Musing on nationality and locality. Gibraltar, where I am right now, is a very strange place. It tries so hard to be British: literally the first thing you see when you step out of the border post is a red telephone box. The street furniture is British, the pedestrian crossings are the “WAIT until signal shows” type… and yet the driving is on the right and speed limits are 50kph. The feel of the place makes me want to go into foreign language mode and yet everything’s in English and the accents are mostly those of bits of the UK.

The aggressive Englishness is in the food too. Everywhere is desperate to sell British Fish and Chips, and on Sunday all the pubs do a Sunday roast. The policemen routinely wear old style helmets.

Compare La Linea just over the border, which is assertively Spanish. Little or nothing is translated into English on menus etc. and the waiters have only a little English. This is quite a contrast with Portugal where basically everyone under 50 has functional English. In the context of the competing claims to Gibraltar, though, it feels like an assertion of “we’re Spanish, cope with it”.

The atmosphere of the two places differs hugely too. Gibraltar has wavered when I’ve been here between a bit dead and utterly heaving when a cruise ship is in town. La Linea has this constant buzz and hubbub of people sitting and chatting outside in many street cafes. Everybody seems to be meeting someone and catching up.

The last observation is that when we’re at sea in Gibraltar bay, Jebel Musa in Morocco is clearly visible, closer to Gibraltar than England is to France. And yet Africa is somehow (in the popular mind anyway) distant and different.

The lines humans draw are weird.