An e-mail I wrote yesterday to a Lithuanian friend.

It’s a very bad time for Europe, and particularly bad for Ireland which may soon get a frontier like that between Lithuania and Russia or Macedonia and Croatia.  (Northern Ireland, like Scotland, voted mainly to remain in the EU.)

In recent weeks thousands of people of Irish descent living in Britain have applied for Irish passports. Indeed the largest group of ‘immigrants’ in Britain is the Irish, who (according to the treaty of 1922, reinforced by the Belfast and Anglo-Irish Agreements of recent times ) have voting rights and welfare rights in any case.  Most of them, like me, can choose their nationality.  In theory, I could actually get a British passport again… Not that anything short of a very English red-hot poker up my arse would persuade me.

The referendum of course was not so much about the EU as about ‘immigration’, and it was the “working class”, the "great unwashed" "the man in the street", who voted for the right-wing demagogues, just as they voted repeatedly for Mussolini, and, eventually Hitler (though it was the middle classes who actually put him in power).

Not to mention Russia’s and Belarus’ “Dear Leaders”…

There is a strange feeling of instability, rather like the 1930s.  And there’s Ukraine and Syria, Turkey becoming more authoritarian…and the strong possibility that Mr Trump will be the next president of the United States !!!!

Not so many English people will now be buying houses in France.  People already here for 20 years are talking about having to apply for French driving-licences if not for French nationality and right to residence, even if their children were born here.

I wonder if the governments in Edinburgh and Belfast will be sending people over to Brussels to try and keep their 'countries' in the EU, as England (with poor old, horribly disempowered Wales) spends a lot of money - extracted from its poor -  to extract itself…

Blackest joke of all: Gibraltar also voted to leave the EU.  That may add to the eventual fishing-war with Spain.  (Britain had a ‘Cod War’ with Iceland in the 1960s.  Nobody was killed directly, and Iceland won.)

Many Anglophones here in south-western France (whom I generally avoid) had the same feeling in their stomachs yesterday as I had.  I certainly didn’t expect to have that ‘sinking’ feeling…like I had so often at school before 'the business' of getting caned by the headmaster.

But I am keeping cheerful.  A little cannabis in the evening is very good for my mental health, and...damn England to Hell - which kept Ireland from Europe for close on a thousand years!