Sphinx

March 2015. While his mother, a typical liberal academic, heads off to an evening of European cinema sponsored by the German embassy, young Alex joins a UKIP rally. Unfortunately she sees him waving a Nigel Farage placard, and has a heart attack that puts her into a coma. She sleeps through the election of David Cameron’s Tory government, the referendum campaign, the vote to Leave and the final departure of Britain from the EU*; when she regains consciousness, Alex is terrified that another shock will kill her (and also wracked with guilt), and so endeavours to conceal from her the fact of Brexit.

He racks up huge credit card bills to maintain the supply of fresh vegetables and olive oil, creates an entire fake Guardian website, and hides the fact that he’s lost his job in banking and is now working as a cleaner in a care home. When the heating in their house breaks down, his friend Dennis has to be persuaded to put on a foreign accent and pretend to be Polish. But the whole enterprise threatens to fall apart when his mother wants to go on her usual holiday to Aix-en-Provence – can Alex and his friends recreate the experience in Clacton?

At the climax, Alex’s mother walks through the streets, wondering why all the foreign delicatessens have closed and are covered in racist graffiti, and is then confronted by a giant statue of Boris Johnson. Can Alex negotiate a successful exit for them all from his fake Europhile world – which, as his girlfriend (whom he first met on the UKIP rally) observes, he now seems to be completely dedicated to..?

*Yes, I’m aware that this currently seems to imply her waking from a decade-long coma, if not longer…

Idea inspired by Will Davies on the Twitter, who was musing on the idea of having to convince a grandmother who’d been asleep for twenty years that Tony Blair was still in power, Britpop was still a thing etc.