So to the North Atlantic and the former fishery of England, where at 11am local time, the civil strife and corruption that mark ordinary life in this remote outpost are momentarily forgotten as England’s Día De Muertos comes to an incongruously solemn end.
Having shaken off the manacles of frictionless trade that marked it a European colony, Global Britain was supposed to rise Phoenix-like from the bonfire of red tape. It never emerged. Instead, its puppet government lurches from calamity to calamity.
Rivers of shit, empty shelves, and pyres of burning pork are now the daily reality for the nation that gave us Shakespeare and Bruno Brookes, and the annual month of ancestor worship that culminates in a national silence beside phalluses of Portland stone could not be coming at a handier time for despot Johnson.
Like Christmas, Easter and Transfer Deadline Day, today’s carnival of mawkish one upmanship has evolved from an earlier tradition, when widows with paper poppies, bereft mothers and solemn veterans said, ‘Never again’. Their grief has been replaced by front-lawn Passchendaeles and publicans with hand tattoos of Spitfires who urge trawler war with France.
 This new remembrance cult is not to be confused with Sovereignty – a local shamanic tradition that only full exposure to common-sense can induce. Rather, it is a display of love of war by people who have never experienced it. With empire, fuel and food now passing into memory, this hyper-jingoistic sentiment is all Thatcher’s children have left.
If post-boxes decked in tea cosies detract from the veterans whose mental health was shattered in Port Stanley, or five-foot poppy mascots dimmish the sacrifice of the warriors who never returned from Helmand, so be it. For a nation in psychic disarray, what price dignity when fantasy is free?