Half and Half

Someone asked me last night how long I had been living here in the Netherlands, and I replied: “35 years”.

“So, for half your life?” he asked. And up until that moment I had not thought about it, but he’s right: for the first 35 years of my life, I lived in the UK (even though, technically speaking, the country of my birth, the Isle of Man is a Crown Dependency and not part of the UK) and now I’ve been living for 35 years in the Netherlands.

It gave me pause.