Should I return to the land of my Italian ancestors?

When I was growing up, my Italian grandfather was my favourite person. He taught me to play a mean game of draughts. He told me stories about his childhood in a remote mountain village in Abruzzo. I couldn’t hear often enough about how he got the deep scar across the bridge of his nose.

He was standing as a little boy behind his father who had a pair of shears slung over his back and they fell and sliced his face. He told me they had to stick the adhesive strip of an envelope over the cut. My mother told him to be quiet every time he gave me the lurid details but I loved it.

The builder boyfriend and I have been thinking a lot about our heritage. Like many Brexit voters, we find the charge of ‘little Englander’ ironic.

We are a nation of immigrants, and the BB and I are hardly indigenous.