Don’t start pissing in my pocket and try to tell me it’s raining. And believe me, you don’t have to be called Rover to hear a dog whistle. The impromptu rash of flying of the Union flag across the country is not some benign outpouring of spontaneous national pride.

It’s a malignant signal working at a wavelength outside of the perception of the human eye, but I’m not blind to the message. Like dogs pissing on lamp posts, you are just marking out your territory.

So now, I feel like the tide is coming in, like my little slice of paradise is under threat. Now, it’s not often that you hear South Norwood being compared with utopia. But for me, it is heaven.

Stood on the High Street opposite the Gringo Butcher and the Jamaican African store and fishmonger. I’ve seen it all. Waiting for a bus, the whole rich tapestry of life has unfolded in front of my very eyes.

From balaclavaed up drug dealers riding conspicuously expensive quad bikes to pimped-up mobility scooters blaring out reggae and everything in between.

Expressions of love and hate expressed in almost every language under the sun, by just as many races. Christ, even the squabbling immigrant ring-necked parakeets that scream and squawk call it home.

As the smell of the amazing, Original Tasty Jerk wafts down from the football ground, you’d swear you were in the Caribbean on some Dreadlock Holiday.

So if your idea of Eden is hot spiced suburbia with Patois and Polish, rabbiting Russians, a smattering of Somali, a smidgen of Serbian, and so many languages I don’t even recognise. South Norwood is a brilliant babbling Tower of Babel. Think Terry and June, filmed up the borough, dubbed badly in a thousand tongues.

Things that would have shocked me when I first left Devon and came to London almost forty years ago are now invisible, and now, I get uncomfortable if an area is too white.

Danger? It’s had its moments, but I imagine no more than any other slice of spicy London. Like everyone, I’ve seen circling air ambulances and heard the hovering copper choppers. I’ve witnessed the tributes and flowers, those street testaments to bad luck and bad timing, and I walk on by.

Until I came under rocket attack during one visit to Iraq, I used to joke that I’d heard more gunfire around here, but the area is on the way up. And so is South Norwood.

If my love of Jungle, Drum and Bass was passed in some manner of reverse osmosis, what on earth did I give in return? But perhaps trying to find logic in this exotic universe is just an exercise in Absurdism.

Yet there is nothing absurdist about its joy and energy. Blissfully free of some of the more cloying social niceties. It’s a long way from Bideford, the town of my birth, a million miles in attitudes to race and gender. Yet I feel more at home here than I ever did in Devon.

I don’t like South Norwood. I love it. There, I said it.

So imagine my shock when my partner and I started a conversation that if I’d lived for a million years I could never have imagined having, one that even only twenty years ago would have been considered ludicrous.

Having a family comprised of many mixed races and religions, I’m perhaps more invested in multiculturalism than those who live outside of London, a place that is beginning to feel like an island of common sense in a sea of madness.

Coming off the back of the images of the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march, with its visions of Crusaders in faux chain mail and oceans of Union Jacks, ironically, many unintentionally flew upside down in the universal signal of distress, and quite frankly, I was distressed too.

The scale of the event shocked me to my core. Honestly, I’m not ashamed to say it alarmed me. Behind all that ersatz patriotism and misplaced national pride, there was something else.

Flags and banners that talk of preserving and protecting our heritage and history are just code for racism. The chants of saving and protecting our young girls and women from immigrants are just code for more racism.

I’m not blind, and neither am I stupid. You didn’t need to be Alan Turing or a computer to decode this enigma. And as a wave of populism engulfs this country, I fear it will wash Nigel Farage to the very steps of Number 10. Yet, while the thought of Farage as PM terrifies me, something else horrifies me.

As my partner and I talked, we spoke of the morning after the night before. And the demons it might unleash. Emboldened by the victory, will all the little Englanders and closet racists feel it is safe to come out and rid the streets of immigrants?

Like armies of the undead, will Tommy from Tiverton rise up and join forces with Brian from Bideford and take the law into their own hands? After all, all those lefties and woke wankers from London who didn’t vote for Farage just need a hand to see the light.

Why stop at immigration? Let’s do something about drugs and crime, they chant, pitchforks in hand. Like ICE descending on US cities, will bands of Tweed-clad vigilantes in wellies from the West Country decide to instigate their own brand of Stop-and-search on the streets of South Norwood? After all, we won fair and square.

Good luck to them if they do, they’ll need it too, for I don’t rate the chances of those good ol’ boys in the hood.

Picture the chaos, with the genie out of the bottle, Pandora’s box open wide. If you thought the riots after the Southport murders were bad and the immigration hotel protests were threatening, imagine a conflagration of righteous and unrighteous indignation, both convinced they are saving the world. The country. And themselves.

What was once an elevator pitch for a dreadful B-movie now sounds like the gift of second sight. As they once said, you have nothing to fear but fear itself. Sadly, I fear that a Reform victory will change all that.

Now, before you accuse me of hitting the cooking sherry and getting carried away with it all, consider this: once the thought of a second civil war in America was considered unthinkable, now you would think such thoughts prudent.

So how on earth did we get here? If what was once an unthinkable fantasy could become thinkable, it would have passed from abstract thought to a possible reality.

And if that does not scare you, you are probably a Reform voter, but as they say, be careful what you wish for. I’m alright, Jack, are you?