As anyone who’s read this thread knows, I now live in and work in Germany.
I‘m on an off-site meeting with my colleagues from our Swiss site. One of our team had a birthday and we sang „Happy Birthday“ in French, English, Spanish, German, Italian and Croatian, because amongst the 30 of us. there are Swiss, Germans, Austrians, Italians, Spaniards, one Frenchwoman, two Croatians, an Indian guy, and me as the lone Brit. The conversation wandered between German and English depending on who was in and who was buying the drinks. It is late, trust me there were a lot of drinks. And this is the world I want to live in, a genuinely cross-national world where a bunch of people through chance, or birth, or career choice, have ended up on the same team, with the same goal, in the same hotel bar arguing how to achieve it.
This is why I loathe Brexit, all who advocated and voted for it, who still agitate for it. It is a catastrophe, an insult, a resurgence of all that wrong in humanity. I grieve still for the land of my birth.