‘Well, hello Runcorn. My name is Dan and I’m not from around here’

The week after Osama Bin Laden was killed, I arrived at Runcorn train station, Cheshire, and walked the short distance to Brindley Arts Centre to perform my Edinburgh Festival show, which is a living. As I crossed the car park I came within the orbit of a youth. He was sitting on a low wall, waiting for events to befall him – business was slow in this regard and my arrival would have to do.

He took in my appearance, gait and aura and decided that Cheshire blood did not run through my veins – my face was bearded, reasonably alert and not made of distractedly kneaded dough. An ancestral impulse rose within his breast – he must defend his people against the exotic interloper.

His brow furrowed and we both knew he was going to say something – something devastating to my aloof presumptions. But what would it be? Would he attack London? Would he call my good coat gay?

“We killed your leader!”

He was very pleased with himself and I was quite tickled. I could have explained that I was born near Tel Aviv and of the two of us was the less eligible for recruitment by al-Qaeda, but as I already had a tough sell programmed into my day I discreetly conserved my energies and smiled at his exuberance.

“Good one!” I rejoined merrily. I left him basking in rhetorical triumph, got to the Arts Centre and diligently googled Runcorn – it’s 96.3% white British. Wow that’s white British. I wondered what reference that kid would have had for my appearance had not a dodgy foreign type been in the news. If he could conflate my sort with Bin Laden for taunting purposes, perhaps also Jafar from Aladdin – “You will never hold Agrabah!” or Idris Elba – “You are too tall for Bond!”

A big part of Other-ing is actually Same-ing. When we’re not shoving people out of our group (to conserve resources real or imagined), we’re creating spurious new groups and dragging unconnected people into them – all the better to Other the lot of them: “Here is an economic migrant, there is a political refugee – but I’m too busy for fine distinctions so I’ll scoop them into a bag, whip out my sharpie and label it ‘They’re After Me’ Lucky Charms’!”

And how instinctively we gerrymander our worlds. A couple of years ago I was driving down the eastbound lane of a narrow street in south London. There was oncoming traffic and I pulled left into a parking gap and let two cars pass – because when I am not running late and a danger to all, my driving manners are most genteel.

My westbound brothers acknowledged my noblesse with nodding and flashing and I resumed my progress, flushed with the spiritual benefits of paying goodwill into the traffic ecosystem. A third westbound driver approached and we both slowed.

He had a serviceable gap to his left, although bafflingly he did not seem to be pulling into it. It was almost as if he didn’t understand the karmic debt his westbound predecessors had bequeathed him. I began to find his lack of haste to give ground unseemly. “After all I’ve done for you lot!” I thought bitterly.

Of course, I knew that these people’s westboundness was a temporary trait, that on reaching the western end of this shortish road some would turn north and some south, but for me – now passionately enraged – they had a collective responsibility which this ingrate sought to shirk.

Even after the first two drivers had laid aside their technical westboundness they must surely retain its essence like a homeopathic memory and communicate it to their essential cohort like quantum particles! Why would this cad not do his duty? Well I was damned if I was going to cede – altruism is a fine thing but you have to draw the line somewhere or life will take you for a doormat. As I say, I was not in a rush and could afford obstinacy.

He made way, though it was grudgingly and my bonhomie was compromised – making me work for my simple due! I neither nodded nor flashed any thanks but drove on, sullenly muttering to myself.

“Westbound car, ruining it for everyone… I mean the first two were okay but this one, well let’s just say he is doing a terrible PR job for Westies everywhere – oh why be naive they were the exceptions and this one is the rule. Look at him – typical Westie – immigrants to a man by the way, best locked up if you ask me, or deported anyway. Vote Leave. I’m so angry. Vote Leave.”

Enraged beyond reason I spun my car around, chased that driver, slew him and held his head aloft for all Westies to see. “We killed your leader!” I crowed.

For a year after the Referendum I walked around thinking of Brexiteers, Tories and Racists as a group. It was incurious of me to same them – they were just sharing that westbound lane and many have since turned north or south. But for that brief moment they added up to 52 per cent and the consequences of that intersection in their journeys will far outlast their time together.