How I accidentally became British

I came to the UK to do my PhD, back in 2014. At the time, Portuguese politics were still very much dominated by the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis; and every time someone my age announced their intention to go abroad someone would inevitably bring up that one time that our then Prime Minister “invited young people to emigrate”. Therefore, every time I made my intentions to come study in the UK known, I felt compelled to assure people that my case was completely different, it had nothing to do with the government or the crisis, and in fact I was only going to go abroad to study (which I’d wanted to do in the UK since before the crisis), plus I had every intention to return to Portugal once the degree was done — as long as “they let me”. So, naturally, they didn’t “let me”, I didn’t return after the PhD, and as it turns out I acquired (dual) British nationality earlier this week. So what happened here?

I

There are two basic attitudes that people can display towards comparisons between their own countries and other countries: either “we’re number one” or “foreign is always best”. Often both attitudes are significantly represented in the population, with different “tribes” preferring different ones, but also with individuals preferring one or the other depending on context. Still, I don’t think anyone would object to my classifying the USA as a “we’re number one” kind of country, even though “foreign is always best” can still be found firmly entrenched in discussions of things like healthcare, sports, food, and art.

Anyway, all this to say that Portugal is a strongly “foreign is always best” kind of country. If you are living the high life, you are living “great and French style”¹. If an event starts exactly when it was supposed to, or someone arrives at exactly the right time, “British punctuality”² is the expression you will hear without fail. Mind you, people will still make slogans about how “national is good” and politicians and poets will still extol the “unique Portuguese spirit”, but at the end of the day we all know we are trying to deceive ourselves. Portugal compares itself to other European countries the way that the most backwater village anywhere compares itself to New York.

Part of this is surely down to a combination of realism (hey, we really are, by several objective measures, at the “tail of Europe”) and a contrast with our long-gone status as a major empire (I mean, if at one point you were dividing the world in half with your neighbour, winning the Euro one time just isn’t going to cut it). Yet I think there’s more to it than this: after all, even at the height of our imperial power, we were still largely relying on our Spanish neighbours for linguistic innovations³. Heck, our national poet, wrote both in Portuguese and in Castilian Spanish and most of his linguistic innovations were basically translations from Castilian. Let that sink in: the guy who would go on and on about how great Portugal is for 8816 verses straight, the guy who is the personification of the Portuguese language, mostly contributed to our current vocabulary by importing Castilian words! I’m sure there is a perfectly reasonable rational social geopolitical explanations for why Portugal came to view itself thus – but the fact of the matter remains and we are undeniably a country with a huge inferiority complex.

At this point you may be wondering where I am going with this. All of this is to make it really clear that, at the best of times, qualified Portuguese people find the allure of the foreign extremely seductive. Add in the thing about the Prime Minister suggesting emigration as a winning job-seeking strategy – and what you get is almost literally everyone around me doing Physics in Porto being super clear that they had zero intentions of staying in Portugal after their degree. They were going to go abroad never to return and, for all that they may have anticipated missing their families, they bitterly resented the provinciality of the backwater village-country they were about to leave. And all of this just to make it very clear that this could not be further from my own feelings!

II

Everyone knows that the most Portuguese word is saudade: the feeling of missing and longing for something or someone that is not there.

Portugal is a country of migrants. Currently the number of Portuguese people living abroad may exceed 20% the number of those living in Portugal. Supposedly, Paris has more Portuguese people than Porto, the second biggest Portuguese city.

There are also historical roots for this phenomenon, dating back to the days of the empire and of people leaving for Brazil dreaming of gold. However, the current situation is due mostly to two main waves of immigration: the current one, started by my generation, and another one started in the 1960s by my grandparents’ generation.

I recall my grandmother’s quoting of the supposed words of Salazar, our dictator between 1932 and 1968: “I rid you of the War, but not of the Famine”. The “time of the famine” (plus a colonial war), it turns out, compelled many to seek greener pastures elsewhere, especially in the poor villages of the rural Portuguese “Interior”. One among many of those was my father’s village in Trás-os-Montes.

My paternal grandfather was among the first couple of batches of migrants from his village to go to France “by jump”⁴. He left when my father was little and he was soon joined by his eldest son. A few years later, my grandfather returned – but his son remained in Paris.

Once a dam is opened it is not easy to close it while the water is raging through. So it was with emigration in my father’s home. Of five siblings, only one settled in the area. The others moved about a little, but two ended up in Paris, one ended up in Andorra, and my father ended up in Porto. My father tells me he tried time and time again to find employment back in Trás-os-Montes, but the circumstances never allowed it. It was not meant to be.

Saudade is a powerful thing. Migration gave all of my grandfather’s children new opportunities and an improved quality of life – but it dismembered the family and left all in the suffocating grip of saudades. At some point before I was born, my parents were presented with an opportunity to emigrate to Australia, at a time when the Australian government was trying to encourage certain qualified migrants to settle there. I’m told my father is the reason they didn’t go. “There are enough emigrants in the family”, my father said, and refused to further dismember the family. He never did manage to return to “his land”; but at least he didn’t move almost as far away from it as geographically possible, and this is the only reason why I was born and raised in Portugal. For that, I am truly grateful.

III

I am a lot like my father. Even though I spent my entire childhood in the outskirts of Porto, I came to regard Trás-os-Montes as a sort of spiritual home, an ancestral land in whose quirks our characters are modelled. One of my favourite writers is Miguel Torga, a poet from Trás-os-Montes who was big on the connection between man and land. Particularly engraved in my memory is an image from one of his books where someone returned to Portugal from political exile, certain that he would be arrested by the secret police, because living as a free man severed from his homeland was so unbearably painful.

It should be clear, at this point, that I did not intend to settle in the UK. What’s more, my wife (who came at the same time as me, as my girlfriend) also never intended to settle in the UK. And yet here we are.

Even though I never meant to settle abroad, I was always well aware that “foreign is always better”. England, in particular, was a kind of holy land: the land of Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking, the land of Cambridge and the Royal Society. One of the books which convinced me to become a physicist, rather than a doctor or a biologist, was written by a Portuguese physicist who ended up at Imperial College London – about which and about whose students he wrote wonders⁵. The Department of Physics at the University of Porto basically only became a Department of Physics worthy of that name after a series of people returned from studying in British institutions and modernised it. My plan, in the best tradition of modern Sebastianism⁶, was to come to the UK, do my PhD, see how Science is done here, then return and contribute to enriching Portugal’s cultural and scientific life.

Yet fate cared not for my plan, and did to it the same it had once done to my father’s plans.

To be fair, Portugal doesn’t make it easy. I started sending applications for postdoctoral jobs everywhere in Europe and in the USA well before I actually got my degree. Everywhere, that is, except Portugal – the only country I came across where they wouldn’t even consider an application unless I already possessed an actual PhD diploma! And then of course there aren’t that many opportunities compared to in the UK. But then of course I don’t want to spend my life solving partial differential equations in exchange for food under a bridge, so naturally I won’t want to go back if I’m not going to get a job. And then of course even outside academia employment was not brilliant in Portugal even before the crisis – and oh look!, what’s that I’m seeing – boy, isn’t that all my friends⁷ from secondary school and University moving abroad and finding it so much better? (And have I mentioned how much easier it is for me to become a teacher in England than in Portugal?!)

As it happens, as much as both my wife and I wanted to return to Portugal, returning to Portugal was not our highest priority. We were definitely not willing to indefinitely delay our plans for our family in order to maximise chances of return. And so it happened that we had our first child in the UK, and he was British at birth⁸ and only became Portuguese after we went to the Consulate in Manchester to request it.

At this point we started contemplating our situation in this country, and considering the path to citizenship. It certainly seemed convenient, so why not? (Well, besides how much money it costs: over £1300!) So many of our friends are now British. We ourselves have acquired some British habits (who knew tea with milk was so right?!). We were even becoming knowledgeable in British history and politics. Every time I go back to Portugal I now feel like murdering everyone who does not stand on the right in an escalator (which in Portugal is literally everyone) – and I reckon that the fact that I resist this urge should count towards some British Upper Lip points!

IV

I am now British. Luso-British, like Major Alvega⁹.

Major Alvega

I am still Portuguese. I am still immensely proud of our Portuguese roots and food and traditions and… I’m certainly not going to shut up about Portugal any time soon, in this blog or in real life! But I am now British too. I eat and drink and think differently because of the way this country has helped shape who I am today. My son may grow up speaking English everywhere but at home. It is a new part of my identity – but a part of my identity nonetheless.

I think I can say I am also proud of my British self! (But cautiously, because national pride has more complicated connotations in the UK.) I have certainly for a while rejoiced with triumphs of team GB, and even been deeply moved by Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home). I will never not be amazed by the concept of pub quizzes, crackers, and filling every newspaper headline with as many puns as possible! This, too, has become home.

I don’t know if I’ll ever return to Portugal. I don’t know if I’ll ever live close to my parents again. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to see my old friends more than a couple of times a year (you know, when there’s no pandemic). And that does hurt, but it doesn’t make me any less Portuguese. After all, everyone knows that the most Portuguese word is saudade.

I am Luso-British. And I am still me.

Footnotes

1. My sincere apologies to everyone who is familiar with this Portuguese saying, for the cognitive dissonance which I am certain this attempt at translation has triggered.

2. One of my first cultural shocks in the UK was realising just how much British people do not identify with this stereotype. British people seem to view themselves as severely lacking in punctuality, and look up to the Swiss in this department. The Swiss, the conjecture goes, in turn look up to the Japanese. The Japanese, I can only assume, do not look up to anyone because their train timetables are already about as accurate as you can be without having to take into account tiny relativistic corrections that mess with the concept of punctuality itself.

3. More on that at a later date!

4. Illegally. I’ve always thought the expression was meant to invoke an image of leaping across a border river.

5. As starkly opposed to an impressively negative portrayal of scientific life in the USA. By which I mean rude words were used and apparently the book at some point had to be “rewritten by lawyers”, which of course I can only imagine was great for sales!

6. Seriously, I need to write something about this at some point!

7. Fine, a majority of my friends (especially the most qualified ones). Can’t a guy use hyperbole?

8. At this time, Brexit had happened and both of us had settled status, which is why our son was British when he was born.

9. When I was little I used to enjoy watching this TV series about Major Alvega, an officer in the Royal Air Force during WWII who routinely reminded everyone that he was “Luso-British” before going on to foil Hitler’s evil plans. It was great. It was also based on a comic book series which turned out to be a shameless appropriation/plagiarism of the über-British character Battler Britton. Regardless, being able to introduce myself like Major Alvega did is one of the coolest things about my new status!