There was a six-month-old baby there whose name, disgracefully, I have already half forgotten. I think it was Avari.
He will forgive me, I hope. He has plenty of time.
What mattered was that he was there: another tiny human being laid down in the sediment of this complicated family. Somebody’s daughter’s son, somebody’s niece’s baby, another small layer added to a formation whose original shape nobody can now reliably reconstruct.
He was lovely.
And he is welcome.
My version of England is not particularly grand. It is a village called Fairlight, just outside Hastings, where my brother Nick lives with his wife Kate and their son Bede. Their garden looks out towards the sea.
Nothing there is still.
It only looks still because geology moves more slowly than we do.
It was hot. Properly hot.
Baxter Dury’s ‘Miami’ seemed to be playing somewhere in my head for most of the week. Nick asked Alexa and she helped.
We swam. We walked. We played almost every sport anybody could invent. We drank wine. We sat in a hot tub.
My three boys, Max, Henry and Ollie were permanently in the sea. Their English accelerated frighteningly quickly. Within days they were teasing their 21-year-old cousin Bede with the merciless confidence of children who have not yet learned that a Gucci model is supposed to intimidate them.
Because Bede, incredibly, is now a Gucci model.
He is also just Bede.
The boys were slightly in awe of him, I think. Perhaps slightly in love with his lovely girlfriend Lola, who came for the party before the two of them disappeared off to Marrakesh and 40-degree heat.
But they are still young enough not to turn admiration into competition.
So they climbed all over him, mocked him and demanded his attention.
Another layer forming.
Nick and Kate organised everything. They cooked, planned, fetched, carried and somehow kept the machine moving. They gave everybody somewhere to sleep, something to eat and, more importantly, somewhere to belong.
Kate is one of those people I think of as a rock in the landscape.
Not because she does not move. Rocks move too.
They fracture. They weather. They are worn down and rebuilt by pressure. They carry the marks of what has happened to them.
That is another England.
Not flags and speeches and a heritage theme park.
Hospitals. Parents ageing. People forgetting. Families improvising care. Somebody quietly making sandwiches while somebody else is falling apart.
The country is made there too.
Kate’s sister Kirsty came, with Natty and Eliza. Ellen was there, a new world opening up for her I hope and Annie with Sam. They sat talking to my boys for hours, treating them not as inconvenient children to be managed but as people worth listening to.
My stepsister Isla attempted to make me do yoga.
I failed.
Badly.
Her partner Andy is an artist: quiet, watchful, saying little. I suspect he may be a genius, although he would probably be deeply embarrassed by the suggestion.
Iona was there too, with her son Charlie, who suddenly seems to have become a grown man and is studying in Brighton. Her new partner Vince is a folk-music agent. They live in Devon.
I liked him immediately.
Another arrival. Another piece added without anything else having to be removed to make room.
My mother could not be there, but she sent two cakes, collected by Annie. They were lovely. Peggy has always understood that if you cannot attend an event, you can still cater it.
And there was Rupert, my cousin, one of those gloriously oversized characters who seems to bring his own weather system with him. Big-hearted, noisy, funny, complicated.
Verna, another rock in this story.
Soren was there too, Rupert’s 14-year-old stepson.
A quieter presence. Always smiling. Able to occupy himself without demanding that the room rearrange itself around him.
There is something steely about him, I think. Something self-contained.
I wish him well.
I don’t think life has always made things easy for him.
And then there was me.
I was fine.
More than fine, actually.
I walked along the Sussex cliffs and down onto the beach. I swam in the Channel. I watched my children disappear into a family that is theirs as much as it is mine.
At low tide we crossed what I christened the ‘Valley of Treachery.’
To reach the sea you have to negotiate a trench of thick, foul-smelling mud. There is no elegant route around it. You put one foot in, then the other, and suddenly you are thigh-deep in prehistoric sludge wondering why you ever left the house.
In places it came almost to my waist.
Mud is only geology that has not finished becoming something else.
You sink into it. You swear. You pull yourself free. Eventually you emerge on the other side.
And there is the sea.
Things arrive. Things settle. Pressure changes them. Water removes pieces. New material fills the gaps. The whole formation shifts almost imperceptibly until one day somebody looks at the cliff and insists that this is how it has always been.
It hasn’t.
While we were flying back to Warsaw, Aston Villa were playing Paris Saint-Germain. Villa lost, although apparently they played brilliantly.
It seemed appropriate.
New team. New kit. New expectations. Players arriving and leaving. Everything changing.
And Unai Emery still standing there on the touchline.
I grew up with Aston Villa. It belongs to a part of me so old that I cannot remember choosing it.
The colours survive because different people keep putting on the shirt.
A baby arrives.
A new girlfriend.
A new boyfriend.
A stepson.
A son-in-law.
Someone marries in. Somebody separates. Someone dies. Somebody moves to Devon. Somebody moves to Poland. Children grow up speaking two languages and then suddenly start taking the piss out of their English cousin as if they had lived in Sussex all their lives.
Something is always being added.
Something is always being worn away.
The family does not become less itself.
It becomes the next version of itself.
Sussex is built out of sediment: particles carried by water, settled, compressed, lifted, broken and exposed again. What looks permanent is simply movement happening at a speed we cannot easily see.
Celts, Romans, Saxons, Normans, Huguenots, Jews, Irish, Caribbean families, Indians, Pakistanis, Poles, Ukrainians, Syrians. People arriving with money. People arriving with nothing. People fleeing something. People looking for something. People marrying somebody who was already here.
Layer upon layer.
Then erosion.
Then another layer.
There has never been a final England.
There has only ever been the next one.
So yes: fuck Nigel Farage, and fuck the people whose fantasy of England requires somebody else to be kept out of it.
The idea that migrants somehow contaminate this country is not only cruel, it misunderstands the geology.
Purity is not how landscapes are made.
Nothing stays where it began. Rivers move things. Seas carry things. Wind deposits things. Cliffs collapse. New ground appears somewhere else.
Even the rock beneath our feet is travelling.
Thank God.
My England that week was Nick and Kate. Bede and Lola. Max, Henry and Ollie throwing themselves into the Channel. Isla doing yoga while I collapsed beside her. Andy watching. Vince talking. Soren smiling.
My mother’s cakes arriving from somewhere else.
And a six-month-old baby whose name I may have got wrong.
Another new arrival.
Another layer.
Welcome to the family.
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