Step by step towards the exit

Slowly the ties to what I’m beginning increasingly to think of as ‘the old country’ are being loosened.

It’s a slow-motion version of the existence of any immigrant. It’s not out of solidarity with immigrants that I’m doing it, though God knows in today's world they need every act of solidarity they can get, but I am going through the same process as other immigrants. Gradually, I'm leaving the country of my passport for another.

We haven’t actually left the UK yet. Our main home is still in Luton. More important still, so’s our cat. What we’re engaged in is a trial, for the month of September, of life in the place we feel we should move to, Valencia. That involves checking out what it’s like to travel from there, since my job involves being somewhere else quite a lot of the time.

That’s what loosens the ties to Britain. Travelling between third countries, without passing through Britain, delivers a useful object lesson: the UK is not the indispensable nation we Brits, even among us anti-Brexiters, sometimes think it is. Most of the world can live just fine without it.

My first trip involved a flight directly from Valencia. It went smoothly. That encouraged me for the next, rather more complex because it involved travelling to Madrid and catching a plane from there.

Because I wasn’t too sure of how each stage would go, I decided to take an early train – 8:00 am which, on a Sunday morning, feels like the crack of dawn. I’m glad I did, because it left with half an hour’s delay. I assumed it would catch up some of that on the trip but, on the contrary, it added significantly to it. Nearly doubling it, in fact, and that ‘nearly’ is crucial: an hour’s delay would have meant a partial refund. 29 minutes means no refund at all.

It was on arrival at Madrid that I received the first real shock of the journey. Heading quietly towards the exit I eventually found a door with a sign over it reading ‘Exit to city of Barcelona’.

Exit to the city of Barcelona

I have to confess that my first reaction was one of sheer terror. Had I somehow managed to get on the wrong train? It made no sense. As far as I know, there’s no high-speed railway connection between Valencia and Barcelona. Besides, hadn’t I heard the announcements and seen the information displays confirming that we were heading for Madrid?

The explanation was simple. It was bound to be. The exit I was taking led onto a street called ‘Ciudad de Barcelona’. But – well, eight o’clock on a Sunday is a tough time to be at work. I wasn’t entirely conscious, I think, which is why the sign nearly precipitated a heart attack.

At least, my early start meant the hour’s delay had no serious effect. On the contrary, it made it possible to have a coffee and another glorious fresh orange juice (one of the delights of being in Spain) with my charming daughter-out-law for nearly the last time: I’m unlikely to see her more than once more before she becomes my (equally charming) daughter-in-law, an event planned to happen in less than two weeks’ time.

A second daughter-in-law? An event to be celebrated. As we shall, in proper style, in the hills near Madrid, the weekend after next. In the meantime, conversation, coffee and orange juice were a more than adequate interim pleasure.

And getting to the airport was no problem. Proving again that living in Valencia won’t reduce my capacity to do my work. Further loosening my ties to the Brexit state I barely recognise any longer as the nation I’ve always thought of as my own. 

Like any migrant.