Living in "deep England" for a decade has been an education. Principally in how Englishness attempts to elide Irish culture, when it isn't engaging in outworn and superannuated stereotypes. I was a fairly Anglophile Irish person. Brexit and 10 years of Toryism have changed that.

Cultural insensitivity is one thing. But the whole spectrum from IRA jokes to jokes about how stupid Irish people are to supposedly highly educated people expressing surprise that we have our own television stations does tend to wear thin after a while.

I've come to the conclusion that for most English people Ireland simply doesn't exist. There is this place they call "Eire" or "Southern Ireland" which in their minds is sort of a "home nation" and yet inconveniently not. They find you hard to place, socially.

Perhaps English people domiciled in Ireland find us full of unexamined assumptions about Englishness too? I don't know and would be curious to find out.

It's forced me to confront my own sense of identity in ways that are strenuous and that I'd have preferred to avoid.

But that's probably just because I'm lazy.

Many assume we are part-British because we speak the same language. Playing hide-and-seek among those cultural assumptions can be tiring.

The Irish do well here. But I think many of us live with a powerful sense of alienation.

The astonishment or irritation many Brexiters displayed over the inconvenient fact that the UK has a land border with another sovereign EU country is a testament to this obliviousness. Ireland is a "home nation" until - oops - it suddenly isn't.