What I'd like to talk about is an amazing coincidence that happened to me a few years ago.

Now just to set the scene: I teach at Leeds University. I'm a diehard Lancastrian, but the whole of my working life has been spent in Yorkshire, either at Leeds Trinity or at the University of Leeds, teaching French and German. And like so many of my colleagues in languages at the University, we were somewhat depressed with what happened with the referendum in 2016, because in many ways we felt this was a negation of what we’d spent our whole working lives striving towards, which was enabling young people to travel, experience foreign cultures, and communicate in other languages. So, a certain amount of depression at that time.

Anyway, soon after, I had the quite remarkable experience in that I went home from university one evening, back to Lancashire I would emphasize, and the light was flashing on my answerphone. I picked it up and there was this rather strange, diffident voice at the other end - sounded like quite an elderly Englishman with a Home Counties accent.

He said something to the effect of ‘I'm sorry to ring you up like this. I've never done anything like this before, but would you please mind ringing me back?’ And he left his number.

So, I thought that was a bit odd. It was quite late in the evening, so I didn't do anything till the next morning. Then I phoned him up and he said ‘Oh, thanks for getting back to me. I'm sorry to have disturbed you, but I actually own a house in the far east of France, near a place called Chambéry. And last week I was walking through a nearby village and I just got chatting to a chap, literally over his garden fence, and we talked about the UK and the fact that he'd been to the UK, and I sort of asked him what he thought about England, etc. And one of the things that came up in the conversation was this chap said, “I'd love to get in touch with a chap called John Sagar again.”

This was actually my long-lost penfriend of the 1960s and 70s, whom I hadn't seen since I was at Montpellier in 1972, whom this chap had just actually stumbled across 300 miles from where I had known my penfriend to live, so the coincidence was quite astonishing.

What I found particularly touching after that, was that this chap had then come back to the UK and gone to the trouble of scouring through phone books to put me back in touch with this old penfriend. Which, I'm very pleased to say, the contact has now been re-established and we are communicating regularly again.

So, to me, it was great. Because it showed how yes, these apparent obstacles had been created through Brexit, but there are certain things which of course transcend such obstacles. And I think that's wonderful.