D-Day for Theresa May.

D-Day for Theresa May.

The lady in white faced her audience defiantly and wished she could disappear into a hole in the ground. She just wants to flee the country perhaps and, quite possibly, take a sabbatical where nobody could find her. Perhaps she just needed time to gather her confused thoughts because this is turning into some comical feud where nothing can be achieved and the only people who end up any the wiser are the ones who convinced that the whole subject in hand is both easy to understand and simple as the multiplication table or the alphabet.

Prime Minister Theresa May glared across at her Labour and Lib Dem opponents rather like some stern and incensed school headmistress who is so mortally offended that anybody should challenge her authority that she just stares them out as if determined to get her way. It all looks like some horrendous shambles reminding you of a storage cupboard full of dust, dirt and old board games cluttering up your room.

Today Mrs May faces the ultimate judgment on our withdrawal from the EU. Does she stick or twist? Does she keep a poker face and call her European counterparts bluff? Here we now have the vitally important terms and conditions which could either make or break May. It is hard to know what exactly it all means, those long term implications for our departure from the battleground that is the rest of Europe.

We have now reached the point where everything is becoming so wearisome and complex that we may be tempted to switch off  all our means of communication with the outside world for ever. Wherever we go we seem to be surrounded by this awful noise, this baffling double speak, this piffling silliness and absurdity, these grammatical mysteries, the insults to our intelligence and the unbearable references to the same words over and over and over again. When on earth are they going to put a sock in it?

At this point in the proceedings today could be the end of the road for Theresa May which does seem  a crying shame because to all intents and purposes she does seem a nice, decent and friendly Prime Minister. In fact Theresa May is a woman of both of the highest integrity and principle. Essentially, she hasn't really done anything wrong as such but to her increasingly vocal critics she has dropped so many clangers that you wouldn't know where to start.

For the last couple of weeks or so we have been bombarded with threats of a civil war on the streets of London if things simply get out of control. Blood will be spilled and men will take up rifles, flintlocks and blunderbusses if they don't get what they want. The military will be called in and the British army may well have their work cut out.

 There  will be mutiny, rebellion and then a good, old fashioned bust up in the heart of London. Banners and placards will be unveiled with messages of hatred and hot headed bitterness. People will tell us that they just  can't stand it any more and then they'll refuse to to be told what to do. They will stomp up and down Oxford Street, faces twisted with anger, shouting and bawling, fist pumping, gesticulating forcefully at the tops of their voices, outraged and emotionally at the end of their tether.

So this is what has happened to British society. We are now at war with ourselves, internalising our hurt and then blaming each other for something we can no longer understand. Brexit is rather like the worst of our nightmares, a lingeringly rancid smell that keeps hanging about us which we simply cannot remove. We keep using the same old disinfectant but it keeps coming back over and over again. The voices of dissent and discord are rising to deafening levels and sooner rather than later we may have to stuff the thickest cotton wool to our ears.

We begin to count down the hours and scratch our collective heads because very few of us can shed any new light on the one political issue that seems to destined to just go on and on indefinitely regardless of what the British think. The likelihood is of course that once we wake up tomorrow morning all the hullabaloo and kerfuffle will all amount to nothing in particular.

All of the rather strange vocabulary that we've been burdened with for the last two and half years will once again be repeatedly aired for the mouth watering delectation of those who just love new words and phrases. In the far corner we have those seasoned Brexiteers, a growing army of working, middle and upper class men and women who just keeping making what appear to be ill informed or well informed comments about all those cliches and hot air platitudes they may have heard a million times either on the radio or TV.

Then there are the self righteous ones who are absolutely convinced that the country is about to fall off the map of the world if a proper agreement can't be found. In the very red corner are those ruddy faced, fuming Remainers who for the last two years have been demanding second referendums every week and every month since David Cameron fell on his sword.

Now though it seems though Noel Edmonds has been drawn into this most long winded of arguments. Would it possible to reach a deal or maybe a deal with strings? Perhaps we'll have to settle for a no deal because the other one isn't nearly convincing enough for our liking? Or do we go back to the drawing board and, quite possibly, draw lots or even as a last resort, toss a coin? This is all very inconclusive and terribly incoherent, a loud slanging match  where nobody can either hear themselves think let alone make any rational decisions without somebody telling us that we have no right to be thinking along those lines.

But perhaps most importantly there is the eternally thorny issue of the backstop which sounds as though it belongs at an American baseball match. We've been told quite emphatically that the backstop is the insurance policy that may be needed in Ireland if hard and soft borders can't be found. Are you with me at the back? Are we any the clearer or is another explanation required?

The peculiarities of the modern day political system have never been so embarrassingly self evident. At this rate they may well have to compile a completely new set of dictionaries, maybe a new thesaurus or two just to keep pace with the new influx of new verbal variations on a theme. We could always invent a completely different language to make matters even more complicated than they already are.

Still, here we are on the verge of yet another political meltdown. Fingers are being bitten to the quick, the Palace of Westminster could be about to explode and all of those flags and banners could be the catalyst for a full scale street riot. Then again, we could always set a competition to decide which flag or banner is the most striking or well designed. Then the cyclists, who look as though they may be in  full training for the Tour De France later on this summer, continue to pedal up and down the road as if clocking up the miles necessary for such a punishing schedule. Somebody really ought to tell them that this is the Houses of Parliament and not a French country lane.

With an hour or tow the lights are blazing away in those small, private rooms where the politicians will be huddling together in a kind of secretive hideaway where only those in the know have any real clue about the result or why they've been summoned here in the first place. The conspiratorial whispers are getting louder and louder, the Tory gang leaders clicking their fingers and bunching their knuckles. Slowly but surely Brexit is turning into that last memorable scene in West Side Story when the Jets and Sharks prepare themselves for warfare.

Anyway by the end of the evening we should have a clearer picture of where we might be going or maybe not. The chances are though that we may have to look each other in complete bemusement because this is not the way we should be going and we're just delaying the inevitable. In the pre life Brexit we all seemed to know exactly where we stood, life was simpler, the sun always shone during the summer and the moon was always in the right place at the right time. But now the air has a sharper edge and things are not the way we'd like them to be.

And yet we'll just keep going because we always have and always will. We'll rush down our breakfast at an electrifying speed, grab an apple, sprint towards the bus stop or railway station for our daily workaday wage and then fix our eyes on a computer that keeps beeping and flashing at us like some ancient Space Invader machine. Life has to go on and besides there has to be something else to talk about.

 The fact is though that we can't get enough of Brexit. We may be gluttons for punishment and actually enjoying it all. In which case some of us would love nothing better than a huge nationwide street party just to celebrate that last day in March. Surely, we deserve something else. It's two years too many and some of us need to find a Brexit alternative. Our ears are beginning to ring and we can only take so much. Roll on April.