I feel grief and loss for my country

I woke up this morning tired. Bone tired. I am not sleeping. I am having bad dreams that wake me up. I am restless and irritable in the day probably due to the lack of sleep. I feel flat. I feel lost. I feel empty. And I feel angry.

And I realize that I have felt this before. It is grief. I am grieving.

I am living through the most rapid and profound changes that may have ever taken place in the the long history of my country. I do not like these changes. This no longer feels like my country.

I remember a different Britain. The country of my childhood - not perfect by any means but cohesive, fair, and just. It was a nation with a shared sense of identity, common ancestry and a cultural fabric that bound its people together.

The Britain I remember had an unspoken understanding of the nation’s history - both its glories and its failings. The legacy of Empire was acknowledged, lamented, sometimes glorified but with a recognition that those days were complex and not uniformly positive, particularly for those who lived under colonial rule. However, this shared history, our shared blood, our shared enemies even, fostered a sense of unity among us. Us. We. Britain.

Religious tolerance, while imperfect, was largely a given. We prided ourselves on living in, being a place of fairness and gentleness. A country where most people felt they had a stake in society, where they belonged to one common community. We felt pride in our flag, in our long and rich history, our inventors, our writers, our scientists, our philosophers and even our greatest politicians. A long list of great men and women, born and raised here in the United Kingdom.

A country that shaped the world and a country that would continue to do so. A place where there was a common understanding of what it meant to be British.

In its place is something unfamiliar, unsettling, frightening. That sense of unity and shared identity has largely unraveled. We have become a nation deeply divided, with an increasingly eclectic mix of cultural backgrounds that, instead of enriching the social fabric seem determined to pull it apart - a smorgasbord of competing cultures.

I now live in an alien country populated with alien people. And by this I don't just mean people from other countries. I mean people who have lived here forever. Born here. Ethnically from these British Islands. They hold strange and increasingly strident opinions that I just don't understand.

They push a narrative that condemns the nation’s past, a one-dimensional view that overlooks the complexities of history.

They encourage the continuation and the acceleration of cultural and demographic change.

They seek to silence those they disagree with and even imprison them.

Now, the sneering middle classes, civil servants, educators, non-integrated immigrants and extreme leftist may very well ridicule my misty-eyed reverence for a country that in their eyes never existed at all.

But to steal their words, this is my 'lived experience'. I feel lost and I fear so is my country. A country I once knew, so familiar, so safe, so mundane in many ways has slipped away. I know that it will never return. Not the way it was. I am sorry that I never really appreciated it.