IF there were a second referendum I would vote differently this time. Everything has changed since the first vote.
Everything I expected to happen hasn't happened. All my hopes of a 'new era' country working together in harmony and towards a common goal have been dashed.
All my expectations of divisions ending after the referendum have also been dashed.
So yes, give me another referendum and I will change my vote.
I am, of course, talking about the Good Friday Agreement referendum.
If someone had told me that Northern Ireland would, 20 years later, be more electorally polarised than ever before in my lifetime, I would have voted No in 1998.
If they had told me that the DUP and Sinn Féin would be sweeping up almost two-thirds of the vote between them, I would have voted No.
If they had told me there would be no new political/electoral vehicles worth speaking of, I'd have voted No.
But nobody - and I really do mean nobody - thought that was likely to happen. Even the official No campaign didn't centre their objections around those possibilities.
My point is, that on reflection you can accept that you were probably wrong to vote in a particular way.
When it comes to general elections and council elections you usually just shrug your shoulders and wait for the next elections a few years later.
But, as we saw with the EEC membership referendum in 1975, it can take 41 years before you have another bite of the referendum cherry.
Unlike the message of Channel 4's Brexit: The Uncivil War, broadcast on Monday, millions of us weren't manipulated into voting Leave.
We knew from the outset how and why we would vote - as did the vast majority of Remainers.
And, irrespective of the result, we expected Parliament to accept it, even if, in legal terms, a referendum is only ever 'advisory'.
After the general election in June 2017 I noted, "there clearly isn't a majority in the Commons for a clean-break exit from the EU, or for an exit in the absence of a deal. This will be an arithmetic nightmare for Mrs May and an ongoing headache for red-in-tooth-and-claw Brexiteers".
The other problem, of course, for Brexiteers is that they set great store in the sovereignty of Parliament.
That sovereignty resides with the MPs collectively. If a majority of them don't want a clean-break or no-deal exit and vote against those options, then that is an example of Parliamentary sovereignty in action.
The Brexiteers may not like it: but unless and until they can get their own majority elected they are stuck with it.
The reason we are in the present mess - and I'll own it here, as someone who voted Leave I didn't anticipate the subsequent dog's dinner - is because the champions of Leave didn't, don't and never have had a coherent exit strategy.
It is absurd to say that we just walk away and fall into the arms of the WTO - an option which is not as easy as they suggest.
And just look at how many other exit strategies they have toyed with over the past two years.
To be honest, listening to Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Farage, Carswell, Paterson et al is a bit like listening to those unionists in the 1970s and 1980s - think Sunningdale and the Anglo-Irish Agreement - who argued, "Let's face down Westminster until they cave-in to our demands".
Unilateral bravado rarely works in politics; particularly when the pro-Brexit gang suggesting it don't appear to be much more sophisticated than Enid Blyton's Famous Five.
I don't believe that a general election would actually change the arithmetic all that much.
There hasn't been a pro-Leave Commons majority in my lifetime and I'm not expecting one anytime soon.
A keyboard army of pro-Brexit warriors is warning of the destruction of the Conservative Party if Mrs May gets her way; yet it's never clear where they think those voters would go.
The rise of the right electorally has been predicted for years, but it never happens.
This isn't America. A Trump figure can't just come along and seize power.
And people here who talk about the 'yellow jackets' revolt in France don't seem to realise that many in that movement are hard-left and merely anti whoever they define as the 'establishment'.
There are a dozen or so online figureheads in the UK talking of revolution and claiming to 'speak the truth' and tweeting any old nonsense in the hope of building their 'follower' profile.
But, as Mark Twain said: "Those who claim to be brave enough to say what everybody is thinking, rarely get elected." And that's usually because they've never made an important decision in their lives.
Barring a miracle next Tuesday - with May getting her Withdrawal Agreement through - I don't see how the mess gets sorted without either an election or a referendum. Maybe both.
