How Brexit drove my affair with Wetherspoons on to the rocks

I’m not sure what I’ll be doing on 31 January, when the UK officially leaves the EU at midnight – Brussels time (just in case you thought things were going to be on our terms, now). Marching feels inappropriate and possibly dangerous. Spelling out an “SOS” that is visible from space would be logistically challenging. Maybe, as on the day after the referendum result, I’ll head to my local cheap and cheerful Italian for a Birra Moretti and some clam spaghetti and sit there, miserably, to a soundtrack of Andrea Bocelli like the filthy, sentimental remainer I am. Maybe I’ll get completely off my face. All I know is that I definitely won’t be in Wetherspoons, which is cutting its drinks prices to celebrate, in a campaign it is calling “Let’s stay friends”.

In the past four years there hasn’t been a company that has championed Brexit more than Wetherspoons and its chairman, Tim Martin. The chain of pubs has produced millions of pro-Brexit beermats– prompting concerns about corporate governance – and a special Brexit-themed edition of Wetherspoons News. It has removed European beers from its menu, replaced Jägermeister with an English equivalent to create the “Brexit bomb”, and ditched champagne and prosecco in favour of English, New Zealand and Australian wines. I’ve drunk buckets of wine in Wetherspoons pubs – some of it from a tap – and honestly, it could have come from the lush vineyards of Scunthorpe for all I cared. Let’s just say that terroir was not my overriding concern in those days. And yet, it all rankles.

I’ve fallen out of love with Wetherspoons, you see. Ours was a dirty love, all-consuming through my teenage years, then later underpinned by a fond nostalgia, as though for an ex who never left your hometown. I may have moved to London and become a bit gastro, but the appeal of a quick one never faded. It was cheap, and a bit filthy. It did the job. It felt like home.

When I was in my mid-to-late teens there was an established routine. Our parents would drop us off in the car park round the back. There, we would consume a bottle of Aldi’s finest Badger’s Creek wine, before stashing the other bottle in our favoured shrub and heading inside, where everyone from school would be waiting. The Wetherspoons was in an old Catholic church. I have dim memories of going to see the priest there with a friend and her mother when I was very young: the spartan, dusty living quarters, the echoing emptiness of the place. When it became a pub it was full, jubilant. We sang our hymns at fever pitch and gave confession while nursing comically large fonts of sauv blanc. Repented upstairs in the loos, speaking to God down the big, white porcelain telephones.

Later, when my brother moved to a care home, we’d take him out to Wetherspoons. He’d have fish and chips, or a burger. Sometimes he would hoot with excitement, and flap his hands – all symptoms of his autism. I was always struck by how no one batted an eyelid. Wetherspoons has seen it all. In fact, it was one of the few places where you’d often see people with disabilities. Lots of older people too, and people who clearly didn’t have much cash. Wetherspoons’ prices have kept it inclusive, like an informal community centre.

I’ve always vociferously defended Wetherspoons against perceived snobbery, as when the Sunday Times restaurant critic Marina O’Loughlin ate in one for the first time in October 2017. She described the scampi, which my mum usually orders, as “stiff orange coffins emitting an ooze of vaguely fishy goo. Their peas somehow have a haunting backnote of fag ash” – she’s a brilliant writer. Yet I was irked by her review becauseit felt like she was implying something negative about my family and our tastes, our lack of money, possibly our class. As my husband says when MasterChef is on: “Chill out, it’s just a bit of dinner.” But in this country, it never is.

I don’t think Marina was necessarily wrong about the food, and she certainly didn’t deserve the abuse that ensued. I’m curious as to why so many of us imbue a chain of cheapo pubs with such sentimental significance, to the point where even the carpets are fetishised. Wetherspoons seems to have become another front for a proxy culture war that’s about so much more than just Brexit. It’s infused with our ideas about social class and belonging, and who we ultimately are.

Since the referendum, I haven’t felt like going in, much. It hasn’t been a conscious boycott; unfortunately, it’s coincided with my brother struggling with public spaces. Unlike some remainers, I don’t have a list of Brexit-backing companies I refuse to do business with. But Martin’s rabidly pro-Brexit stance has alienated me, and it feels weird giving him my money. I still think Brexit is colossally stupid, and often underpinned by bigotry (it should be noted, by the by, that Martin says he is pro-immigration and in 2016 one in 10 Wetherspoons staff was from overseas). At the same time, I’ve done enough research into how the referendum has divided families, and spoken to enough Brexit voters, to know that isolating ourselves from the rest of society is not going to heal the deep divisions in this country. You can’t escape where you are from, though at times I’ve tried. It’s true that I live in a bubble, surrounded by remainers. Yet I knew enough of my brother’s North Wales constituency to understand that it would switch from red to blue in the general election. To have seen the dying high street: Wetherspoons being one of the few thriving businesses.

So, while I won’t be in there on the 31st, necking a Brexit bomb and singing Rule Britannia, it won’t be long, I’m sure, until I’m back in the Coronet on Holloway Road – a beautiful cinema with art nouveau ironwork – worshipping at the altar of cheap G&T and trying, again, to love my neighbour, despite everything.

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist