Britain increasingly feels like a terribly old country. We keep hearing its pipework hasn’t been properly overhauled since the Victorian age, so its own sewage laps at its shores and courses through its rivers. Earlier this month we crowned our oldest ever new monarch, a man who looked a picture of melancholy pretty much throughout, even if media sycophancy made it verboten to categorise the mood as anything other than joyous renewal. The country is overwhelmingly governed in the interests of older voters at the expense of the young. And this week, the latest update on the literally crumbling Houses of Parliament warned that the building is so comprehensively knackered it could be destroyed before renovation is agreed upon, let alone begun. This would be the only conceivable occasion on which this cohort of politicians could be described as bringing the house down.
Even the sewage crisis has been folded into the nostalgia myths that some find more comfortable than dealing with the present. “I remember as a child in south Wales swimming in sewage,” reminisced the Conservative MP Damian Green this week. “Jackson’s Bay in Barry used to be a sewage outlet where we all went and paddled and swam...”
