It never happens, of course, but everything about the referendum has taken us so far from even the usual depredations upon this ideal that the outcome has left many – 48.1% of us, I guess - feeling like we live now in an entirely different country from than the one that existed six months ago.

The campaign led by Nigel Farage - the privately-educated former commodities broker founder member of UKIP, now self-styled ‘man of the people’, and not a member of parliament – infected everything with his toxic brand of “dog-whistle” not-at-all-racism.

This became less “dog” and more “earsplitting” as time went on, as he stood in front of posters purporting to show queues of migrants at our borders (they weren’t) that directly recalled Nazi propaganda and called the murder of Jo Cox by a man shouting “Britain First” (a rabidly anti-foreign-blood group) “unfortunate timing”.

Not every Leaver is racist. I absolutely know this, not least because I am married to a keen Brexiter. But Farage and his ilk preyed on legitimate fears and stoked them with misinformation about all of ‘Them’ coming over here to take ‘Our’ jobs.

“I am paralysed by furious helplessness”: Lucy Mangan on feeling like a stranger in the face of a new Britain