My British kids

“Please let me wake up on Friday in the Britain that I know,” tweets just about everyone. But not me. I’d like to join in, it’s not that I don’t feel the referendum angst, but I feel oddly detached. Sure, I get the economic arguments, the emotional pull, and the historical logic. Who’d want to turn their back on a club promoting peace? Which is how I remember explaining the odd-one-out flag, those yellow stars in a circle of friendship against a calm blue background, as I lay in a Jerusalem park gazing up at the colours of Europe fluttering over the King David hotel with my then three-ish-year-old son.

But me and Britain have never got on, not properly. I used to blame my parents for choosing December to immigrate from sunny Singapore. The itchy jumpers. Tight trousers. And the dark. Ugh! But that was 30 years ago. Three decades. I’ve had plenty of time to feel at home, even if I was born in Bangkok and did spend the first 10 years of my life in south-east Asia.

I’m good on Wales. I even voluntarily holiday there, Tenby specifically, where my grandpa still lives, and have done since I was a baby. But apart from a couple of hops to the Lake District, and the odd trip west, I’m hopeless on the rest of Britain. From London, Paris feels nearer than Liverpool (it isn’t, I know), and the shops are better. I’ve always sought holiday heat and sun, which means I’d rather head south than north. And I like languages.

Even now, when people ask where I’m from in the UK, I say, ‘Nowhere, really.’ I mean, I’ve lived in London for years, almost decades, but I’m not “from London”. And I’m certainly not from Buckinghamshire, where we lived for the schools and because it was close to Ealing where first my dad, then mum, worked. But I’ve never known what it feels to be From Somewhere; to have somewhere to emigrate Home at Christmas.

I didn’t even expect still to be living here by now. I thought I’d have spent years globe trotting from continent to continent. Yet here we are, in south-east London, in the same house we moved into eight years ago for god’s sake. Which is nearly as long as my entire Singaporean childhood. How I scoffed when the friend I made aged 10 told me she still lived in the same house she had as a newborn; now my son, Louis, is on track to do just that in only two years time. The same son I imagined speaking at least one if not two different tongues fluently by now. I half feel like I’ve failed him.

And yet. And yet. If these long months of campaigning have made me think anything it’s that maybe it’s not a disaster that Louis, his brother, and his sister are born and bred Londoners. I want them to know the world, but perhaps they’re in luck also knowing where they’re from, and not just because their passport says so. Not that being from Britain means they need to turn their back on being part on something bigger; the 8-year-old is a passionate Remain-er.

So let me, for his sake, for their sake, let me wake up in a Britain that they want to grow up in.