I am nearly 51. In 11 months, one week and three days. Then I'll be 51.

Heck!

I have been ruminating on identity recently. The Olympics will do that to you. An Olympics held in your home nation brings it home even more.

I left the UK, with a skip in my step, almost 25 years ago. I had always felt that my life would not be made there and I was eager to move on. Two years in Iceland, followed by over two decades in Switzerland and France has seen me remain a Brit. English is still my main language for living, working, socializing. I still keep teabags in my kitchen cupboard and I still eat baked beans on toast for dinner (Heinz, of course). In a contracting world, my half-American child, born and raised in central Europe, has been brought up on Doctor Who and Blue Peter. She’s stood in the Blue Peter Garden at the old BBC TV Centre in London, and had her photograph taken with a beefeater at the Tower of London. She’s got a kilt made from our official tartan and she yells for Team GB in sporting events. It is a much smaller world than the one I grew up in.

Next year, my daughter (solely Swiss and French raised) is going to school in northern England. She will be nearly 16 and she says she’s going ‘home’ to school. Does this mean I failed? Did I fail to really leave my mother country when I left? I know my lack of decent language ability has hindered my ability to fully integrate in the countries I have lived in, not helped by marrying a fellow Anglophone (although not the same nationality), and working in a Anglophone environment (does it count that it is the United Nations and, therefore, a kaleidoscope of nationalities?).

I love the countries I live in. Switzerland has become home. I have lived in Switzerland longer than any other country in my adult life and soon longer than any other country ever – including the one I was born in. France has become my destination of choice – the first few years after leaving the UK (still single) I would rush ‘home’ to the UK for Christmas and any holiday time available – now we go once a year because we feel we have to. Well, the part of the UK I was born in, where family still live. We travel around the UK as tourists – me included: I fumble with the unfamiliar money and question the validity of new coins that didn’t exist when I lived there; I forget what size clothes and shoes we all take when converted; I forget that HP sauce is called ‘brown sauce’.

My daughter reminds me that just because everyone there speaks English it does not mean they all want to talk to me, so don’t start conversations, Mum, everywhere we go. But I do. I talk to everyone. And they talk to me. It seems that I am trying to reconnect with my Britishness. Or am I just desperate to communicate with those who understand my humour and my accent and the cultural awareness that can only be ingrained? It is all of those things and more.

When you no longer live in your homeland, national identity becomes something thrust onto you, whether you like it or not. When I would move between regions and cities in the UK, people’s first thought would be ‘Ah, she’s northern’. Now, I am always ‘Ah, she’s British’. I live in possibly the most diverse cultural and linguistic environment globally. I am now used to introducing my family as ‘Hi, I’m Jenny and I’m British, from the north. This is my husband and he is American, from the Pacific North West, and this is our daughter, born here in Switzerland’. This is how every family I know introduces themselves. I had no idea that this had become indoctrinated in me so quickly until I visited a friend in England a few years after moving to the Geneva area. She told me about her new boyfriend. My first question was not his name, his age, his occupation. It was which nationality? She stared at me for what seemed like ages and just said ‘British. What else would he be?’.

While so many aspects of daily life are becoming homogenized, it seems that national identity is still an integral part of understanding our place in the world. The London 2012 Olympics have demonstrated that to me in ways I thought I’d left behind me 20 years ago. That my non-UK resident child also identifies with her Britishness is perhaps more surprising. But for one more time in this Olympic month, I will shout loud and proud – GO TEAM GB!