BREXILE: Red, white and ... blue

I’ve sold the house that was in my family for 61 years. The decorators are champing at the bit to get in there and tear down wallpaper, rip 70s and 80s fitted carpets from the stairs, the sitting room, the bathroom (yuk!). 

I wanted a long, lesiurely sale. Perhaps to be there still over Christmas, into 2026. But it wasn’t to be, and maybe that’s for the best. No more heating bills, no more worry on ski holidays about burst pipes. 

10 weeks from going on the market to completion. A sprint, even if you’re living in the country. I have shut myself off - from work, from friends, even family - to get Brexile done. And done it is. 

Last time I sold a property was in 2004, pre-mobile internet and apps and codes and excessive identity proofs. I was younger - and completely blase about it all. I had zero interest in who was buying my Wimbledon flat, just wanted a high price and for the thing to be done swiftly, without complications.

This time, I was a nervous wreck. The logistics of it all gave me the heebie-jeebies. I had recurring nightmares - even the night before last - about floods, fires, lost keys, other disasters. I didn’t help myself by the desire to do as much as possible single-handed. Because it wasn’t just about selling a property. It was about uprooting and my identity.

The timing ended up feeling portentous, if that’s the right word. In the last week, there's been the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the “Unite the Kingdom” march of 150,00/3 million flag-shaggers/patriots in London (alternatives depend on your perspective - the truth, as ever, lies somewhere in between). And yesterday US President Trump arrived - he’s currently in Windsor, just a few miles away from me. 

But one thing the whole disorientating experience has taught me is this. Trust in your faith in human nature, not in random media and opinions on the internet. I feel as if I’ve been brainwashed to believe that everything is going to go pear-shaped, that people are useless, that no-one can be trusted to do their job.

That’s bollocks. Over the last few weeks, I’ve met so many different characters, from the estate agent, the solicitors, the removals man, the guys at the local tip, the tea shop lady who gratefully accepted my china, the auction and house clearance guy, my lovely neighbours, my first cousin-twice-removed and her boyfriend, the staff at the hospice charity depot, my friendly local plumber ...

... and everything got done - even the returns bag for the router arrived just in time.

In the end, we muddle through. We always do.
 

Lifetime brands

 

I’m on the (fingers still crossed) last lap of the house sale and I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a period of such intense physical and emotional exhaustion. OK, I’ve brought it on myself in some ways: of course I could have thrown money at it and simply paid someone to do it. Sift through over 60 years’ worth of stuff. Find new homes for some and dispose of the rest as responsibly as possible. Maybe even make a little money in the process. But I simply didn’t have time. 

So if my posts here are lacking in depth, please forgive me. My brain is scrambled - I wake up at unearthly hours wondering what to do with that, what order to do x, y and z, fretting about the logistics of the whole thing, hoping to God that people turn up at the right time.

When I’ve gone to the local dump, aka tip, aka recycling centre, I’ve tried not to dwell on things. But my mind flashes back to when we’d go to the dump to find things, not chuck them. Some pram wheels, a baby billiard board - and, hey presto! - a go-cart. Fat chance of anyone finding anything I’ve chucked, though - they’d have to abseil down into the skips and then risk being crushed by the infernal machines, lurching over the containers like mechanical birds of prey.

It’s been a dusty parade of brand names, mostly long forgotten, that have tumbled into those skips. Occasionally, I’ll find myself humming a jingle and seriously not know whether it was real, or something I made up when I was a small child. Pax-i-mat elect-ric!

But amongst these mid-century relics, there are a few brands that - I think - are in it for life. Like Thermos - in the same way as Hoover, is this a brand name or an item? I was slightly surprised to read that Thermos was founded in Germany (it now has its HQ in the US and is under Japanese ownership) - maybe that is significant, somehow.

My first memories of Thermos flasks were on Tarshyne Beach, Aden. All the families had them, to keep orange squash cold and coffee hot. Back then, they came in garish stripes like deckchairs, or a wicker design like the furniture in the Officers’ Club. Later, back in cold and gloomy Britain, they were lugged round caravan sites, lochs and glens, mountains and castles.

On the website today, the copy says that Thermos flasks are for “adventurers, explorers and everyday folks like us”...

... so I have a new-ish Thermos. It became my Covid companion on long drives from home to home. And the habit stuck. Here’s to the next adventure!

   

BREXILE: Musn’t grumble?

 

I never thought that a cryptocurrency ad would make me chuckle - but this one from Coinbase raised a wry smile. 

As part of the Brexile process, I’m making a list of reasons I’m glad to be jumping ship - to keep me going when I get second, third and fourth thoughts. These range from seeing my favourite local curry house being torn down unceremoniously to pretentious restaurants charging £6 for a couple of pieces of non-descript bread to no beer on tap at the local. 

I’ll just play this gem next time I start to get the staying pangs - 2 minutes of squalid, crumbling, bleak, rat- and rubbish-strewn Brexit Island, all to a jolly Oliver!-style song-and-dance number.

Everything is fine. Yeah.   

BREXILE: Never Turn Back

 

Unlike this sleepy swing, things are moving pretty damn quickly with the Brexile plans. Quicker than I would have liked, ideally - I have accepted an offer on my house. The last few nights have been as good as sleepless, wondering What On Earth Have I Done? 

This is going to hurt. A lot.

I knew it wouldn’t be easy. I wrote the following back in Feb 2021, mid-pandemic. It’s without doubt the most personal thing I’ve ever posted on this blog. A few months later, in June 2021, I spent a quarantine summer in the house, alone. That’s when I took the photos. It brought me closer to the place once more - and made those ties even more difficult to sever. 

But the longer I leave it, the more formidable that cloud becomes.

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NEVER TURN BACK

 

‘It’s a forever home,’ said the taxi driver in a twinkling Sarf London accent as he pulled into the drive. I looked at my mother’s house – like one of those social media memes where children’s drawings are brought to life – and nodded. We’d talked all the way from the airport, me about my ageing mother, he about his plans to retire in Spain. He was the sort – a Dave, or Phil, or Kev – that I’d been to school with, and had spent my twenties and thirties trying to escape. And now here we were, he ready finally to flee the Home Counties nest, seeking adventure, and me returning to my roots.

 

My parents always told me that I chose the house. I’ve never been quite sure if that was one of those semi-truths that parents explain to indulge their offspring that eventually take on mythical status in the grown offspring’s mind. I do have a very, very vague recollection of dogs, dogs in the quiet cul-de-sac of shiny new houses. I was obsessed with dogs as a small child. Maybe I chose the dogginess, not the house.

 

The house is (give or take) the same age as me. Twenty-seven detached houses were built in the grounds of a grand house that was repurposed as an Old Folks’ Home, as such places were called in the 1960s. The houses all bore the same style but varied in the brick colour – reddy-pink, yellow, or white stucco, like the layers of an Angel Cake. Some more generously sized, others smaller. All with a miniscule (to 21^st century eyes) single garage, the doors painted in cheerful Matchbox toy colours. Ours was a summer sky blue, next door’s a British Racing Green.

 

We moved in in the spring, as the horse chestnuts on either side of the hill were in bloom. My bedroom was at the back of the house, overlooking a garden with lavender, snapdragons, roses and apple-trees. And oak woods at the back. 

 

Together we’ve climbed hills and trees, 

Learned of love and A-B-Cs, 

Skinned our hearts and skinned our knees 

Goodbye, my friend … but no, not yet.

 

I could walk to school from the house, to Scottish dancing, and ice cream with tinned fruit salad if we were lucky, prunes and custard if we weren’t. Netball games and making cross-stitch tray-cloths. Poetry (of a certain kind) also featured on the curriculum and two poems stayed in my mind – in fact, I probably did what I’d now call a mental mash-up of the two. Hardly surprising as they were both on the same theme, and probably written around the same time:

 

I remember, I remember

The house where I was born,

The little window where the sun

Came peeping in at morn;

 

… and

 

… It made the Paradise complete:

My early home was this.

 

But a paradise is never stable. As I grew, I accumulated thoughts and ideas that didn’t fit in that “bower of bliss”. It became a prison in my mind. I didn’t want to have friends round as I was ashamed of my father’s posh voice and my mother’s fur coat. The garden became a chore, the bedroom – now decorated in turquoise, olive green and orange – somewhere I hid furtively to write pretentious poetry and cut pictures of dubious rockers out of the NME. We drank tin party barrels from Watneys in the woods, made bombs, and experimented with smoking sunflower leaves.

 

I couldn’t wait to leave.

 

In my twenties, I bought my own flat – decorated with one or two bits and bobs from the old place that I considered ironic in their slight tackiness, but otherwise all furnishings were new. My parents would talk about me coming home for Sunday lunch, but I saw it otherwise. Going to Camberley was a duty, a rather arduous one at the time, which inevitably involved drinking sherry on top of a hangover at some ungodly hour. Home: unwittingly, I drifted into being someone that didn’t really have a home. I lived in hotels, slept on aeroplanes, kipped round at friends’ places at weekends and disappeared off to weekend cottages with gangs of chums, in a Richard Curtis film sort of way. I was one of those devil-may-care Anywhere people. Wannabe global elite. Probably quite obnoxious.

 

In March 1996, I jumped the great ship Britannia as she sailed towards the island of Cool. My one-way ticket cut through the Heathrow fog like a landing light. Terminal 1 echoed with finality – no going back? London still slept but my mind already marched to the beat of the Teutonic clock. My heart followed more than willingly, long lost in the mists of a fairy tale. My mother, in some of her more dramatic moments later, called this an abandonment. I didn’t see it that way. I was European. I could come and go as I pleased. It was only later that I realised that this wasn’t about me. It was about my father, by that time already ill. 

 

The last years of the 20^th century were probably the furthest I’ve been, emotionally, away from my early home. The new Millennium marked my slow return. A birth and a death in unbearably quick succession. Taking my infant son back to my family home for the funeral meant the aviation genes in his blood would be stimulated, and he’d grow up knowing this place too.

 

It was a rediscovery, each time we flew across to the UK. The swing in the garden, painted dark green by my late father, the oak woods waiting for us, along with the toys in the toy box, the Puffin books, the sherry in the cocktail cabinet of the Ladderax, and my mother’s fur coat which Marius could dress up in and pretend he was going to snowy Narnia. I’d toppled off the career ladder (was I pushed, or did I jump?) and didn’t really give a toss. I now had Somewhere – two Somewheres – two Places for Us to accumulate not just stuff but memories, opinions, friends, hobbies and responsibilities, all in a glorious binocular muddle.

 

When one Somewhere became too much, I’d know the other was waiting for me and jump in the car.

 

Before she died, my mother asked what I’d do with the house. I was honest and said I didn’t have a clue – there were more pressing matters on my mind, like how long she had left, and whether she was in pain. 

 

‘Perhaps you’ll live here,’ she said, hopeful as ever.

 

The pandemic has put its killjoy foot firmly down on my double life and my flitting across the channel. The neighbours sent jolly pictures of bunting for the VE Day Anniversary Street Party last year, and recently crocuses from the wooded area up the hill. My brother checks on things, rather half-heartedly. This friend or that one makes helpful suggestions. You could rent it out. It’s a good time to sell. People are moving out of London. You could turn it into a writing retreat (I know, I know – they mean well).

 

In my sleeping and waking thoughts, the house lurches around from being the most cumbersome, resource-leeching and ridiculous of white elephants, to being some sort of paradisical life-force source, to being a magnificent mythological cabinet of curiosities, to being a domestic disaster waiting to happen.

 

In German, there’s a verb abnabeln – translated as “to cut oneself loose”, literally, to cut the umbilical cord. I know this is what I will have to do one day. But currently I cannot begin to countenance it. The pandemic is a frustration, but also an excuse. We all like to wallow in the comfort of helplessness. 

 

When I do summon up the wherewithal to say goodbye to the old place – at least in its bricks and mortar form, I hope I can heed the words of aviatrix and adventurer Beryl Markham: 

 

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.

 

It’s going to take every ounce of courage I have not to turn back and take one last look at my early home. 

 

Wish me luck!

 

P.S: July 2025

… The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I have learned it late.

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BREXILE: Passport Palaver

 

I’m doing it like this. 

Brexile-related activities only every other day, for the sake of my blood-pressure and family harmony.

This is one I’d been dreading, and was actually on the cards, Brexile or no Brexile. 

The joy of passport renewal. I kept putting it off because the fiasco of 10 years ago is still horribly fresh in my mind. In those days, you could get the whole process speeded up by taking everything to HM Passport Office in person (and paying a wad of cash for the pleasure).

I braced myself, with some professionally-taken biometric photos in tow that cost me a good few €s. And all was going smoothly until my expensive photos were rejected:

My pleas that it was cream or greyish and not Persil-white were to no avail. I was shooed off to the convenient photo booth where a combination of trying to take a picture without my glasses (which are for moderate-to-severe myopia, not for vanity), no makeup and unwashed hair resulted in a passport photo that looks like a corpse dredged up from the murkier parts of the Thames.

I’m not sure it’ll be any better this time. Renewals, from overseas too, are done online. And there’s no way of telling what you’ll need to answer or find or indeed pay in total without starting the thing onscreen.

It’s not a blinking exam, for goodness sake!

Now to my favourite topic: photos. Two options were presented: go to a proper photo shop or booth, and you’ll get a nice convenient code which will speed everything up.

Or mess around doing a selfie - and woe and betide you if you take this ill-advised option.

Unfortunately it has not occured to the UK passport office that professional photographers abroad e.g., in Germany, can do proper biometric photos but haven’t heard of this code system.

I struggled on.

Next issue - I owned up to having 2 passports (maybe unwise) and learned that I had to - in addition to the soon-to-expire British passport - send either my current German passport to the UK (no way!) or get a colour photocopy of all 34 pages. Including blank ones.

My colour copier has long since been deemed incompatible with my laptop. And the local copy shop closed down many moons ago. The local stationer's came to my rescue and gave me a discount - 60c instead of 80c per sheet. So much for sustainability, though – I could have sent photos or a scan but it seems that the UK passport office prefer to waste paper.

 

My day of fun was completed by a trip to the only remaining local post office, contending with roadworks, only one woman on duty, a queue of disgruntled people …  

Can’t wait to hear that it’s all been lost in transit.

BREXILE: Lost Content

 

A spot of Brexile nostalgia - one of the first things to make a new home in Germany was The Shell Nature Book, published in 1964. Fifty years later, in 2014, I wrote about how this early example of “branded content” (yeurgh!) stirred my childhood imagination. 

My imagination (slightly addled) continues to be stirred.

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LOST CONTENT

 

The usual portal to the landscapes of childhood, those blue-remembered hills, is a photograph album. Something with tassels and stiff dark pages, perhaps. Or from a later era: once-sticky backing sheets that now release fading squares like autumn leaves.

 

But not for me. Those happy highways are captured only in slides, packed in their yellow and white boxes, dated with Dymo tape and relegated to the category of one-day-we’ll-sort-those-out.

 

No, my vehicle to the vistas of days gone by belongs to the collective, not the personal. A book, one that I’m sure many 1960s families possessed. But with the boundless and borderless imagination of a child, I made it my own. The process of growing up involves the setting of more and more boundaries. What is real. What is imagined. What is present experience. What we can see. What we can’t. As a child, these merge into one, as they did each time I opened that book. I made it an interactive medium before the notion was ever dreamed of.

 

My copy of The Shell Nature Book was published in 1964. Bought, I expect, by my parents on their return from the barren rocks of Aden. Were they driven by underlying guilt? Their two small offspring had been deprived of the British countryside for most of their lives. That we had paddled daily in a warm sea and conversed with camels did little, perhaps, to mitigate this imagined deficit.

 

The book has seen better days. Although, like a much-loved toy, I still see it as I did then. The cover picture, with its unlikely juxtapositions of butterflies and bats, birds and beetles, night and day, lies under cellophane courtesy of my mother. As a primary school teacher, she knew the secrets of protection from eager clumsy thumbs and sherbet-licked fingers. Inside, the pages are still shiny as mother-of-pearl, faintly redolent of the print room.

 

I still wonder that “branded content” – for this is the 21^st century term for such publications – can be of such high and utterly lasting quality. Shell’s reputation these days has so much of the negative baggage associated with the fossil fuel industry that the words “Shell” and “nature” sit uneasily together. But the list of contributing painters (not illustrators) reads like a Who’s Who of mid-20^th century British talent. S.R.Badmin, Edith and Rowland Hilder, John Leigh-Pemberton … In between war service – often as not for the RAF – their work was commissioned by the Ministry of Information, by London Transport, by Ladybird Books.

 

These paintings captivated me, and I would lose myself in their Arcadian landscapes. The Flowers of the Countryside section, arranged by month, features a detailed foreground by Edith Hilder against a backdrop stretching into infinity, by her husband. In June, a rustic wooden pail brims with dog roses, foxgloves and wild irises, buzzing with summer, while the background of ivy-clad ruins – and a blue-remembered hill – fades mysteriously under a high sun.

 

S.R.Badmin’s painting of Trees and Shrubs for May beckoned me in, from the balcony, overhung with Horse Chestnut candles, down, down, under caterpillar-green beech leaves and wild cherry blossom, to the lake, where a boat waits ready to row to the island. John Leigh-Pemberton’s Life on the Downs scared me a little with its soft eeriness – sinister fairies had surely not long departed the ring of mushrooms nestling under that foreboding, rainbow-streaked sky.

Many of these paintings merged into real places plucked from my 1960s Home Counties world. The Hilders’ May with its backdrop of oast houses and rolling hills mirrored the view from my paternal grandparents’ Kent garden. Badmin’s July, all clipped hedges and lawns, seemed to echo with the clipped accents of the Air Force Staff College. And the Rowland Hilder and Maurice Wilson sun- to moonlight scene with young badgers frisking oblivious to the stateliness of the white mansion in the background was surely a corner of Windsor Great Park.

 

Amid these scenes of moor and meadow, cornfields and copses, like the evil godmother at the christening, lurked a stranger section to the book. Entitled Fossils, Insects and Reptiles, the paintings are by Tristram Hillier, who I have since learned was a British Surrealist, influenced by de Chirico and Max Ernst as well as Paul Nash, with whom he worked. And here they were, the bits that didn’t fit in the golden land of the other paintings. Creepy-crawlies, lower forms of life. Parts discarded by death. Or that not yet alive. Shells. Moths. Birds’ eggs. Skulls.

 

Hillier’s painting entitled Fossils epitomises this curious world that skulks below the surface of the sunlit British countryside. A quartet of books sits on a desk, two of these perched on a Pandora-esque box. Proper learned books, with stiff spines, muted cloth covers and old gold lettering: Elements of Geology, Vol II. And growing out of the volumes, like petrified fungi, are the fossils. Corals the shade of ancient teeth, a sea-urchin resembling a decaying bun – and the “ites”, iron-grey relics from way beyond the Iron Age. Belemnites, Pyrites, Ammonites.

 

One ammonite sits at the centre of the display, a perfect specimen, although all ammonites are perfect in their neatness, coiling for eternity to the centre. They are described in terms of extinct weights and measures – “vary from penny size to giants two feet across.” 

 

Before leaving this page, the eye is drawn to the left of the desk. A used match lies there, carelessly placed but carefully painted. Did Hillier light a pipe – perhaps the one that appears in his otherworldly study of moths three pages later – before he embarked on his work? Was this a hint towards the carboniferous era? Or simply a surreal gesture?

 

In these days of Google Earth, we can travel to any landscape on the globe in a matter of seconds. We never have to visit the same scene twice. Yet I still have a yearning for these scenes of my childhood, for they have not been fossilised. Viewing them today, memories and experience combine with my immediate perception, to create something of wonder anew.      

BREXILE: The Light at the end of the Chunnel

More reanimated scribblings from me on the subject of belonging (or not). I wrote this in June 2017, reflecting back 21 years to June 1996 and that football match.

Even June 2017 seems a distant world now - “Germany - under the chancellorship of Angela Merkel - is being hailed as leader of the free world.” Well, there’s not much hailing of that sort going on at the moment ...

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THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE CHUNNEL

 

21 years ago, I sat down in a cellar in Mittelbuchen and wept. 

 

And then I got up and demanded a taxi to take me to the airport, to go home, back to England. This, of course, was absurd. I was plastered and was expected at 9 o’clock sharp in a Frankfurt West End office the next day. All I had were the clothes I stood up in and a large artwork board bearing a Magic-Markered cross of St George and pictures of Gascoigne, Shearer, Sheringham et al clipped out of the newspapers.

 

They were oblivious to my anguish, my German friends. Oblivious to my cries of how England had deserved to win, needed to win, for the good of the whole country. The tragic irony of it all. Beaten at Wembley – the hosts! It just wasn’t cricket. 30 years of hurt. Hurt to the bone, and what’s bred therein. It was like finding your new spouse cheating on your honeymoon.  

 

In March 1996, three months previously, I’d jumped the great ship Britannia as she sailed towards the island of Cool. My one-way ticket cut through the Heathrow fog like a landing light. Terminal 1 echoed with finality – no going back?

 

Who in their right mind would want to go there? We had Oasis, the Spice Girls, two World Wars and one Word Cup. They had bad haircuts and even worse music. I arrived at Frankfurt airport with the baggage of ignorant superiority and (relative) youthful arrogance. And a yuppie hangover.

 

Last night, 27^th June 2017, was the half-final of the Under 21s. England vs. Germany, and history seemed to be repeating itself, although none of the players on the pitch had even been born, that fateful night in Wembley. Maybe their mothers had wept, as I had, clutched their bumps, and dreamed of their little man growing up to be the saviour of English football, a young lion. Or maybe not.

 

Has nothing changed? Maybe not on the football pitch, but there’s a world beyond that. In that world, Germany seems to have achieved a feat even more remarkable than an English football team winning on penalties. Germany – under the chancellorship of Angela Merkel – is being hailed as the leader of the free world. This isn’t about economy, or defence but about values. Who can’t fail to be delighted seeing Angie’s scornful glances and wry smiles in the presence of Donald Trump? 

 

Meanwhile: Oh! England, my hamster heart.

 

The great ship Britannia sank unceremoniously amid illegal wars, lies, cheating, fraud, bad banks, dissent, phone hacking, unscrupulous journalists and I could go on but it’s just depressing. The country is a stirred-up wasps’ nest. Full of sound and fury and signifying I’m not sure what. People have forgotten how to be human.

 

Am I a patriot? I don’t really know. All I can say at the moment is that I love my country for what it was and what it could be, rather than what it is today.

 

So, what about the football? Did history repeat itself for me too? Well, this time, no. There were no tears on my part and no alcohol. Maybe the two were connected.

 

The only barriers between me and getting my German citizenship now are time and money. I’ve passed the tests, gathered all the documentation and all I need do now is make an appointment and hand over my Euros.

 

I read an article pertinent to my situation, the other day:

https://www.theschooloflife.com/article/countries-for-losers-countries-for-winners/

 

The idea is that there are countries that reward winners richly, but where the losers pay the price. Yes, guess which country is top, followed by – yup, got it! And this all works because many people naturally assume that they’ll win at some point.

 

Germany is on the other list of countries – those where voters graciously admit they are and will remain losers and where public transport, housing and schools are fit and decent for the majority of the population: the ‘losers.’

 

I do wonder if my wish to become German has something to do with my middle-aged but happy acceptance that I’m not one of life’s ultimate winners?

 

So, German citizenship, here I come. Watch this space.

 

But I would like to see those bastards once, just once, lose at football! 

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These days, I’m clutching both passports as I scurry back and forth across the Chunnel. 

And soon we’ll get a new government here. Let’s see.

Whatever happens, and politics aside, as far as I'm concerned, There’ll Always Be a Europe. 

BREXILE: A tale of two ferries

 

I stuck my head in the sand as far as my looming Brexile project goes over Christmas and New Year. Well, that’s not quite true. There wasn’t much sand about, and instead of an exotic holiday on a warm sandy beach, I decided to see in a New Year in my Old Home and party like it’s 1999. Turned out it was more like 1979, even better, but that’s another story.

Choosing ferries was important as it would set the tone for what’s going to be a frequent commute this year. I note that, mid-Covid, I was bright and breezy and optimistic about the future of travel. 

If only.

That was before P&O fell in a lamentable mess out of my consideration set (I do actually have one of these fabled constructs for ferries) as a result of their shocking treatment of staff. But maybe because it was near Christmas and I was feeling peace-and-goodwill-to-all-ferry-operators, I decided to give them another chance.

The pre-sailing email didn’t exactly inspire confidence, but it was too late to change things by that point.

I can’t abide the expression “grab” - which P&O (or their AI copywriter) see fit to use every other sentence. I would have hoped that Mr Trump’s use of the word in connection with female anatomy might have put writers off using it. Regrettably not.

It was even worse than feared - I don’t like getting all hoity-toity-Karen and threatening with eternal damnation on Trip Advisor, but sometimes you just have to vent forth. I regurgitated much of the review above when P&O sent me one of their badly-constructed surveys.

Just when I thought it was all over, I got this email. If you can make any sense of it, well done you:

A glutton for punishment, I clicked in an idle fashion into their website and wasn’t too surprised to find one of Germany’s most famous landmarks has moved a few hundred km north west to Frankfurt. Ho hum.

What do I take out of all this about the brand P&O?

Easy. They don’t give a seagull’s shit about customers, service or accuracy.

The tale does have a happy end as I’d booked the return ferry with DFDS.

Now, that’s what I call a ferry service!

BREXILE: I left my soul in SW19

 

     New Year’s Eve 1995/6

This where I get personal. 

Not much about brands or ads, but a lot of me-me-me. (I’m entitled, though, aren’t I?)

Next year’s big project will be clearing out and selling up. Going into Brexile officially. I’m dreading it, but perhaps it’ll be therapeutic to jot down my feelings and experiences so I can look back and laugh.

It’s also a chance to regurgitate some of my creative writing. This first piece was written in 2010, so 14 years ago, but also 14 years after my move here.

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I LEFT MY SOUL IN SW19

 

In March 1996, I jumped the great ship Britannia as she sailed towards the island of Cool. My one-way ticket cut through the Heathrow fog like a landing-light. Terminal 1 echoed with finality – no going back?

 

London still slept but my mind already marched to the beat of the Teutonic clock. My heart followed more than willingly, long lost in the mists of a fairytale.

 

Only my English soul stayed stubborn. 

 

Like my mishandled baggage, it was wrenched kicking and screaming from the conveyor belt at Frankfurt. 

 

The tear could not be repaired.

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BREXILE: I’m leaving you, England. But we’ll stay friends, for old times’ sake.

 

There comes a point where you have to part company.

With a partner, an employer, a country, a way of life.

It’s finally come to that with me and England.

Is it Brexit? Is it AI? Is it me? Who knows?

I read this, the other day, in yet another excellent article by Ian Leslie:

We’re giving up our USP in order to meet the machines on their turf. Meanwhile we’re training humans to think and act algorithmically, following rules and checking boxes.

And that’s the issue. When I left the UK, in 1996, I was a human being. But now, the country’s systems are trying to mould me into a machine.

And I don’t fit.

My broadband and landline service in my UK home has changed to TalkTalk. Not my wish. I’m sent paper bills, for which I’m charged £33 a year, which I didn’t request. The problem is that TalkTalk don’t support or recognise any of my email addresses. 

The council has seen fit to impose a 100% premium on my Council Tax and given me precious little warning. Oh yes, easy to clear, pack up and sell a home that’s been in the family for 60 years. Especially from abroad. Only need a couple of months to do that, don’t you?

I liked the idea of monitoring my home from afar, to avoid any more frozen pipe disasters. So I had a Hive thermostat fitted. All fine and dandy, except I need a UK phone number to receive all the authentification messages. 

Undeterred, I set off to Vodafone to get a basic Nokia that’ll do the job. All well and good, yes, I do have a UK bank account, marvellous ...until ...

That account needs to be registered at a UK address. So end up having to get a pay-as-you-go phone where the number runs out if you don’t use the phone in the UK within 3 months. 

Tiresome doesn’t begin to cover all this. It’s the same frustration you feel filling in a form and you’re given a set list of options, none of which apply. And no open-ended questions.

It’s left me feeling like this:

I’m trying to live with tech in peace, honestly, I am. And I know I have agency, it’s not personal and all that.

But it’s grinding me down, and it shouldn’t.

So it’s going to be toodle-pip.

I miss my freedom to be a European, with my two passports and two homes.

The time has come to lean into my humanity and lean away from England.