Every now and again, a social media storm comes along that makes you stop and think about identity — what it means to belong, to be from somewhere, or of somewhere. The recent one that caught my attention involved the writer Michael Rosen, who found himself being told by strangers on the internet that he “can’t be English” because he’s Jewish.
I found myself nodding along to his reflections. Because the truth is, none of us is just one thing. We are mosaics, not marbles — pieces of story and history, accident and choice, gathered over generations and rearranged every time we move, fall in love, learn, change.
My own heritage is a good example. My dad was Jewish, from an Ashkenazi family whose roots wound their way across Europe. But one branch, the Cecils, can trace their lineage all the way back to Elizabeth I’s court — a reminder that Englishness is never as tidy or as pure as some might wish it to be. My mum, meanwhile, was Australian, with family ties that stretch to both Ireland and Oxfordshire. So if anyone ever asks me what I “am,” I can only smile. The answer depends on the day, the company, and perhaps even the weather.
I’m the son of a Jewish-English-Australian household. I’m a Londoner, Gloster, and an Oxfordshire man. I’m a husband, a brother, a friend. I’m British, certainly — but I’m also the sum of countless little inheritances: recipes and phrases, values and mannerisms, stories and songs. And I carry an Australian and a British passport.
I think Michael Rosen is right when he says that we’re living in a time when too many people want to make us smaller, to flatten the layers of our humanity into a single, convenient label. Maybe it’s fear — of difference, of complexity, of change. But we lose something precious when we pretend that identity is simple.
The richness of our country lies in its mixture — in the way our histories overlap and tangle, in the way people from wildly different backgrounds somehow find themselves cheering for the same team, serving on the same parish council, volunteering at the same cat centre, or sharing the same patrol at Scouts.
It’s in that mixture that I find hope. Because once you accept that identity is layered — that it breathes and evolves — it becomes harder to fear others and easier to see yourself in them.
I’m proud of every strand that makes me who I am: the Jewish humour and compassion I inherited from my father’s family; the warmth and plain-speaking Australian spirit from my mum’s; the quiet rootedness I feel when I walk through an Oxfordshire field.None of them cancel the others out. They combine. And that, to me, is what being English — and human — is really all about.
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