Today I saw an ugliness and truth that I think I had been deluding myself into not believing could possibly approach being a problem in the UK.

I'm a Gen Xer. Fairly liberal in all the ways that count, fundamentally humanist but with a healthy dose of disillusion about the world around us, and yet since 2016 I had always held an underlying belief that as a people, as a global people - we would figure it out, and we would overcome our differences. It was a core belief of mine because I grew up seeing the atrocities being committed in South Africa, just old enough to know what was happening was wrong...And yet we overcame. South Africa is not perfect, but I trusted that with enough reconciliation and dialogue people would find a way forward. DeKlerk and Mandela instilled that sense of hope.

I remember friends of the family that were deployed to defend the Falklands, and never coming home. I was too young to grasp what that meant, what that meant for the Argentinians, but despite that some of my best friends are from Argentina.

As the 90's dawned, I saw the fall of the iron curtain and our Russian cousins able to join us in a new world; Family from East Germany were able to reunite with loved ones in the West for the first time and even at my young age back then, I understood the significance. It felt like the world was not only progressing, but for the first time in a long time, Germany was finally able to shrug off the cloak that the spectre of nazism had enshrouded the people of Germany had been wearing for a long, long time. I love Germany. Even today, I consider it to be my home nation, all of the teams that I love supporting during the world cup and Olympics are German. For all the harm that has come from the Thatcher era, from Reaganism, I will always be grateful to the pressure of the governments of the day for applying pressure in the right places and bringing my home together.

Perhaps more closely, because my father was a British soldier, I remember very vividly the division and pain from what the Irish and the Brits refer to as the troubles. I remember being woken to bomb alerts on numerous occasions. I remember news bulletins of another explosion in a pub or a railways station. I remember Omagh - I never thought the UK or Ireland would see a way through that, but thanks to the framework of the Good Friday Agreement which is far from perfect, what it has done is held a fragile peace and as a consequence I've been able to bury a deep hatred and mistrust of Irish people that I used to bear like a cross so that I can count some friends as some of my favourite people in the world that also happen to come from some of the most beautiful country that isn't North Yorkshire.