on others?

We voted to Leave and then to Get Brexit Done. Now we’re doing it.

We’re still friends. There were speeches and they sang Auld Lang Syne.

Let’s move on.

*Green, since you ask, after a Red canvasser explained to me at length that a Green vote would be wasted. That logic has to change.

Says something about the modern world that trade deals require such lengthy negotiation.

The EU/Canada trade deal took seven years to sort out. What did they talk about on, say, the second Tuesday of the third month of Year Five?

I haven’t seen the phrase “Please allow 28 days for delivery” for a while now, but I used to wonder – why did they ask for so long? What did they expect to be doing on the eighth day? The seventeenth?

Can’t take that long to wrap and post a parcel, surely?

Turns out that the EU/Canada trade deal was vetoed at the last moment by the Wallonia region of Belgium, no idea why, and that it was further delayed when the Canadian prime minister’s flight (to the signing in Europe) had to turn back due to engine trouble. Thanks, Google.

Thanks BBC, actually. Went from Google to a BBC story about the signing of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (Ceta to its friends) dated 30th October 2016. Scrolled down, obviously, to read the story, and found links to other stories. Is Ceta a good model for Brexit? Is visiting a strip club anti-feminist?

What? And here are two more. The nursery putting fitness at the heart of learning. Seven things Brexit will change and seven it won’t.

Oh, doncha just lurve a good list? Refusing to be distracted, I just want to say: you can’t just trade any more. You need a trade deal. And that means hiring trade-deal negotiators.

Trade negotiators, I should say. People who will make the job look easy. People who will tell you, “Yeah, no problem. We’ll get that done in no time.”

Because their whole purpose is to make life easy for the rest of us, right?

Not to impress us with how difficult their jobs are. Right?

Had a conversation earlier with somebody who wants to write.

She started by asking what I wanted – a cappuccino. But then Jess, who owns the café, came up behind her and said, “William’s a writer!”

And then to me, “She’s a writer!”

No name, oddly.

But I think there’d been a conversation between them about writing. And I’d arrived just slightly after the right moment.

Anyway, She-Who-Remained-Nameless told me that yes, she did want to write, but that actually, she was a copywriter.

She writes copy for other people’s websites, but wants to write her own blog.

Then we talked about Ayurvedic personality types.

There’s Vata, which is air/ether, and there’s Pitta, which is fire/water. And then there’s Kapha, which is, um, She hesitated, probably what I am. “But you’ve probably got bits of the others as well!” Kapha is slow, grounded, earth/water. Not, you know, thin. Kapha people are more on the, ah, heavy side. Sort of, um, slow.*

My new friend and I got through the Ayurvedic personality-types conversation, and then She gave me a series of reasons why she hadn’t actually quite got around to blogging about them yet.

She just needed to spend some more time planning to do it, and getting ready to do it, and talking about doing it, and checking the alignment of the planets, and finishing the washing up, and Hoovering behind the sofa, and deciding absolutely one hundred percent what exactly she was going to write, and anyway, she was very busy…

I told her to fail.

I told her that it’s easier to succeed from failure, which is all about learning from experience, than it is to succeed from having a lot of perfectly convincing reasons why you haven’t started yet.**

I told her to write something.

She told me she couldn’t because she was going snow-boarding next week.

I went and sat down and she brought me my cappuccino.

I thought about fear – can’t do anything that matters, for fear of failing at it – and I tried to believe that the picture on the cappuccino (it was a tree) was a ski slope (it was a tree), and then I dawdled around the idea of having the ability to draw anything in the foam on a cappuccino. Not much of a story prompt, but good for a moment or two.

Then I went off into a proper daydream about the young writer I’d just met. Inspired by me (this was MY daydream), she’d forget about the possible cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling of the stairwell, abandon plans to buy pencils that she’d have to sharpen before she could possibly start tapping at her laptop, and actually start writing.

Her blog would be an instant, massive success. There’d be books, a TV show, merchandise, a biopic.

I’d be able to say, “I knew her before she was famous.”

Inspired by her example, I decided to go straight home and write something big.

And I will. Everything’s in order. I just need to tidy my desk and deal with that cobweb, and then…

*I should probably look them up, rather than reconstructing the conversation from memory. Mistakes and misunderstandings of Ayurveda – my fault. If only some young person would start a blog on the subject.

**You should have heard me. I was quite convincing, albeit in a self-help-book kind of way.

Went for a walk the other day. “How many steps?” somebody asked.

No idea. But that reminded me.

I went in search of my Fitbit, which I’d taken off in mid-December and forgotten to put back on again.

Found the charging cable. Plugged it in. Opened the Fitbit app in my iPhone. Clicked on Forgot my password.

Got that sorted out. But no, the app couldn’t find the device. Was it charged up? By now, yes.

Was Bluetooth on? Yes. Had I turned Bluetooth off and then back on again? Yes.

Tried Update device. No. Tried removing the device from the app and reinstalling it. Aha!

Agreed to the terms and conditions. Waited while the app updated the device.

Clicked through the introductory blah about how I can use the device to measure stuff about myself.

Spent a while looking at the app’s new dashboard.

Finally found the menu leading to the bit where I could specify that I would be wearing the device on my non-dominant wrist. Put it on that wrist – loosely, as reminded.

Worked out roughly how long all that had taken.

Went upstairs to my sock drawer – which is the one place in the house where there are no socks, given that I always start there when I’m looking for socks – and shuffled aside all the old manuscripts, notebooks, hats, gloves, until I found my old pedometer. Clipped that to my belt.

Went out to buy some birdseed. Success. 4,130 steps later, I have birdseed and I also picked up some birch logs.

My pedometer’s back in the sock drawer. Along with the Fitbit.

Very bright sunshine. Very clear air. Cold, but I prefer that to the rain.

Maybe I’ll go out for another walk later. Argal Lake, perhaps.

If I do, I’ll take one of my devices, just to know how many steps.

No, not that one.

Posting today to keep up my record of posting (at least) once a week for quite a long time. Nothing to say. The year ended; the year began. Fireworks. Headache.
 
Now, if I was John Wyndham, a morning like this would spark the idea for something like The Day of the Triffids (1951). Lights in the sky, and then something more than the average hangover.
 
Wyndham also wrote Chocky (1968), which developed the idea that a child’s imaginary friend wasn’t imaginary at all. Not in a scary way, if I remember rightly (long time ago), but to raise the question: what if aliens aren’t physical creatures like we are, driving physical spaceships like we would drive if we had the know-how?
 
I remember Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods (1968), and somewhere off a different chart, the Outsider author Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites (1967) - we’d have emotions, and not recognise them as aliens. No wonder I, ah, didn’t pass all of my exams that year.
 
But I educated myself. Facebook’s full of cute little memes about reading a lot, and if that’s what matters, then my teenage self was the most educated person on the planet at the time.
 
I still have an aversion to King Lear (due to an administrative error, we “did” King Lear twice, rather than switching to the alternative text in the second year; none of us questioned the repetition), but I can still remember a lot about Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius. And his various alternative egos - ugh! The scenes in that cave.

Herman Hesse.
 
The sky’s taken on a very, very slightly pink-ish tint; it was pretty much duck-egg blue a moment ago - but we don’t need a new-year reminiscence about my painting of Airfix models.
 
If the colour charts for those models were accurate, then a lot of effort must have been expended by the air forces of World War II, in sourcing duck-egg blue paint for the undersides of their aircraft.
 
Duck-egg blue was as rare in model shops as getting Peter Shilton in the football coins. And weren’t there coins about flight, as well? Finishing up with the moon landing? I wonder how many of the mechanics working on those historic aircraft thought to bother with duck-egg blue.
 
Who had the idea of painting aircraft-undersides blue anyway?
 
Who first had the idea for anything we do?
 
Who first said: “Before you eat your meat, let’s cook it on the fire and see if that improves the taste?”
 
Who said: “Let’s collect together all this wheat, crush it up, add water and yeast, knead it for a while, then bake it in the - quick, somebody invent ovens - oven, because it might be worth eating while we’re waiting for somebody to pull the meat off the fire?”
  
“And look what’s happened to this old milk. Perhaps you’d like to spread it on your baked wheat?”
 
So silent, earlier. No triffids, but no people, either. The students have all migrated to sunnier climes, so the parking spaces are easier to find. This is the interval between years: the clocks tick more slowly; there’s no politics.
 
Must find a fresh battery for that clock. Before Monday, when the world begins again.