We mustn't let Brexit battles spoil our Christmas

To be aware that our future here in this geographically detached corner of the United Kingdom is being fought over, put through a mangle, chewed up and spit out then kicked in the head again is mesmerising beyond belief.

I voted for Brexit and was thoroughly surprised that our count here turned out to be against Brexit. But then what did I expect?

I thought Boris Johnson had been winging it a bit prior to the vote when he suggested we’d all be a lot better off when shot of the European Union. I didn’t necessarily think so.

Maybe he didn’t see the wider picture believing perhaps that those in the southern part of the island of Ireland had no grounds for making a fuss.

I have a high regard for Boris’s intellect but his grasp of the nuances of Irish politics and how the southerners might react had many shortcomings.

In some ways I’ve always seen Boris, with his colossal intellect, in the mould of Cicero, the Roman statesman in the time of Julius Caesar.

He was intellectually ahead of the most powerful men of that era 63 BC ; they valued his opinions but when Cicero decided to oppose a move by the three most important men in Rome, Caesar, Pompey the Great and Marcus Crassus to dominate the state, he had signed his own death warrant.

Renowned author and expert on Roman history Robert Harris in his book Dictator (published by Penguin) describes how Cicero ‘wrote the laws’ but `Caesar tore them apart’. There is a lot of Boris in that.

Many of us like what he has said of Brexit but the good and the great of Westminster and in Europe don’t want to hear him even though both sides have nothing new or useful to bring to the table of debate.

Boris has likened the Brexit debt to a car crash.

In one of his recent articles in the Daily Telegraph he describes the Irish backstop as the ‘fatal patch of oil on the road where the skid began.’

Most of us in fact were completely puzzled by the term ‘backstop’.

In fact the whole terminology applied to the crisis is enough to send some of us to a shrink.

Does our main negotiator, the hapless Theresa May, understand it herself? Clearly she had little idea, when she set out on the first doomed negotiations what she was taking on. She has already had to backtrack on her first suggestion some months ago that we in the North must stay in the EU after Brexit. But then she didn’t bargain for the DUP and Nigel Dodds’ assertion that ``the UK joined the Common Market together and we must leave the EU together’. And no, he ‘wasn’t bluffing’ about that.

The whole `leave’ process as seen in Westminster eyes had to be viewed differently since, clearly it was forgotten by all those English, Scottish and Welsh MPs that Northern Ireland in fact is part of the UK and has been since the southern Irish went to war to kick the Brits out back in the 1920s.

Boris wants the current Brexit plan ditched and a ‘Super Canada’ free trade deal instead be introduced. And who knows much about a Super Canada trade deal? I had to start all over again.

Would we have to talk to Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Pierre Trudeau? Was he to be another negotiator in the loop?

Honestly, I like Canada, I have family there but don’t want to fight or argue with them over trade.

But Justin might be a better man to deal with than the Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson who threatened she may resign if the Brexit deal gave Norn Irn special trading terms with the EU.

We don’t want to argue with Ms Davidson who awaits the birth of her first child. either. Maybe she’ll feel differently about us when she’s a mum.

At the moment I’m still not much wiser about where we will be in all these shenanigans. I just hope it does not spoil my Christmas.