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Leavetaking
Feb. 5th, 2019 10:23 pmLast night I helped an old friend pack up her flat. She's about the seventh friend of mine to leave the country due to Brexit.
She was one of my first friends in this country; we've known each other since the year I came here to do A levels. She's Swedish and has lived here since she was 8.
For the past few years, she lived a short bus ride away from me. I helped her build all the flat-pack furniture in her place. It was only Ikea stuff, but we chose it carefully and were ridiculously pleased with our building skills.
Last night we watched the removal guys break it all up and throw the pieces into the back of their truck.
What we built didn't have any kind of market value, but it was of value to us.
This is far from the worst of the evils wrought by Brexit, of course. Couples and families are having to choose between staying in Britain and staying together. People born in the UK are being told to "go home," or seeing their parents and older relatives lose their right to live here. And all across this country, people are having to destroy or abandon the lives and relationships and places in the world they built with care.
What they built doesn't have a market value that the Home Office can recognise. But the small, human structures they built, their ways of doing things and connecting things and making things work-- families, jobs, neighbours-- have made this country better in a way that can't be measured. When people make their homes here, things get rearranged and cared for in small ways that add up to something greater that makes life here more liveable.
That's what we're losing.
[Posted to Facebook 5 February 2019]
She was one of my first friends in this country; we've known each other since the year I came here to do A levels. She's Swedish and has lived here since she was 8.
For the past few years, she lived a short bus ride away from me. I helped her build all the flat-pack furniture in her place. It was only Ikea stuff, but we chose it carefully and were ridiculously pleased with our building skills.
Last night we watched the removal guys break it all up and throw the pieces into the back of their truck.
What we built didn't have any kind of market value, but it was of value to us.
This is far from the worst of the evils wrought by Brexit, of course. Couples and families are having to choose between staying in Britain and staying together. People born in the UK are being told to "go home," or seeing their parents and older relatives lose their right to live here. And all across this country, people are having to destroy or abandon the lives and relationships and places in the world they built with care.
What they built doesn't have a market value that the Home Office can recognise. But the small, human structures they built, their ways of doing things and connecting things and making things work-- families, jobs, neighbours-- have made this country better in a way that can't be measured. When people make their homes here, things get rearranged and cared for in small ways that add up to something greater that makes life here more liveable.
That's what we're losing.
[Posted to Facebook 5 February 2019]
