In 2018 I decide to seek refuge away from my native land. To become, in essence, a refugee. I was not fleeing from conflict or for economic advantage, although impending economic disaster was the constant backdrop to my plans. No, I became an existential refugee.

I don’t know if there is a formal existential refugee category, but if not then perhaps that is another example of rejection. I apologise to other types of refugee. I haven’t been tortured, seen my family raped and murdered, nor have I faced starvation or vanishingly faint opportunities for employment. On anyone’s hierarchy of human needs, most of the basic ones are met.

Without wishing in any way to imply moral equivalence to those who flee from persecution and terror, through millennia there has been another factor that has have driven migration, pushing people to uproot themselves, cross borders, arrive in uncharted territory; leave all that is familiar and safe behind.

Equating familiarity with safety is not an entirely self-satisfied first world conceit. The drip, drip, drip of insecurity can build up into a flood of anxiety as the waters rise inexorably, submerging the familiar landmarks that bind a person to their culture or country.

Having spent 20 years evolving a European identity, my country decided that it did not share my sense of who I was. Indeed, the most senior politician in the land of my birth told people of my ilk that we were “citizens of nowhere”. We begged to differ. Suggesting that accident of birth does not bind you to a land, we preferred to be boundaried by political action not happenstance. This did not make me a citizen of nowhere, but it certainly led me to doubt that I could remain a citizen of England.

So we decided to become citizens of somewhere, a somewhere that might grow to love us as we loved it. This is our story, as we race to beat the gathering storms of Brexit – such a hateful and hate filled term – and gain a foothold in a continent that still equates geographical with political definitions, where cooperation is prized and where friendship was seen as the best hope for a collaborative future world.

And that somewhere? That somewhere was France.