And in the midst of it all, I became French. “I have the pleasure to inform you that you have acquired French citizenship,” said the letter from the nice man at the ministry of interior. Watching Ukrainians fleeing west rubs in the simple truth: your passport is your fate.

My family of rootless cosmopolitans has experience in this business. In the previous four generations, we’d successively upgraded from subjects of the Russian tsar to South Africans to — first prize, or so we thought at the time — Britons. I moved from London to Paris in 2002 with the entitled insouciance of a privileged nationality. I was British, and European, and could therefore go almost wherever I liked.

My poor wife was a mere American, so I watched pityingly as she jumped the endless hurdles to become French. But by the time she got there in 2017, we’d swapped places: Brexit had downgraded my passport and I was no longer legally European.