1 I AM AN old man, still trying to save my country but much too old and not quite brave enough to walk the streets and wave a flag. Too old to follow fashion by way of angry rants on social media. I worry about the relentless disseminating forces that are tearing us apart. There is no centre, no middle ground of reason, calm debate or understanding.
2 I am an old man and all my friends are old. The young are shrouded mysteries. We are baffled by the blind and careless way they laugh at reason, live with nonsense contradictions and disregard the warnings from the past.
3 We wonder as we watch them tap, prod and stare at tiny screens, asking some remote insentient device where to go for coffee, what they ought to think today, and follow some wonder-person’s empty life because that’s what people do.
4 Switch off, look up, extract yourselves from that persuasive manufactured world. You need to be aware your country is being left to drift untended into such a split-up broken state that there’ll be anxious times of sad and weary years while it’s all put back together.
5 We don’t hold views from websites, social media or the latest demonstrating rabble-rousers. We know how things should be.
6 The very oldest of us can see how far we’ve fallen, how distant are those care-free childhood days between the two Great Wars. We look back, compare, and shake our heads in disbelief that in so short a time so much can change.
7 Other people seeking better lives are still being welcomed here. Many are willing settlers. Others have made their journey an invasion and come with no intent to merge and be included, but we old folk mostly have no special feelings about the country of their birth, we hold no racist nonsense.
8 There’s just despair and a growing fear that careless governments have led us blindly into overcrowded cities, along with deep concern that we are slowly losing all that bold and ancient sense of being a people. A people somehow with that special something that made us English, Scots, or Welsh or Irish.
9 Our abandoned country’s downhill track could lead us to a day when we’re just an unimportant island off the European coast. Rich travellers from the East will come and they’ll be shown the ancient buildings from our legendary past. They’ll mock the rusty cars, the long-abandoned high-speed trains, the craters in the motorways, the dirt, despair and the overriding sense of unrelenting Fate.
10 Those people from the East will pay a guide to take them round the squalid homes that show just how we live in hopeless desperation. They’ll wonder at the useless cooking stove, the refrigerator now a simple cupboard, the freezer in the yard filled up with stony soil and sickly carrots. They’ll wonder how it happened.
11 I won’t be there. That forecast of a sinking back to medieval times is too extreme, perhaps. And like many similar that tell of doom and catastrophic endings it’s likely not to happen. I’m very old and will be gone quite soon but I know you need that warning. Don’t let your leaders hack off, piece by piece, the ‘Great’ from Britain. Where are the wiser ones who will block the downward slide?
12 Don’t vote for smooth-talking politicians who promise a future land just short of heaven. Hear the logic in the other voices that tell of hard work, hard times and years of concentrated effort. Go for those who speak the truth and warn that we have to live through something just outside the doors of hell to drag us back to better times.
13 Those of you who’ll see the eighties, nineties or even reach another century must listen. One day you’ll realise that a world that’s always round the corner might suddenly appear, to bring you nothing but envy, poverty and grief.
