So that’s it, then. The news I had feared arrived like a thunderbolt with the government’s announcement this week that the salary threshold for a spousal visa is to rise to £38,700. My two children are both in long-term relationships with partners who are not British, but who were blown into this country by a spirit of enterprise and adventure and a freedom to roam the world and find love where it falls. It was the same spirit that blew my Dutch grandmother, on one side of the family, and my Irish grandfather, on the other, across the sea during the first world war.
We’ve always been a family of wanderers, so I was delighted when my children seemed to be keeping up the tradition. My eldest fell for a Spanish woman who had come over to London for its world-class dance classes, in a Europe without borders, and found her vocation in a care home. She loved the people she looked after, and was loved in return. But then Brexit happened, so they had to choose where to settle.
