What three years as an expat taught me about Britishness

In Hong Kong, writes Cathy Adams, I clung to my London-ness like a comfort blanket, never having realised before how much I relied on my emotional connection to my home city

As a former British colony, Hong Kong had a reassuring vein of home running through it (crucially, the plugs were the same)

(Photography by Cathy Adams)

I’m writing this from my sofa. It’s not a particularly special sofa: it’s navy blue, from John Lewis, and lumpy from years of people wedging their arses into the cracks between the cushions. If you sit on the chaise longue too hard, it flips like a seesaw.

For three and a half years, this sofa was a sort of talisman representing everything that I loved about my old life: home, comfort and belonging.

I’ve just moved back to London from Hong Kong, that rocky, typhoon-drenched island off the coast of southern China. It’s nice to be home. I’ve gone from being Theresa May’s “citizen of the world as a citizen of nowhere” to being a somewhere person again.