This Side of the Pond

I have been living in fear for the last six weeks – terror that everything I know, everything I am, was about to be thrown to the wolves. This story has a happy ending, but it’s going to take us a while to get there.

My torture began just before Christmas, when I sat down with a couple of friends for a festive meal and to swap gifts. As we dined on chicken and garlic potatoes, tinsel sparkling in the background, one of them placed a box in front of each of us.

She’s one of those people for whom being stylish is annoyingly effortless, so the package was perfectly wrapped in tasteful paper – no tiny rips where she’d misjudged the amount of paper and she clearly hadn’t stuck the tape to itself and then realized it was the last piece on the roll. But as I innocently admired its clean lines, she looked me in the eye.

“When people ask what I got you for Christmas, I want you to tell them this,” she said. “I want you to tell them I gave you… the truth.”

Let’s pause for a second with one of those record scratch sound effects that were so popular on 1980s television. I should explain who this person is and why she turned traitor.

If you’re a regular reader of this column, you may remember an incident involving a friend who grew up in a French community (real nationality changed to protect identities, even though she doesn’t deserve it), doing French things and learning French history from her French relatives.

She took a DNA test and, to her surprise and my endless amusement, turned out to be two thirds British. She didn’t have a lick of French DNA.

It was my own fault for finding this funny, I suppose. What this friend of mine had decided to give me for Christmas was a DNA test of my own.

Now, you might be wondering what could be terrifying about learning your personal history, but then not everyone makes a living by writing columns about what it means to be British. What if I was Spanish or Italian? My coloring suggests it – dark hair and eyes and olive skin is relatively rare on the isles.

What if I, too, was French, or my genes didn’t even come from Europe? It would have been exciting, but I’d have had to pack up my musings about being a Brit in the Midwest and slink back to wherever I actually came from.

Not to mention that, at least in terms of behavior, I am about as British as it’s possible to be. I tut, I drink tea, I can be amazingly passive aggressive and I have a tendency to make jokes at inappropriate times.

What if all that was a lie?

I began to realize I’d brought this on myself for failing to be supportive when my friend turned out to be British. My only excuse is that I responded exactly as a Brit should handle another Brit in distress: by sniggering to cover my discomfort that there might be some emotions coming my way.

What could I do but bite the bullet and take the test? I spat sadly into the tube, mailed it towards my doom and the long wait began.

I got little sympathy, which seems appropriate. I did come up with a plan to ignore the test results if they turned out not to my liking, but my friend pointed out she was hardly likely to forget about it.

The company providing the DNA analysis told me to download an app on my phone so that I could follow the progress of my test. There was a brief period of relief when it seemed like my saliva was lost in the mail system, but it turned out the company is just busier than usual after Christmas.

Finally, on Saturday evening, a message flashed on my phone. “Great news!” it lied. My DNA had been analyzed and the results were now available.

It took several minutes to muster the courage to take a look. Several more to hit the button inviting me to check out my “ethnicity estimate”.

I needn’t have worried. It turns out that 74% of my DNA is from England and Wales and the remaining 26% is from Ireland and Scotland.

I’m not just a pureblood Brit, though that was enough of a relief. I’ve also got the whole of the British Isles covered, from coast to shining coast.

Not even a sprinkling of exotic DNA, which puts to rest my mum’s theory about a rogue Spanish element somewhere in our deep history. Not even a single percent from somewhere exciting like India or the Baltics, so we’ll never know how we ended up with unusual hair and eyes.

The biggest surprise was the 26%, which is specifically Celtic DNA. I hadn’t realized there was a connection in my blood to one of Britain’s most famous ancient peoples, so you can expect me to be sharing some research on the matter in the near future.

The 74% has a strong connection to the knobbly bit on the English map located east of London, which also makes sense as it was the birthplace of my maternal grandfather. And that, right there, is the sum total of my genetic heritage.

My friend can’t quite believe how pure my blood is and has finally accepted that, when it comes to lessons on how to embrace her heritage, I am by far the best teacher available to her. I promised a happy ending to this story, and here it is: you may continue to take my scribblings seriously, because science has proven that I am quite literally unbeatable when it comes to being British.