What the sea remembers, the land forgets.

The first people to walk this green and pleasant land came from Africa.
Not recently – but in the long dawn of our species, when the only borders were rivers and mountain ranges, and the only language was survival.

They carried no papers or flags. They followed herds, water, warmth.
They crossed what was once land, and what would one day become sea, and left only stone tools, footprints, and genes in their wake.

They were not white – and whiteness had not yet been invented.
That came later, gradually and imperfectly, through ice and pigment, adaptation and isolation.

Evolution, not entitlement.

And still, they moved. Across rivers and seas, over ridges, through forests, to the islands.
Long before there was a Britain to be British about, there were people here – wandering, settling, moving again.

The earliest settlers brought fire and language. They carried no passports.

Then came others, in waves, over centuries.
They brought bronze, iron, farming, burial rites, new gods and ghosts, memories and myths.
They came from the west, the east, the near continent –
from what we now call Europe, Asia, the Middle East.

They came because people always have – in search of food, space, safety.
More clement skies. More peaceful and accepting neighbours.

The Celts – only a beginning because the fog of time obscures what came before – were just one ripple in the sediment time left behind.

The Romans followed, with roads and walls and underfloor heating.
Then the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Norsemen.
Vikings who came to plunder and stayed to trade.
The Normans came latest of the conquerors, but left their mark in law, language, and stone.

This island has never been still.
Never pure.
Only porous.

And yet somehow, in our painful and lingering post-imperial insularity, we convince ourselves we are the finished product.
Native. Defined. Entitled.

Some scowl at the boats now battling the waves across the Channel –
forgetting that boats carried all of us, if not in our lifetimes, then in the long-forgotten memories of our ancestors.

Some of my own forebears came in chains. Others wielded the whips.
One branch fled Jamaica. Another claimed a Scottish coat of arms.
That is not contradiction. That is Britain.

Every family tree, if traced without blinkers, eventually runs aground on a foreign shore.
Refugee. Coloniser. Indentured labourer. Chancer. Survivor.

We are not a race.
We are a journey.

It is not migration that is new – it is the outrage.
The myth of purity.
The delusion that history and culture start and end at Dover, and that identity can be ring-fenced by fear.

It is not the boats that shame us.
It is how we greet them.