Negative splits

Today I ran, as I sometimes do. Today, as I ran, my head was full of questions and worries and concerns, like many of us I am sure. I was trying to run a negative split. Now I am not a good runner but I can always try to be better. A negative split is when the first half of your race/run is slower that the second half – you finish faster. Now in order to do this you can start artificially slowly and ‘save yourself for the finish or you start out at a pace and as you become more and more tired you just try harder. Today, when I ran, I tried to do the second and two things happened. I had to stop after 5.5 miles (I wanted to do 6) and I was absolutely wrecked and shattered by the end of it. What started with good intentions, enthusiasm and energy became increasing harder as the task before me became increasingly more and more difficult.

I voted in. I can tell you why, kind of. I am not stupid, I read the news, I can work things out but my vote was far more instinctive than it was logical. I was brought up in a very working class household on a council estate, 5 years in St Pauls, the rest in Fishponds - all Bristol. It was all wonderfully, multicultural and I am the better for all of that. My dad (yeah not father he is my 'dad') probably would have joined the communist party if there was one, he is a hardworking, honest man who was made redundant time after time at the hands of Thatcher and when Tebbit said 'get on your bike' he already had, literally cycling wherever work could be had. All of that makes it hard for me to be Conservative. But, all that said, I am not a socialist with a big 'S' and when I voted conservatively with a small 'c', it was a hunch that things are better as they are, that Europe with all its bureaucracy and red tape has, at its heart, socialist ideals that people were more important than politics. Naïve eh?

I remember as a child playing with Plasticine; that wonderful, malleable substance that was limited only by the imagination of my 4 year old mind. In my day you could only get it in grubby, greeny brown. Well actually the reality was that my Plasticine was so loved, so played with that in time the variety of colours have melted into one indistinguishable lump, a homogenised mass. The wonderful blues and dashing reds had melded with the luminous yellow and vibrant green and in their ‘gathering’, in my hands had literally become indistinguishable from each other, the colours were there but had bonded to serve what was literally a larger purpose.

Now I love colour and variety and difference and eight (or 27) little balls of colour, separated have so much potential. A house needs its yellow thatched roof to sit upon its red bricked walls, bedecked with white sashed windows on top its verdant green garden. A pink faced clown (pink = red + white forever mixed) needs a mop of yellow hair, white smile, red nose. And every time I created something bigger from the smaller balls, however hard I tried I would always leave a bit behind – green in the yellow, blue in the red - until after all my creativity – browny, greeny, homogenous unity.

There is a saying that ‘you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy’. My hunch to vote ‘in’ was that despite any protestations and determination to leave Europe for right or wrong reasons, we are European. We have become increasingly so over the past 40+ years and whatever we do to deny that ‘European-ess’ I suspect any way to delineate or redraw any of the boundaries: social, political, financial, can only be artificial.

So as I ran I wondered and pondered and worried not so much whether Brexit is a negative or positive split but whether it is in any way viable. Can we actually unroll all those little balls and when we do so what kind of Great Britain, what kind of England, what kind of Europe will we be left with.