Back on British soil for the first time in four and half years; I’ve not been back since the day I moved to Sweden. People seem amazed when I tell them that. “Don’t you miss it?” Not in the slightest.

The reasons why were apparent as soon as I passed passport control in Brussels. Gone are the extortionate but at least welcoming and agreeable array of concessions where one might get a decent coffee and some breakfast. Now you’re funnelled straight through a duty-free zone full of shouty designer tat and influencer-bait, and the only coffee available is from the sort of machine that makes you groan aloud when you spot it in a workplace you’re visiting.

(There are of course two branded Costa Coffee machines in the duty-free zone, but these have hand-drawn out-of-order notices pasted over their blue screens of death.)

For no reason that makes any sense, the duty-free zone is only selling converters that convert to European sockets. Apparently there is sometimes stock of a Euro-to-worldwide converter, but they’re all sold out, and anyway it costs upward of 40euro.

You don’t even have to step on the old sod before some fucker has his hands in your pocket. Everything is tatty, or broken, or tatty and broken… and most people, quite understandably, seem to have reached an accommodation with that fact, a shruggy sort of “computer says no” sort of vibe.

I don’t blame them.