Wake up and smell the covfefe and tell the spinning corpse of Robin Day the news. The old politics is over. This election is no longer a choice between left and right, between traditional working-class or middle-class allegiances, between self-interest and concern for others. It is a new kind of choice. It is a choice between bastards and twats.

It was half-term and, like Theresa May, I began the week appearing before prearranged crowds of people who loved me, applauding my arrival, and clapping everything I said. Then, after leaving the Wells comedy festival, I crossed the nation honouring familial obligations, and projecting my own electoral anxieties on to obliging British landscapes. Who knew that the gaping gash of Clutter’s Cave in the Malvern Hills, when viewed from the footpath, looks exactly like the prime minister’s open mouth?

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On Monday I made my annual visit to the Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling competition in Gloucestershire. The uninsurable million-year-old-produce-pursuing event sees heroic drunks leap suicidally down a 2:1 slope to chase a 9lb wheel of double gloucester, which they have no chance of ever catching. Foreign observers need look no further to understand the peculiarly British mentality that drove us as a nation to embrace the vertical cliff of Brexit, our nostalgic visions as elusive as a speeding cheesy wheel.

The cheese rolling over, I arrived in Gloucester (Leave) and sat down to watch the evening’s bastard/twat face-off on Channel 4. But even the biggest bastard, even the most feckless twat, I decided, deserved better than to be interviewed by Jeremy Paxman; an embarrassing and punch-drunk old prize-fighter now, decades past his best, fit only for satirical election-night specials, keen to land one killer blow to prove he once had it, before soiling his concealed Conservative party Y-fronts in public, and stepping down to endorse aftershave or a range of fat-reducing grills. He could have been a contender.

I went into Gloucester to buy a pork roll from a van and carry out a mobility-scooter census, but when I came back, Paxman was still snarling and growling, like a senile attack dog who had mistaken his own flaccid penis for a dangerous snake. “Mr Corbyn, if you were asked to shoot a fluffy kitten through the head with a bolt gun, could you do it? Could you do it? Could you? Answer the question!” “I could do it, Jeremy, but I would have to be fully aware, from the intelligence agencies, of the facts that supported the cat’s supposed guilt first,” answered an unflappable Corbyn. “What if the fluffy kitten had a ribbon tied in its hair, and a tinkling bell, Mr Corbyn? Could you shoot it then? What if it’s name was Twinkle? Answer me!!”

The debate seemed less like a news programme, and more like an ancient, traditional ritual humiliation, still played out to this day, of would-be mayors in the square of a Pyrenean commune. During her wobbly TV appearance, trembling Theresa’s jawbone began all but flapping loose of her skull on its right-hand hinge. If May were a gunfighter in an Italian western, this familiar phenomenon would be the “tell” that revealed her cracking under pressure, and Sergio Leone would zoom in on ever tighter closeups of her gradually dislocating mandible.

The southern regions of May’s visage now seem held in place only by skin and saliva and fear. I wonder if she didn’t attend Wednesday’s debate because part of her face had actually worked loose. On Monday, it seemed almost inhumane of the Conservatives to expect her to continue to front out a shoddy manifesto she clearly found quite literally jaw-dropping in its inadequacy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by David Foldvari.

The next morning, on my way north via Tewkesbury (Leave), I passed an intriguing brown sign for Hartpury Bee Shelter and Barn. The bee shelter, it transpired, is a 19th-century stone structure designed to hold 28 hives full of hard-working bees, but it is as empty now as the future fields of Lincolnshire. The roof of the 14th-century barn depicts a dragon looking east to England, a lion looking west to Wales, and a gargoyle looking south to Brussels, flicking its Vs and masturbating while slitting its own throat.

On Tuesday evening in Worcester (Leave), in the company of elderly relatives, I watched the artist Grayson Perry on Channel 4, fashioning two healing pots, depicting Leavers and Remainers respectively. My family are not Perry’s natural fanbase, but they were nonetheless delighted by him, though they thought his twin sister in the dress was strange.

It seemed that Perry had used a glazed image of my face as the sort of thing trendy Remainers like. Luckily no one in my family noticed as they would have been utterly baffled by how a man they regard as having wasted his educational opportunities to become a kind of travelling gypsy-clown could have possibly symbolised anything other than failure and tragedy.

Perry’s pots aimed to show that we had more in common than that which divides us. I would have put Peter Stringfellow in a thong on the Remain pot and Nick Griffin’s funny eye on the Leave one, but I am not an artist. At the end of the show, Perry united the two different groups of white people depicted on his ceramics and they all cried and hugged like a bunch of dicks. If I had been there I would have kept the angry flame of despair burning and called all the Leavers arseholes to their stupid Leave faces. Not only have they ruined the future, but they also get a lovely pot commemorating their stupidity made by a top artist. Where is the justice in that?

On Wednesday I drove back to London (Remain) across the Cotswolds at dusk, listening to the leaders’ debate on the radio. The children couldn’t believe it – loads of supposedly responsible adults just shouting over each other and screaming. It was just like being at home. Corbyn stayed calm, and I found myself pitying Amber Rudd, press-ganged to defend the indefensible, to audible audience laughter.

We stopped at the bronze age Rollright Stones to eat pizza, bananas and homemade cake. The sun was sinking over the horizon as we made our usual votive offerings of lavender and brown pennies. Some dreadlocked young people, sitting in a ring, were smoking and drinking and setting the world to rights. I remembered being their age, here in this exact same place in a summer twilight 30 years ago, and doing the same, blissfully unaware of just how bad things were going to get.

Stewart Lee is touring his new show, Content Provider, throughout 2017