Beyond Brexit

A month or so after moving to Amsterdam, I found myself discussing tea with one of my Dutch colleagues (I had ticked off the weather and football from my Brit-abroad bingo card). He was confused why what I called tea, he knew as English Breakfast Tea. It was a quiet day in the office, ok? Anyway I mumbled something about it being “a European thing,” calling it by its full title, and he laughed in my face with a sort of gentle affection. “You are not European then? Interesting.”

I have thought about this exchange quite a lot since the referendum results came in on Friday morning. I am pretty embarrassed about it. I have been welcomed to this country not just by all the talented, interested and interesting new friends and colleagues I have met, but also by a government which made it super easy to register here. And moreover, both my partner and I got generous tax breaks thanks to our “special worker” status. We have a beautiful flat, better protection as private renters, and a better quality of life than we ever had in London.

And yet even after all that, I still thought of myself as British, rather than European. Now I don’t.

Much of a romantic weekend away was spent watching the madness of the last few days through Twitter and TV news. I still can’t really process it; the unfolding chaos, the lack of leadership, reports of racially motivated attacks on one side and the sneering, anti-democratic spite on the other.

At one step remove it’s been terrifying, so I can’t imagine what it’s actually like in the UK right now. So while I will never, ever, refer to it as English Breakfast Tea, I am now proud to think of myself and call myself a European. I am not repudiating Britain, or Britishness, but I do want to recalibrate my identity to better reflect the values of this new place — liberal, welcoming, tolerant — we now think of as home.