Brexit spoilt our social lives for three and a half years. I was in Austria in a house party of 20 Britons when the result came through. Sixteen of us had voted Remain (three while ‘holding their noses’) and four had voted Leave. The Leave voters stayed silent while the rest of us raged about the stupidity of the voting public. One of the party got busy cancelling a long-planned canal-boat trip with a lifelong friend who she knew had voted Leave. She suddenly couldn’t face sleeping in close proximity to him.
In London, protest marches were being organised and it was considered very bad form if, as a Remainer, you failed to turn up and be counted. And in Wiltshire one neighbour who already boasted of having two address books to consult when planning dinner parties — one for people who only wanted to talk about horses and one for people who could talk about other topics as well as horses — now had to implement two more sub-categories: Brexit and Remain voters. It had become clear that never the twain could meet amicably.
Because of Brexit, many of us simply stopped going to and giving dinner parties
A celebrated writer and an editor, who had been great friends for 30 years, stopped seeing each other. ‘Sorry but I just couldn’t have anyone in the house who had voted Brexit,’ said the writer. Anyone who had been at Glastonbury and had not got around to organising a postal vote woke up determined it would never happen again. Brexit-voting boyfriends were axed as ‘fascists’. At every dinner party and in every restaurant, Brexit became the irresistible topic. Even airheads were suddenly ‘informed’ about politics.
As the arguing continued, a Leave-voting friend in Shepherd’s Bush asked me whether it was OK to have forbidden any discussion of Brexit at an upcoming supper that she was hosting for eight old friends.
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