I travelled across Canada in October, ostensibly for a break, but really for complicated personal, and also political, reasons.

The first was to rediscover who I was before fate brought me to these shores. The lives of all migrants are split into a before and after. Just as with many adopted children, the new life is for most more secure and rewarding. Yet the head and heart keep returning to the old life. A close South African friend, an activist who fled from apartheid-era South Africa in 1985, goes back often to make sure, she says, “that I keep myself whole. Otherwise you are broken into half a person”. Wise words.

My past was available to me while my immediate birth family members were alive. Now they’re all gone – my father, mother, older brother, and, most recently, my older sister, who died of Covid. She was mentally ill, often closed off. But we still spoke in our home language, Kutchi, and loved looking at and talking about old family pictures.

Since she passed away I’ve felt profoundly alone and discombobulated, and yes, broken into half a person. Close cousins, my ex-husband’s family and childhood friends who have settled in Vancouver and Toronto put me back together again. I cried often, spoke to them in Kutchi, revived fading and lost memories. Mr Brown, surely the most patient and loving husband in the world, must have got so very bored. But he knew I needed to do this.

I also needed to get away from British politics for a while and go somewhere less fraught. Ever since Brexit, the country has been unsettled, hopelessly fragmented, perpetually ireful and, at times, like a developing state where politicians exercise power without responsibility making the population cynical, eventually ungovernable. My husband has felt the same, though he is........

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