Mayflies

by Andrew O'Hagan

I didn’t know what to say. It can take a whole lifetime to know how to thank a person.

‘I never saw any love between them. Never once. Never saw them kiss each other or laugh together or plan a holiday. Nothing like that. I imagine they were put on earth just to make it smaller than it is.’

He’d quickly folded away the conversation from earlier, the factory, the depression, the fears he harboured about his life, and returned to the banter, as if to prove that every mood has its instantaneous opposite.

‘Well, by a similar logic, I can tell you it was Fred Astaire who caused Brexit.’ ‘Shut up.’ ‘I’m serious. I’ve worked it out. Fred Astaire was in a show in 1926 called Lady, Be Good. A girl from London called Maude Wells was in the audience. Because of him, she set up a tap-dancing school in the East End. One of her pupils was Noele Gordon, who went on to run the motel in Crossroads. But her first gig, straight out of the dancing school, was doing a test transmission for John Logie Baird’s new invention, colour television. He broadcast her trying on a few hats, and he convinced everybody it worked. When Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the Web, was at college he built a computer from an old analogue TV. Without him there would be no internet and no social media, and, without that, the rightwing faction couldn’t have spread all those lies and convinced people to vote us out of the European Union. So, there you go – Fred Astaire caused Brexit.’ ‘I actually love you,’ I said.