In the year since the Brexit referendum, a resolve has grown in me to leave London and return to live in Scotland. Online, we look at flats in Edinburgh and Glasgow, where we know a few people, and houses in the Tweed valley, where we know nobody. Of course, there’s an element of fantasy in this ambition, and, of course, it may be foolish. People of 70-plus who uproot themselves from friends and neighbours to move somewhere they imagine more pleasant or “suitable” (no stairs) often live to regret it. But set against that is the prospect of citizenship for oneself and one’s children of a modest, well-intentioned country inside the EU rather than a friendless braggart of a nation, the present England, that imagines its future as a swaggering buccaneer of free trade, Rik Mayall playing Lord Flashheart in Blackadder’s Elizabethan period.

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My parents made their return when my father was about to turn 50, and the reasons were social rather than political. Theirs was an ordinary story. In the 18th and 19th centuries Scotland became one of Europe’s great emigrant nations – Tom Devine in his history of Scotland’s diaspora, To the Ends of the Earth, estimates that more than 2 million Scots emigrated between 1815 and 1914. This outward flow of people continued through the 20th century, with a peak in the industrially depressed 1920s when, for example, Scotland contributed more than a quarter of all British and Irish migrants to the US, though it accounted for only one in 10 of the UK population.

Standing outside these figures, and less noticed, were the hundreds of thousands of internal migrants who moved south to England and Wales (not until the present century was there a significant flow in the opposite direction) and it was to these statistics that my parents belonged.

They left Fife for Lancashire as newlyweds in 1930. It looks a small distance now – a few hours on the motorway – but in my childhood it took the best part of a day to accomplish, on trains that seemed to labour uphill all the way, as though Scotland were a high plateau. We went to what my parents called “back home” only once a year. I can’t recall much longing for it, no fond memories spoken in the firelight, and yet there must have been some, because after two decades as a mechanic in various Lancashire mills my father began to look for work that would return us north.

A job in a Dundee jute mill was tried and rejected; after his experience in linen and cotton, he found the looms too old, simple and rough. But antiquity was a problem everywhere in Scottish industry at that time. In the job he eventually took at a Dunfermline linen factory, he wrote that the mill seemed to him “like a locomotive lying on its side with the boiler burst but the wheels still turning”. One piece of machinery dated to 1851. The newest of the mill’s engines had been installed in 1912. There then developed in him a feeling that, by coming to Scotland, we had left a better way of life behind.

None of this feeling found a political expression in nationalism. Scotland’s faults were seen as self-inflicted, and it seemed natural to many in my father’s generation and in mine that by travelling south, especially as far as southern England, you reached a gentler and more forthcoming country as well as a richer one. The effects were sometimes profound. It seems plausible to me, for example, that The Wind in the Willows owes something of its English lyricism to the fact that its Scottish-born author, Kenneth Grahame, was taken as a five-year-old from the cold shores of Loch Fyne, where his mother died and his father drank too much, to his grandmother’s house in the warm slumber of the Thames valley.

The same contrast in weather still exists, but other contrasts have switched sides bewilderingly. It’s England, newly flushed with English nationalism, which looks the stranger of the two nations: misgoverned, romantic and backward-looking, imprisoned by self-regard and its imperial history. Glasgow is no longer a place of singular behaviour: Scottish towns and cities can be drunk, squalid and rough, but no worse in these qualities than many parts of England.

The Scottish press is generally kinder and less savagely partisan than the English press: the Scottish Sun’s front page on election day carried the headline “Nic Can Do It” above a picture of Nicola Sturgeon; the London edition mocked up an image of Jeremy Corbyn in a dustbin (Cor-Bin, you see) and labelled him a Marxist extremist, a puppet of the unions and the terrorists’ friend. In a word, Scotland seems the gentler place.

Scottish nationalism only reluctantly admits its part in the imperial British project

Why has the balance changed? A large reason must be the story that is central to the nationalism of each country. English nationalism insists on British (which in this context means English) exceptionalism: England’s glorious past continuing to a future in which, somehow defying the laws of economic gravity, it remains one of the world’s most powerful states. Scottish nationalism, on the other hand, only reluctantly admits its part in the imperial British project, preferring to see Scotland almost as a half-liberated English colony with egalitarian traditions and a friendly welcome for the world.

Both stories contain lies. England’s history will not secure its future; Scotland cooperated enthusiastically with England in exploiting the empire’s resources across two centuries. But for a country adjusting to a new status in the world, the second lie is much more helpful than the first.

As for British nationalism, of the non-bombastic NHS-and-BBC kind I believe in, it seems to have fewer and fewer takers. The cross-border polity that sustained it has been withering, with one-party states headquartered in London and Edinburgh, and until last week only three MPs in Scotland to represent the idea that the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties were even notionally pan-British. In these circumstances it became easy to see oneself as a member of a lost tribe, the Old Britons, who would have in the end to pick one side or the other. That side for me could never be England, because the form that English nationalism has taken is so repellent. And so I began to trawl the property websites.

The election results have brought a stop to that. Scotland’s 59 MPs now include 13 Tories, seven Labour and four Liberal Democrats; there will be no second referendum on independence any time soon. Meanwhile the debacle south of the border suggests that Eurosceptic rejection of single market membership will need to be modified, perhaps even abandoned, thereby invalidating Sturgeon’s reasons for a new referendum in any case. A political idea of Britishness has re-emerged. It might be foolish to think it will last long – Boris Johnson as prime minister could end it in a minute – but I cherish it all the same.

I think of my parents and how confused they would be if the train north stopped at Gretna Green for a customs inspection: “Are these tins of Spam for your personal use?” And how sad they would feel once they understood that a border existed and that they were now in a real sense expatriates, with their past in a foreign country.