Leaving Home

There are comments here and there and all over noting how many people have left England in recent years.

Raedwald ended a recent post asking 'So when would you have decided to leave Germany? 1934? 1937? Or would you have stayed?' After thinking about it for ages, I would have stayed until circumstances were quite desperate and it would have been too late.

Leaving isn't open to most people. In the best of circumstances it's a hard, sad business, even when there are open arms and open houses at the other end.

Leaving means there must be a destination, and most people haven't got one because they have only one nationality, and a British passport doesn't go anywhere near as far as it used to.

Anywhere in the European Union? Well, yes at the moment, but current rights of residence and employment are just that, current, and the UK rejected joining Schengen, and has placed restrictions on incoming EU nationals, which didn't help. The Commonwealth countries? We aren't particularly courteous to their nationals, Old or New Commonwealth, and they've noticed. The rest of the world? Much of it is very dangerous, and the US and the Russian Federation are hard to settle in.

Acquiring another nationality is hard too; the best way is by marriage, and even that doesn't always confer rights of residence and permanence; and it is even less competent to do so for all of the family.

If you want to take your wealth there are severe regulations that take considerable time to overcome, existing in the name of anti-terrorism financial controls.

Work? The equivalent qualifications must be registered, and the real know -how gained, as well as the language, the contacts; did enough wealth come too, to set up a business?

And if all these difficulties are managed, can the family cope with what they can't even see coming most of the time? And can you help them with not weeks or months, but years of support, explanation, sortings out, understanding, kindness in the face of ill- founded resentment ?

Most important of all, can you persuade yourself that everyone around you is not secretly thinking and acting out every aspect of their lives in English only to deliberately hide this self-evident truth in French, German, Italian, whatever, whenever you are around?