I’m British

Volume 1, Issue 6; 07 Mar 2017

Published by Norman Walsh

It took 16 months (and nearly fifty years), but on Friday I became British.

Noble patterns must be fetched here and there from single persons, rather than whole nations, and from all nations, rather than any one.
— Sir Thomas Browne

Nationality, I am only just coming to appreciate viscerally, is a curious thing.

Lapel pin

A process that I started sixteen months ago culminated quietly in a small, pleasant office in Houston on Friday. In front my closest friends, the British flag, and a photograph of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, the British Consulate-General, a charming woman named Caroline with a coincidental connection to Swansea, bid me recite seventy-seven words.

British Citizenship Ceremony

With those words and a few short strokes of a pen, I became British.

In a sense, I have always been British. My mother is English. In another sense, well, … it’s a curious thing.