WHEN I launched my book Exit a few days ago, by Zoom rather than in a bookshop, my chair Katy Hastie asked what I’d learned in the process of writing it.

A short book of non-fiction on the theme of exit, taking exit signs as a jumping off point to explore transport, architecture, art, Scots language, immigration, evictions, evacuations – and even Sesame Street – I already knew that exits are all around us.

That’s why I was so drawn to them as a theme when I pitched to Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, which explores the hidden and often surreal lives of everyday things, such as golf balls, hotels, and telephone boxes.

But what I hadn’t quite realised until I wrote the book was quite how much exits tell us about society. I think exit signs themselves are beautiful objects, glinting green to light the way everywhere we go.

But in researching their history, I learned about the workers’ rights movement in the US which was becoming newly galvanised after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, in which many workers, mostly immigrant women, died because the doors were locked. From there, health and safety signage was legislated.

The technological development of the signs, from painted word, to bulb-lit, to computer controlled, is ever-evolving communication, breaking down barriers between cultures and languages.

Exits tell us something about how we move around the world. Who gets to open doors – and who finds them closed. Sometimes exits are a choice and sometimes they are not. Exits are an equality issue; a class issue, a feminist issue, a bodily issue.

Ultimately, I also realised that every exit is followed by an entrance. There’s always something on the other side. That’s also true politically.

Excerpt:

Brexit was always a hole through which meaning would fall.

As I write this book, the exit is looming. Watching from a lounge overlooking London Euston train station concourse, a giant electronic sign above the heads of passengers played Get Ready for Brexit advertisements on a loop, side by side with cancellations and delays on the departure board. The Overton window of Brexit’s surreality dances around like an old Windows screensaver whose curser doesn’t work.

The clock has been ticking down to final exit for over a year, and with shambolic negotiations between the UK and the EU ongoing and the country’s citizens fiercely split on the matter, truly no one knows what will happen next, other than that it will either be very bad, or very, very bad. Brexit was an exit with no entrance in sight; no plans, no strategy. It was exit into fantasyland. For some with little hope in incremental political change, having been let down before, that sounded better than what they saw around them.

From the start, Brexit was a project characterised by absence of details, misinformation, and vagary. It was a mirage, far off and promising what was not really there, most memorably in the disproven Leave campaign claim, emblazoned on the side of a red bus, that an additional £350m per week might be re-routed into the NHS. It will not, for it does not exist.

Scotland still has an escape route; the independence campaign is ongoing. Now, it would be an exit from an exit. Unlike the Brexit campaign, the Scottish independence debate in 2014 was information heavy. The White Paper was heartily scrutinised. In the months leading up to the vote on September the 18th it was almost impossible to walk into a pub or stand at a bus stop without overhearing conversation, sometimes between strangers, and often detailed enough to stray into the waters of fishing law or currency options.

After the process it felt that the general populace had engaged in healthy and violent-free debate, learning anew about their country, how it works, and considering what they might want for its future.

The distance between Scottish views on Brexit and the UK’s as a whole has refuelled interest in independence. Yes

badges have been re-appearing on lapels in a new design; its bars of colour speaking of plurality and modularity.

In contrast, Brexit was horoscope-like in its shapeless form. An empty box receiving projected hopes and fears; meanings expanding to fill the available space, of which there was lots. Bad actors traded on racist, xenophobic, populist tub-thumping.

Some will profit from the carnage – like those with an eye on the NHS. Weaknesses in the system were exposed. Digital spending skirted electoral rules. The working knowledge Brits had of the existing EU relationship was shown to be appallingly scant. Brexit jammed a crowbar into the already present cracks in traditional media. Disinformation ran rampant — as it is now everywhere in the world.

Other than the individual motives of agitators, the project stood for nothing at all, and was granted a name accordingly. Brexit, for British Exit. The name was originally laughed at for its crunchy breakfast cereal sound. But it caught on. Politicians of all parties tried to add meaning to it with adjectives, but this made it even more confusing and abstracted; you cannot modify the meaning of nothing.

“I’m interested in all these terms that have been identified – hard Brexit, soft Brexit, black Brexit, white Brexit, grey Brexit – and actually what we should be looking for is a red, white and blue Brexit,” said then Prime Minister Theresa May, missing out on green Brexit, which had also been proposed. The Dutch Foreign Minister went to greater effort in conceptualising Brexit with a giant, blue, fuzzy mascot wearing a T-shirt reading “Brexit”, depicted as getting in everyone’s way. Foreign media rightfully mocked the lack of strategy.

Each time a new menu option emerged, it was soon followed by its opposite, representing the divide but little else. Hard, soft, black, white, spinning as if by centrifugal force. What was at stake, requiring hundreds of civil servants to examine thousands of laws, industry projections spreading the breadth and width of the country, and other constitutional matters hanging in the balance, was reduced to nonsense words, devoid of detail, meaning or sense. It was chaos politically and linguistically.

Writing on violence and inequality, Rebecca Solnit said: “Maybe changing the world means changing the story, the names, and the language in which we describe it. Calling things by their true names can also cut through the lies that excuse, disguise, avoid or encourage inaction, indifference, and obliviousness in the face of injustice and violence.”

Brexit has demonstrated the political risk of imprecise language, in a world where the meaning of truth is being degraded by presidents, broadcast media fallacy of balance has been exploited by alt-right conspiracists, and experts have been derided as “elite”.

Hannah Arendt once wrote: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is […] people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

May tried to put the subject to rest with “Brexit means Brexit”, a tautology in which the nullity cannibalises itself. In one way, the nonsensical language fit the nonsensical politics. But in their imprecision, pro-Brexit slogans fuelled live-time myth-making about the UK. Ideas of taking back control merged with turning back the clock. The most ardent, not only on the Leave side, spoke with pride and nostalgia for a version of Britain that never existed, while wars were evoked by those who never experienced them.

No matter what the constitutional and trade situation is by the point you are reading these lines, Brexit was a one-way ticket to the realm of absurdity, a degradation of democracy at the cost of truth.