Last Thursdays vote was bewildering!

As an individual I have always been an observer of other people and since I became a ‘world watcher’ sitting in the gutter back in West Ham in the 1960s there has never been a political situation as weird, difficult and uncertain as we have today.

The vote last Thursday to leave the EU has severe ramifications: the vote has split our country and our people. Not only did it split us almost half and half (17million v 16 million voters), we now know from analysing the results that we have a deep division between sub sets of our country: the rich and the poor, the old and the young, the educated and the not, and never has the term ‘north versus south divide’ been more poignant or relevant. The vote has caused the downfall of our Prime Minister and the split of the Conservative party and most likely the downfall of the leader of the political opposition as well.

We cannot underestimate the seriousness of all that and I watch it avidly hour by hour unfolding on my TV in complete bewilderment.

And yet as I sat there this morning I realised that actually nothing had changed for me personally: my cat still wanted feeding, I still needed to get my teenager out of bed for work, cook lunch for my house guests, send my son down the corner shop for forgotten potatoes, and pay my gas bill.

It is easy to forget that the massive worldwide ‘macro’ economic and political thing that is unfolding actually has very little impact or immediate affect on our individual ‘micro’, individual worlds. I still need to support my family, and curiously each of my three (now adult) children will be living back home with me by August because none of them have anywhere else to live.

Of course we need to be aware of what BREXIT means but more importantly we need to be aware that whatever happens, whatever changes, whatever political turmoil there may be; at the end of the day how we get through that is due to our own personal action and the amount of responsibility we each take for our own lives and those of the people we love.

There will be some people who become paralysed with indecision and sit like rabbits in the head lights of the oncoming juggernaut and get flattened: and there will be those who dust themselves off, take responsibility, make decisions, take action and move forward. Only you can decide which one you will be:

The choice is yours.