‘Every border implies the violence of its maintenance’- Ayesha A. Siddiqi

Burst dinghies line the shores of our Great Country. Cowards and grifters kneel in the squelching wreckage, drunk on live streams amongst their glorious spoils. Brave boys in their colours with their washed socks and their polyester flags. Adorned with their livery, AI-generated lions prancing across plastic capes, these men bear their plywood crosses and wage their invisible wars.

If the strained shapes of the faces of the souls who died shivering and cold in their crossing of those treacherous waters of the channel were brought forth from beyond our earthly veil and made manifest and material in the crude plastic folds of their dinghies, would patriots remain steadfast in their streams, Turkey-toothed grins glinting at the base of the Dover cliffs?

Borders have been made and remained ragged forever and ever. They are tended to by the scared.

2000 years ago a man tumbled beyond his town’s front gate with a belly full of unleavened bread. Chased from the sanctuary of his living room candles, driven from a hearth towards the coal-faced night, he was garrotted and cut and chucked in the wetness of the bog. Swollen with his wounds, and tanned by the oily slippage, he died and stiffened, becoming the shape of his pain. Hundreds of these bog bodies have been found up and down and across our speckled and pockmarked great isles. Mummified as leather, deflated like dinghies. Often on borders, always in bogs. Killed on the precipice, in defence of Territory or Ideal or God.

There are no passports for the journeys made in their time, to be unearthed like great dripping statues in ours.

Can we understand how fire-forged masculinity has rusted in the digital sphere, how Love-Island femininity has migrated, and how insular online communities operate as echo chambers within the most land-locked spaces across this small boat floating mass? The Midlands. The living room of the house. The keep of a castle. A headlock. The most insular of all, the wallpaper melting along the wall. Bountiful central heating and a fresh load of washing. When fear stays at home, it swells.

Like gas burped up from unleavened bread and yeast breathing. Scared men take up space and take up their crude weapons. They hammer away in sheds built by false fathers, building their own crosses from cheap wood bought in bulk from TikTok Shop. They fashion their own crucifixions and accept gifts and galaxies as they farm their audiences for their fear. They shrivel in their cowardice. They shiver in cotton socks and won’t stop because the country needs saving- grovelling to line the pockets of billionaires with no shred of shared interest.

They dream of ghosts of migrant men. Haunting the doors of food banks and robbing veterans on imaginary cobbled lanes. They cast no critical squint upwards to those charged with the governance of the country, nor the oil merchants lining their pockets with bills from false patriots. They stand in defensive lines in their mothers’ living rooms and feign victimhood and wait for their beans on toast, for tea.

Bogland is the opposite to the indoors. To die violently beneath the widest sky.