Renee Moodie doesn't pretend to understand British politics. But she has spent years trying to figure out what makes the English tick.
Cape Town - My maternal grandparents emigrated from England to South Africa some time in the 1930s. They lived in Johannesburg, where my Cornish-born grandfather worked in the municipality and my genteel English grandmother stayed home, raising four children. They both eventually died in South Africa, having spent the majority of their adult lives here.
They never really left England though. They went back often for extended visits. They took tea at 4pm. They spoke of that faraway island as home.
I grew up in that atmosphere, thinking of myself as English (not British: Britishness has just been demonstrated by the Brexit vote to be a fragile construct).
When I finally went to the UK in the late eighties, I was astounded to discover that there was a gulf as wide as the Karoo between me and my English relatives.
They were completely mysterious to me. I felt large, loud and somehow inferior in the face of their inscrutable politeness.
So I came back to South Africa with a deeper understanding of my own identity: I was through and through South African. I knew exactly where home was, and it was not in the manicured green hills of England.
Oddly, I eventually married a Brit, a man who had come to South Africa in 1975 and who had - in the Victorian phrase for people who turned their backs on King and Empire - “gone native”.
That marriage has meant some holidays in the UK, and some visits to us from his English family.
My initial impressions of the English have not changed.
There are things I love about the English and England. It is all so calm and polite and well-run. The depth of history and language are overwhelmingly enticing. St Paul's Cathedral is quite simply one of the most beautiful things ever made. The world would be immeasurably poorer without the eccentricities of cricket. But. There is a big but.
At its heart, English society and culture is insular and inward looking, self-absorbed and shy. (Disclaimer: None of this applies to my English relatives, who have always been welcoming and interested and open).
What I mean is exemplified in a conversation I overheard on a British train. A man's voice was talking, perhaps to his lawyer, about what was obviously a bad divorce in which it seemed his ex was trying to deny him access to his children. Many vicious things were being said about this ex.
And here's the thing: the entire thing was conducted in a light, high conversational tone, as if he was telling a story to a small child.
This is the essence of Englishness - to behave at all times as if everything is alright. To hide what is actually going on, secure in the knowledge that your fellow English(wo)man will read the code.
And out of that springs a discomfort with anything that is foreign, different, unfamiliar. And out of that, it seems to me, springs the British people's long dislike of the EU.
I don't pretend to understand British politics or to understand why a cosmopolitan nation would decide to turn its back on the world. But I can say this: they may speak the same language, but to this English-speaking South African, the people of that small island are very, very strange.
@reneemoodie
* This is a weekly opinion column.
IOL