Coming Home in the Middle of the Night

The time is 11.35pm, I’m somewhere just inside Manchester and someone is eating Burger King and I wish I’d asked them to get me one too. I just had my first cup of English tea in 3 months. I Snapchatted and Whatsapped and emailed the relevant people who knew I was travelling today that I had arrived, safe and sound. I got a few apologies that I had to come home when the country was in such a state. Mostly excitement at the prospect of seeing me. Someone had recently had a baby. My Mum apologised that it was raining. I haven’t applied heat to my hair in about 3 weeks and I am very much enjoying the natural curls that frame my face, not looking too bad to say my body believes it’s actually 1.35am. Claire 101 is pretty good at the moment.

I am happy to be home. I know it’s not popular to want to be here but I’ve been gone for 3 months so I let myself be excited about the prospect of being home. I am excited, still. This is home and everything is familiar and that’s nice actually when you’ve been gone for a while. Britain is my home and it always will be and unless things go very much more badly wrong, I will never not be happy to see it out of the train window.

Things do feel pretty bad though don’t they. I was heartbroken on Friday morning, I went to sleep on Thursday night just after the polls and thought everything would be fine and then woke up to see it wasn’t. Then things got worse. They’ve continued to get worse. I feel like I want to shut my eyes and take a break until someone can tell me what the hell is going on. That’s all I want. I honestly hate very little more than I hate having to give my opinion on things that might not happen at all. I hate speculation. I will never make a good journalist because I like to bury my head until I have a real tangible situation to deal with. I feel sorry for all of us at the moment. We have nothing concrete to deal with and yet it feels like things are taking a turn in every direction anyway.

I had that time though, I was on holiday when the results came through and I’ve had another 4 days to ignore the news and be in Jerusalem and go to the beach and forget about it. I needed a break before the referendum and I needed one from the referendum, I’ve had one now.

I was privileged to be able to do that because no one questioned my right to live in my home, no one ever has.

Now isn’t a good time to bury our heads. When I supported the Stronger In campaign it was because I believe we are better when we belong to something bigger than ourselves. We still can. We still need more tolerance, we still need to promote diversity, we still need equality and we would still be fighting for those things no matter which way the results went. Those things are still bigger than you and they still need all of us. So, now it feels a little harder? So, maybe progress isn’t as clear and linear when you’re living it.

But this isn’t just about you, or me. It’s about all of us. People are being attacked in the street and on public transport and that is not okay. That is not who we are. We can’t afford to ignore it and get annoyed and go to ground within ourselves. Our next Conservative leader might be someone who voted against gay marriage. We should all be looking out for each other, and we are all going to have to find the fight in us to say things we felt like we didn’t have to say anymore. You didn’t expect to be going backwards and neither did I but we won’t stand in the way of it if we become fed up with politics and bow out of it.

I don’t believe this result only spells disaster, there are real problems with the EU and its regulations and there are things we will be better off without. I would have wanted them changed had we stayed, and I wanted us to stay, but if we can’t then I’d like to try and focus on building the country I want us all to live in. I believe things will settle and get better, I have to have hope that this can end up being a chain of events that lead to a better Britain. But it won’t do that if we let the people who are currently leading the debate continue to lead. We had such a voice before, we were so vocal, and we need to continue to be so.

It doesn't really matter how you do that, whether it's campaigning for someone to be the leader of either party, or against Brexit, or for the terms of our renegotiation if we leave.

As long as it's for something good, as long as you want us to be better,the version of better I would write home about. The kind that values everyone equally and prizes our diversity. 

I bet we outweigh the number of people who don't want a liberal and welcoming country, I bet we are stronger than we think.