No wonder Britain voted for Brexit – just look at our obsession with garden fences

Even in the face of stormy weather, we’ve always gone above and beyond to build new barriers. And it says everything about our feelings towards Europe, writes Jane Fae

Perhaps excluding our neighbours has roots much deeper than a considered critique of Schengen (Getty/iStock)

It is an ill wind, they say, that blows no good. And so it was last week as I surveyed the wreckage of the barrier separating me from my neighbour, and offered up a brief prayer of thanks to Aeolus, the God of Wind and his lately numerous offspring: Ciara, Dennis, Ellen.

For this was the second time in a matter of months – third in a year – that storms had decimated the 6ft fencing that keeps my neighbours safe from me and my wild, Independent-leaning ways. My back garden looked, felt, like a mouth with a tooth missing.

My cat, a boisterous disrespecter of boundaries, is celebrating. He goes where he will: more to the point, eats and sleeps where he will. But this new and open vista is exciting. Like going to sleep in the back of a wardrobe and waking in an open-ended winter wonderland.

“Must you rebuild?”, I ask my neighbour, kneeling before me. Not so much respect, as the fact that he was scraping out the hole where the fence post had been.

After all, we get on, and it's not as though that fence provides much security. Nor do I get up to anything untoward in my garden. (Unlike the long-ago neighbour who was wont to treat sunny summer days as license to air his private parts for all to see!). But they are selling their home and castle, and proper fences are “expected”.

Not for the first time, I wondered if there was a deeper lesson here. A nation of geopolitical xenophobes obsessing over – worshipping, even – the barriers between us. Perhaps excluding our neighbours has roots much deeper than a considered critique of Schengen.

There is, without doubt, a worthy article to be written on this topic. It would combine such disparate strands as geography, typical agriculture, history enclosure, and more besides, before concluding with a quote from a professor in the department of Fence-ology at the University of Wall. This, dear reader, is not that article!

Rather, it is conceit, a pet theory that has been bubbling away since childhood when I lived with my parents, next to an elderly lady who we saw perhaps twice in 20 years. For she too loved her fences: built them high. Though she also loved nature, allowing her back garden to metamorphose into a facsimile of impenetrable ancient woodland. Why? Because, she explained on one of those rare encounters, God had told her to. So there!

For sense check I spoke to friends around and about Europe. From France, Stephanie admits that she had never known such obsession until she moved to the UK. She is amused and bemused in equal measure.

My Spanish informant, Theresa, adds: “Fences, what fences? Everybody knows which bit of land is theirs and sometimes there are no fences. In fact, the only people who have fences are in town (very few single houses mostly apartments) or Germans”.

Hmmm. Those beastly Germans! We'll get back to them.

From Italy, where I lived in a house with a large, mostly fenceless garden for a while after I married, Gianna suggests that while Italians will make sure you know within a millimetre which is their land – and will happily commit murder over local boundary disputes – they are proud to show off their gardens and plants. So “fences are few and far between”.

Although, this view is contradicted by another – a frequent Italian visitor – who claims that in Lombardia, Italians are obsessed with fences, railings and security gates. Is it, perhaps, just coincidence that that region was birthplace to the fiercely nationalistic Lega who, given half a chance, would secede from the south and build a great big wall around all that remained?

None of this is especially new. Back in 1968, the Bonzo Dog Band captured the essence of such thinking in “My Pink Half of the Drainpipe” that “separates next door from me”: a brutal and funny deconstruction of British parochialism.

Meanwhile, from the continent, nuance arrives. There is some suspicion that Germans might share something of a British affinity for fencing: and consensus that “the Netherlands is the worst!”. Also a suggestion that here and there – Poland, for instance (thanks for the insight, Edyta!) – barriers are starting to take root: but for reasons of practical security, more than national temperament.

My cat, of Norwegian pedigree, and an inveterate stealer of fish, is nonplussed. I fear it may have been he who capped my neighbours reconstruction efforts with the addition of a monstrous poo in the hole so lovingly scraped out.

No matter. I shall blame my neighbour's cat, a nervous British shorthair called Reggie who took one look at my continental bruiser and had to be prescribed anti-anxiety tablets. I kid you not.

Perhaps this is the true metaphor for Brexit: Brits doing their best to build new barriers, while Europeans sneak in by night and s*** on the foundations!

But then, if the winds keep blowing, all this may be redundant. In time, true Brits will have to learn to live without their fences. And for me, that cannot come a minute too soon!