Just what I need at my age...

So, I went out to dinner with friends at the end of January and the weirdest thing happened to me. There we were, happily eating a Thai chicken dish and chatting away, when suddenly I could feel something in my right eye. Figuring it was an eyelash, I tried to blink it out, failed spectacularly, and then just sat there as my eye slowly puffed up until I couldn’t barely open it at all.

At this point I started to suspect this might be less of a rogue eyelash and more of a medical drama which was confusing, because I am not allergic to anything and never have been. I mentally reviewed what I’d eaten - some nuts, some crisps, rice, Thai spiced chicken, water because I was driving. There was nothing unusual, nothing suspicious, as far as I could see.

So then I moved on to evaluate everything else. I was wearing minimal make-up, but it was make-up I had worn before. Same with the face cream, just good old Neutrogena, hardly a reckless choice. Nothing was jumping out at me as the culprit, which felt rude given the circumstances.

I drove home while I could still technically see and took one of Thomas’s prescription antihistamines. The next morning I woke up unable to open either eye, which really felt like an escalation. Thomas took me to the out-of-hours, where they confirmed it definitely looked like a bad allergic reaction, which was helpful in the sense that it gave it a name, but less helpful in the sense that I still had no idea to what.

I was feeling very sorry for myself. I don’t exactly have a surplus of social opportunities here, so turning into Quasimodo on a rare night out didn’t feel like a strong long-term strategy for friendship.

The aftermath was dramatic. I was utterly exhausted, like I had run a marathon or given birth, neither of which I had done, and I was completely useless for two days.

Fast forward a week and I’m brushing my hair, minding my own business, when my lip starts to tingle. I look in the mirror and, sure enough, my mouth is swelling. When did I get the free lip fillers?! This time I grabbed an antihistamine immediately like a seasoned professional. The swelling went down and the exhaustion only lasted a few hours, which was a relief. I put it down to a really crazy coincidence.

Another week later, I’m sitting in my armchair, no make-up, no face cream, not even having eaten yet, just watching the evening news, when my other eye suddenly decides to close for business. Despite the antihistamine, I’m back in bed for two days recovering, still completely at a loss.

So, what do we all do in these situations now? Obviously, I described all three episodes to AI, listing everything I had eaten and everything that had been near my skin and asked what it thought, because nothing says calm, rational thinking like consulting a robot at this point.

Its first suggestion, without me even mentioning it, was that I might have developed a severe NSAID allergy which was interesting, because I hadn’t said anything about taking any. Then I thought back and realised that on all three occasions, I had taken ibuprofen about four hours before the swelling began. I've always been fairly prone to headaches.

Thomas suggested I simply take a couple more just to double check, which I didn't particularly fancy given each occasion had left me in bed exhausted for 48 hours. ChatGPT, for once the voice of reason, suggested that could end in anaphylaxis if it was escalating, so I decided to go with tests at the GP instead.

And yes, it turns out I have indeed developed an allergy to painkillers. At exactly the point in life when you start needing them more often. Timing really is everything, isn’t it?

Vote day

Today is election day in Denmark.

It is the third general election since I moved here, and like the others, I cannot vote. Neither can my son, who moved here at 13 and is now 20. In many ways, that has always been the quieter injustice. No one I know is more Danish than he is. He speaks the language like a native, has a general school leaving certificate from here and an STX (grammar high school) leaving certificate too. He understands the culture instinctively, and has grown into adulthood here. I know too that if we were to move away again, he alone would stay. There is nowhere else he would rather be, than here in the country of the only father he has ever known, who has brought him up since before his first birthday. He is, in every way that matters, more Danish than his sisters, who moved here at 11 and 9, but because of their genetics own a Danish passport. And yet, he has no vote and will potentially be close to 30 before he actually can apply for citizenship given only years of continuous full-time work counts towards it, not studies or part-time work. 

It seems strange to me that immigrant kids, including ones born here have to choose when they leave high school around 20 whether to further their studies or take more menial jobs to further their citizenship journey and secure their precarious statuses. How can it possibly better for Denmark if the cleverest kids are forced to choose to work in bars and shops rather than study to be doctors and dentists?

But this election feels different to me, though, because of Anna.

Anna turned 18 in December, and today she can participate fully in the democracy of the country that shaped her teenage years. I am proud of her. Of course I am. But I am also left with a strange and uncomfortable awareness of my own position.

I carried her for nine months. I gave birth to her. I fed her, raised her, and helped her become who she is. I share half her DNA, half her history, half her story. And yet, I have no say in the country that governs her life. 

There is something deeply dissonant about being considered good enough to give birth to and raise future citizens, but not good enough to be one. Trusted to nurture, to contribute, to build a family and a life here, but not trusted with a voice.

It is hard not to feel that line, even in the most ordinary moments. Standing in an airport, for example, and having to queue separately from my own children because they carry Danish passports and I do not. It is a small, practical thing. At their ages, it is manageable. But it is also quietly absurd, this idea that a family I quite literally created can be split by a passport control queue as I am considered somehow less than them.

And it is not just one nationality in our case. I have five children. Three carry French passports, two carry Danish ones, and I remain only a UK citizen. It is such a modern fragmentation of identity. It feels oddly out of step with how things once worked. I remember my former (German) mother-in-law telling me that when she married my former (French) father-in-law around 1950, she was simply issued French nationality. She became what her family was. She shared a nationality with her children as a matter of course. That kind of continuity feels almost unimaginable now.

Instead, I find myself in a position where, despite having given birth to two Danish children and built a life here, it is highly unlikely that I will ever meet the requirements to become Danish myself. I passed the language requirement for citizenship six years ago. That part, at least, I managed. But the rules also require 3.5 years of full-time employment, and at 58, finding someone willing to employ a foreigner full time is, realistically, not something I can count on.

So I remain outside. Not outside the life, because my life is here. Not outside the investment, because many of the people I care about are rooted here. But outside the formal recognition of belonging.

Today, I will watch my daughter step into a right that I do not have, and that her brother, who feels even more deeply of this place, is also denied. I will feel proud. And I will feel the weight of that separation.

And I will keep wondering what it really means to belong in a country that some of my children can call theirs, but I cannot. 

Absurd

 

I got this in the post three days ago and I must admit I am still absolutely gobsmacked at the absurdity of it.

I have been driving for forty years without a single speeding ticket or accident. Forty years. I have navigated motorways, icy Highland backroads, chaotic French roundabouts and the entire length of Denmark more times than I can count. I have survived Spanish drivers who love to go fast, German drivers on the limitless Autobahn, blizzards in Switzerland, cliffs in Greece, you name it... I have even survived Italian drivers year after year on our trips to the Tuscan house - when they shake their fists at you for stopping at a red light because they can see nothing is coming! I had really hoped that would earn me some sort of honorary medal. Instead I have been rewarded with… this.

A speeding ticket.

For driving at 51 km/h in a 50 km/h zone.

I actually read the letter three times, mainly because my Italian is a little rusty these days but also because I simply could not believe that anyone, let alone a real paid adult working for the Florentine police, would bother writing to another adult about one single solitary kilometre. I do not believe I have ever driven a car, hired or otherwise, with a speedometer capable of displaying anything that precise. Especially as the hire car I was in had one of those old-fashioned dial speedometers where the needle vibrates merrily between numbers as if to say, “Look, roughly here-ish, ok? Be grateful.”

I mean honestly, even Ryanair let me away with 10.3kg for my 10kg check-in bag to Madrid two weeks ago. And Ryanair is a company that charges you £60 if you even think about printing your boarding pass these days.

Yet the Florentine police went to the trouble of tracking me down through the hire company, sending a registered letter across Europe, and presumably spending hours of manpower all to fine me €68 for drifting one kilometre per hour over the limit. The postage alone on the registered letter that seemed to have been sent from the hire company head quarters in Amsterdam rather than the local branch I had used in Pisa must have wiped out more than half their profit. Add in the admin time and the ink used to print the letter, and I suspect both of us have ended up financially worse off.

But wait, it gets better.

I had four days to pay it before the fine jumped to nearly €200. Nothing says “Welcome to our beautiful historic region” quite like a threat.

I am not someone who objects to reasonable speeding fines. If I had been flying along at 70 in a 50 zone, I would hold up my hands and accept it. But 51? One measly kilometre? Seriously?

I feel like this is the kind of fine they only get away with sending to hire cars and foreign number plates because the Italians I know would not even consider this reasonable.

Anyway, I have paid it. Mainly because I hire cars in Tuscany too often to be black-listed, but also because arguing over 1 km/h felt like the sort of thing that could tip me into a full midlife crisis. In the meantime Marcel and Charlotte who hired cars in the same region the week after me are hovering over their letterboxes with fear in their hearts.

Next time I drive in Italy, though, I will know to keep a very close eye on the speedometer and piss off absolutely all the locals by driving everywhere at 45km/h.

Old and redundant

For the first time since 1997, I have reached October 31 without buying a pumpkin or a neep. It feels odd. For almost three decades, the rhythm of late October has been the same: pumpkins appearing in the shops, little faces planning designs, and the smell of candle wax and slightly singed squash in the dining room. It is such a small tradition, but it has been part of the fabric of family life for so long that letting it go feels like closing a chapter.

In the early years, I was the one who did everything. I bought the pumpkin, chose the design, and did the carving while small people watched in awe and occasionally tried to poke out an eye or add an extra tooth. Later, in the 2010s, the job shifted hands. Charlotte gathered her minions around her to pick the perfect pumpkin and sketch out faces that grew increasingly elaborate every year. Thomas, ever the traditionalist, sat beside her with his turnip and a range of tools, determined to keep the old ways alive and prove he was the most Scottish of us all.

The last few years have been quieter. The two youngest still asked for pumpkins, but without the same energy. They were busy with friends, homework, or phones, and the carving became a quick afterthought rather than an event. And now, suddenly, there is no one left waiting for me to bring one home. Anna is buried under assignments, Amaia is off to a Halloween party that apparently involves cocktails rather than pumpkins, Léon is living half an hour away in the city, Charlotte's living in Madrid, and Marcel is currently living in Mexico City.

I stood in the kitchen and realised that there was no reason to go out and buy one. For a moment, that small fact hit me harder than expected. This is what it feels like when family traditions quietly slip away, not with drama but with a slow fading. You notice it in these tiny absences - the empty seat at the table, the quiet house at the weekend, the October without a pumpkin.

It is not sadness exactly, more a soft ache mixed with pride. This is how it is meant to go. The whole point of parenting is to raise people who can build their own lives, who are too busy doing things that matter to them to need you for every small ritual. It is what we hope for, even as we secretly wish they still needed us just a little bit.

So, resigned to my pumpkin-free fate and feeling slightly adrift, I grabbed the shopping list to go to Netto. At least the fridge would get stocked, even if the windowsill to the courtyard stayed bare. But as I reached for my car keys, I spotted an item on the list added by Thomas.

'1 pumpkin'

And that was it. The universe’s small way of reminding me that parenting does not really stop; it just changes shape.

It made me laugh, standing there in my jacket with the shopping list in my hand. Maybe I no longer need to buy pumpkins for the kids, but apparently, I still have one overgrown child who is not ready to give up the tradition. Thomas may have a grey beard and a mortgage, but he still wants his pumpkin. I suppose that’s comforting in a way, at least one of them still believes in Halloween magic, even if he needs reading glasses to carve it.

Watching your children grow up is strange because it happens so gradually that you rarely see it in real time. You go from tying shoelaces to teaching them to drive in what feels like a handful of summers. They slip away gently, one small independence at a time, until one day you look up and they are fully grown. You feel proud and amazed, but also a little redundant, as though you have been quietly laid off from the best job you ever had.

Every so often they still need something. A recipe. A bit of advice. Or just a chat. That is when you realise the job description has not vanished at all, it has simply been updated. You are no longer the project manager of daily life, but the trusted consultant, the person they call when comfort or common sense is required. It is a promotion of sorts, though the salary remains the same.

So, I guess I will go to Netto and thereafter to the pumpkin farm to pick out a good, solid pumpkin for my husband. 

The Country I No Longer Recognise

It is just over six years since we made the very difficult decision to leave the UK. At the time, people assumed Brexit was mostly about paperwork and would not really change their lives. But to us, that Brexit deadline was a door about to slam shut, leaving me on the opposite side from my husband and kids. If we did not move before it came down, my children and husband had an escape route but, as the only one in the family who had only a British passport, I would be landlocked.

And I had been afraid for a long time already, at least five years, of the anti-immigrant direction England was taking, dragging Scotland along in its wake and pulling us, kicking and screaming, out of the EU. I began to imagine a future, insular UK. But even in my wildest dreams, I did not think it could get this bad. In my worst nightmares, Farage as a potential prime minister was still a joke. The idea that abortion rights might be up for debate, or that fundamentalist Christianity could ever make inroads into mainstream politics, felt utterly impossible. And yet here we are. The irony is that when I voiced much smaller fears back then, I was invariably told I was overreacting.

I remember once, when Anna was in Primary 3, the children were asked to bring in their favourite book to share with the class. Most of the others turned up with well-thumbed copies of Roald Dahl or Julia Donaldson, the sort of titles every teacher knows by heart and every child has at least seen before.

Anna, though, chose a Danish book, Lotte kan nemlig cykle, a big green hardback her dad often read to her at bedtime. Her teacher picked it up, turned it over in her hands, and realised with surprise that she could not read a word of it. Instead of putting it aside or hurrying on, she was fascinated. She asked Anna to stand up in front of the class and tell everyone the story they would never otherwise be able to read themselves.

And Anna did. Page by page, she translated as she went, telling the story in English, six years old and standing there with quiet confidence. The class sat in rapt silence, wide-eyed, and the teacher stood moved, almost in awe of this small, ordinary-looking child who suddenly revealed such an extraordinary, hidden side to herself. Afterwards, a few classmates crowded round her, asking questions: “Can you really read that?” “Can you teach me?” Anna came home glowing, proud of herself in a way that made my heart swell.

The teacher rang to tell me about it. She said it was one of those magical classroom moments, the kind that make a teacher feel they have glimpsed a child properly for who they are.

But even as I basked in the warmth of that memory, I felt a creeping fear. Because I knew how quickly things can change. I was scared we were on the cusp of a time when the reaction to that very same book might be the opposite, not wonder but suspicion. I could too easily imagine a teacher leaning in with hushed tones, telling Anna to put it back in her bag, explaining it was inappropriate, bustling her off to the library to choose an English book instead. Not because it was wrong, but because it revealed something they thought best kept hidden, her “dirty secret.” I even imagined myself pre-empting it, perhaps suggesting she should leave that book at home.

That thought chilled me. I could not bear to be around for the moment when the genuine delight and admiration in her teacher’s eyes might be replaced by discomfort or disapproval. Because at its heart, what I feared was this: that my children would one day be pressured to conceal half of who they are. To shrink away from their foreign names, perhaps dropping their dad's surname from their CVs, to tuck their second passports out of sight, to pretend their bilingualism did not exist. I was afraid that what should be celebrated as a gift would instead be treated as something shameful.

So we left.

When I look back, I realise I was one of the first to go, but many friends followed in our wake.

The Polish shops in our town told the story more clearly than the politicians ever could. Once vibrant places filled with chatter, with shelves stacked high with breads and sausages and fancy sweets, they started closing down one by one. There was one corner shop I especially remember. We used to buy white eggs there every year for Easter. It was always warm, with the bustle of people chatting in Polish while children tugged at their mothers’ coats. It felt welcoming, colourful, alive. And then one day it was gone, replaced by an empty storefront with a faded, sad “To Let” sign.

It felt like watching colour drain from the streets, a quiet exodus made visible.

For me it is not just theoretical. I have brown family members and very close friends who do not have the luxury of hiding their difference. They cannot soften their names or even tuck their foreignness away in a passport drawer. They are the ones most exposed as Britain grows harder and angrier, and I ache with the helpless wish to scoop them all up, evacuate them to the safety of my annex, and show them how much I care.

I think about them every time the news mentions another rise in support for the Reform Party, even in Scotland. Back when I left, Nigel Farage was still a pantomime villain north of the border, laughed at and jeered whenever he dared set foot there, and chased back south within hours. I comforted myself with that. But now even Scotland is not immune. The things I once believed impossible have quietly become plausible.

Saturday broke something in me. I sat in my living room in Denmark and watched footage of 100,000 people marching through London, openly chanting pro-fascist slogans. London of all places, a city I love, where I have always felt at home precisely because you cannot walk the streets without hearing a dozen languages and seeing the wonderful, beautiful range of humanity in all its colours.

I knew Britain had racism. I grew up with sectarianism and racism. But it got better as I moved into adulthood. Schools began to mix, people married across religions and races without the looks they would have got when I was a child. One of my best friend’s weddings was officiated by a priest and an imam together, and it was a truly wonderful day. I felt filled with hope for the future that I would soon bring my kids into.

To see that hope so thoroughly eclipsed, to see London, my London, overrun by chants that belonged to another, darker world, was devastating.

What made me shiver most were the undertones, the unmistakable echo of American fundamentalism. Religion weaponised against outsiders. Chants and rhetoric that sounded imported straight from US culture wars. Musk on live link calling for violence in the streets. Seriously?

It brought back a conversation I had this summer with one of Thomas’s old friends, Danish, a professor at an American university, raising Asian children in the US. Sitting at our coffee table over dessert, he told me why universities there are facing such a furious backlash.

“It is not only politics,” he said, shaking his head. “It is resentment. Ordinary people who had no chance of reaching the academic level for scholarships watch others succeed where they themselves were excluded. And instead of celebrating those successes, realising they too need those doctors and scientists even if they cannot become them, they are so angry they simply want to bar others from what was barred from them.”

It struck me as such a sad, human response, but also such a dangerous one. And when I watched the London demonstration, I recognised those same undertones. Not just a desire to close borders, but to close minds. Universities in the UK are already on their knees financially before we go in this direction.

All of this circles back to empathy. To me, empathy is the single most important human trait. It is what allows us to look at someone different and see not a rival, but another human being.

The far right thrives by eroding empathy. It tells people their neighbours are competitors, their colleagues parasites, strangers invaders. It feeds on bitterness until there is no space left for compassion. We see that same absence of empathy playing out horrifically in Gaza, where entire populations are dehumanised until their suffering becomes tolerable background noise.

That is the opposite of what I wanted for my children. They have grown up proud of being bilingual, proud of their mixed heritage, proud of their passports, their friends from all over the world, and their complicated family tree. They meet difference with curiosity, not suspicion. They want to know the people who are not like them, deeply and genuinely.

Leaving has not spared me the grief. I still feel tied to Britain. I may be Scottish, but I also have a son, his partner, and their Asian flatmate, who I have considered one of my own kids for ten years, living in London. Every time I see news of marches like Saturday’s, my thoughts go straight to them.

And yet, over this summer, as I watched small, angry white men pitifully painting roundabouts in protest instead of doing something positive about the real problems facing the world, I felt like I no longer recognised the UK. The passport I still carry feels more like an artefact than a document of belonging.

The Britain of the 1990s and 2000s was flawed, often frustrating, sometimes cruel. But it was also a place where I believed empathy had a foothold, where openness and equality could still become the norm. I guess deep down I thought that was the country I was leaving behind temporarily to give it time to sort itself out back in 2019.

The one I see now feels like something else entirely. I can see no hope for a kinder Britain in the next decade. I fear it will have to sink much lower before it comes out the other side, and I am glad my children will not have to live through that descent.