A good friend wrote this on the eve of the 2016 referendum:
I'm voting for selfish reasons.
I know I'd be voting Remain anyway for the multitude of reasons eloquently expressed by Tom a few entries down my timeline.
But the thing, really, pathetic as it may be, is this:
A few years ago I was chatting to (NB: 'to', not 'up.' OK, maybe 'up' a bit) a Swedish girl in Molotow, a music venue in Hamburg. I'd gone to a music festival there.
”Why did you come all this way to go to this?" she asked. "Surely you could've gone to a festival at home?"
I looked around and grinned. A bunch of lovely chaps from Den Haag with whom I'd been hanging out were dancing and laughing with a trio of brilliant Germans that I'd met in the queue earlier.
"This place feels like home to me," I said. And I meant it.
My people are the stellar dudes from Greece, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Spain, Germany, Slovakia, France and Hungary with whom I've shared workplaces (and pub tables, giggles and minor breakdowns) over the past decade. They're the guys I play 5-a-side football with on a Thursday. They're the excellent significant squeezes of old friends from Devon and new friends from Taunton. More than anything they're my closest friend, who arrived in my life in a Cambridge music venue via the Swiss village of Oberembach, Mumbai and Milan. They are kind, open-minded, intelligent, fun, responsible, generous, hilarious and human. They are who I am more than the little Englanders who want to 'take back' the 'power' that they would never find even if they had sovereignty of their precious fucking dunghills.
The top table of my life has seats in Heidelberg, in Malaga, in Berlin, in rural Andalucia, in Lyon, in Gibraltar, in Flanders. It's a big fucking table and I am grateful.
My home is eating fish and chatting about art with a work client who is now my friend in a café in Zagreb. My home is walking through the streets of Sozopol, talking about gigs. My home is drawing daft cartoons with a broken stick on the wet sand of Scheveningen beach. My home is looking at the harvest moon over the sea in Nea Makri while my friends celebrate their marriage. My home is sat flicking through brochures in an English school in Sofia, chatting to parents about the possibilities and advantages of international study.
My home, really and truly, is dancing like a joyful moron at the foot of the steps on the amphitheatre stage of the Parc Forum in Barcelona at dawn on the first Sunday in June.
It's where I've worked and where I've played. It's where I've grieved and where I've developed. It's where the penny dropped that I love who I love.
Europe is my home.
I don't want to be turfed out of it, like a self-piteous dog in this pissing English rain. I belong there.
No. Wait.
I belong here.