Low life | 7 July 2016

I walked into the bar and there was Trev standing in front of a giant screen showing Germany v. Italy and chatting up two overawed teenage girls with his usual aplomb and startling frankness. Pleased to see me after all this time, he dismissed them with a kind word and we went to the bar to start drinking. He had voted to leave, he said.

Then his cousin Danny came in with Tina, Danny’s latest, with whom he is head-over-heels in love. Danny falling in love with someone has been a big shock to the local community, and it was indeed sad to see him so abjectly enamoured with my own eyes. ‘Since I fell 30 feet off the side of a house and landed on my head, I haven’t been the same bloody bloke, Jer,’ said Danny, perhaps feeling that I was owed an explanation. ‘And my memory is shocking. I can’t remember what happened two minutes ago.’ Danny had voted to remain. Tina said that her short-term memory was also shot to bits. Tina works in the café at Asda and she was wearing her Asda fleece. She bungs a customer’s meal in the microwave, she said, then she goes away with the fairies and forgets about it. Yesterday she had a formal warning from the store manager about her plated nuclear disasters. Her customers rarely complain, however, and she loves them dearly — and she loves working in the café at Asda. Did she vote to stay or leave, I asked her? She couldn’t remember. She had gone into the booth with nothing arranged in her mind. She thinks she might have voted to leave. I wandered over to the giant screen to watch the penalty shoot-out.