Good morning good morning good morning what a hearteningly marvellous morning it is too! Gosh, a sunny crisp Autumn morning is just what the doctor ordered. Because good heavens these are trying times if you’re a British hill. Which, if you’re reading this is unlikely, I grant you, but let me tell you things have been fraught with tension here in the Sussex substratum.

And there’s only one reason for it: Brexit.

I first heard that dreadful term a few years ago – in fact around the time I posted my last update – but could never have envisaged how it would come to represent all that is most moronic about the humans occupying my person. And that, coming from a piece of the island in whose name other hills the world over have been stabbed by British flags simply for being populated by people of colour, is up against some pretty stiff competition.

I honestly have no idea why, but Brexiteers keep alluding to the Blitz spirit (apparently remembered best with bunting and teacakes, not bunkers filled with terrified civilians), surviving the War (many didn’t, we’re still at war and survival is apparently the best we can hope for now) and stopping duplicitous foreigners taking the jobs nobody wants but without which the country will grind to a halt like cake-baking during rationing. Result: a green and pleasant land populated by nose-less spited faces.

Well, none of this truly affects me of course because I’m literally part of the scenery and you all come and go so swiftly to me, but I do rather resent being used as the rallying cry by those who have at best a nodding acquaintance with my geography and history. And it gives me the hump. Or hill.

So here’s a reality check: you know that speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II? The one about this royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle, blabla demi-paradise, yada yada this earth, this realm, this England, cue orgasmic crescendo of Jerusalem? Ok well that’s not where it ends. No, it goes on rather prophetically:

That England, that was wont to conquer others,

Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,

How happy then were my ensuing death!

Everyone always forgets that bit.