‘That’s Tony’s son, I know it!’. This, surprisingly wasn’t the first time it’d happened at some big family or diaspora event. One of grandad’s old friends or acquaintances recognised me.

My face, was simply my dad’s face, which he in turn had inherited from grandad. A little clone, prone to defensiveness and with a knack for making complexed things. Or pulling everything in the house apart to the chargrain of his mother.

I only wanted to see how things worked.

Grandad had worked on the production line at the old Ford cars factory in Dagenham, dad had gotten himself an education and gone to Rolls Royce in Birmingham to build aircraft engines before going into engineering consultancy and moving the family back to London.

My story was no different really. I went to Imperial College and studied Chemical Engineering with a few years abroad for both study and work. So far, so similar, and while history doesn’t repeat, it certainly does rhyme.

Grandad made cars, dad made airplane engines and I grow semiconductor crystals to give computers Silicon brains and Indium sensors.

Each of us a man of his time, but the same man repeated. Carbon copies. Combustion, carbon fibre, silicon carbide would be a good way to put it as an analogy to the nascent materials we worked with.

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Enough about work. What of life, afterall we should only work to live.

Back in university, in the time before Brexit when Britain left the EU, I had lived in Brussels to do a year abroad at the ULB French speaking university. I also took an internship at the Audi factory that closed back in 2025 after being open for 77 years.

I loved my time in Belgium and stayed for a few more years. There was something so relaxed and so different about it, the trams, the huge excess of parks and a giant forest that was one third the size of the city.

It was so liveable. Especially when you had other young people around from all over Europe, just starting their lives and coming from every corner of the continent.

My favourites were the Italians because of their intensity and love of great food. At my first student intern house there were 14 of us from nine different countries and we’d have these monthly international dinners in one of the kitchens.

It was a huge house, with a kitchen, bathroom and four bedrooms on each floor. At the top of the house there were only two bedrooms and a huge kitchen were we’d have most of our dinners with views over the city, and of the back gardens of our neighbours.

So many wonderful experiences, people, parties and places. So much to get lost in. It wasn’t until the following year though that things really changed in completely unexpected ways.

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I became wrapped up in a Belgian girl. This was strange to me because there had been girls from other places over the course of my life and especially in the preceding year. Women from places that you don’t just pass through or overlook as you do with Belgium.

Women from big countries, and well known cities with whom I’d had small flirtations and more involved romances. A Parisian by the name of Persephone who’d I’d met at university in London. She was my lab partner and we still spoke often.

German Marie who I’d enjoyed many a good walk with in Forest park near the Audi factory. Museum days with her at the weekends and then dinner and drinks with the house. Perfect.

Finnish Sarah. We also walked a lot! In the huge park next to the university and Solvay where the famous quantum conference had happened back in 1927. Einstein, Curie, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, the lot of them were in attendance.

There was one night me and Sarah had walked home from a party by Centenary park, around the inner ring road, through a few as yet undiscovered neighbourhoods.

We went down a hill through St Petersplein and back up another hill as the tram had stopped running by that late hour. I didn’t know it at the time but we’d walked past the house at number 42 where I’d end up living with the Belgian girl in just under two year’s time.

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It was a hot summer and I was on a date next to Buckingham palace with a psychology student who had a summer job there. My phone went and it was a video call through Facebook Messenger. I excused myself and walked out into the sunshine, more than a little tipsy.

I’d applied for a house share back in Brussels while spending the summer at home in London and it was my potential housemates calling to see what I was like. At this moment I was loud, on a date and on my way to being drunk next to the queen’s house. Not the best first impression, depending on who’s asking.

I also couldn’t move in for a few months but I’d start paying rent immediately. They chose me.

That was in August and I didn’t meet them until November when I went to get my keys a month before moving in. It would be two guys and a girl that I’d live with, all Belgians which was pretty weird given that the Belgians kept to themselves whilst hosting people from all over the continent and the world here.

In the big international house we’d lived with a rare Belgian from the tiny German speaking region near the Netherlands and Luxembourg. There were only 77,000 of them.

Now I was about to move in with two French speaking Belgian guys and a Dutch speaking Belgian girl from Flanders. When I looked on their Facebook profiles the boys had full profiles, but the girl didn’t have any photos close or clear enough to see how she looked. I was too drunk at the time to remember any of their faces from the summer call.

I was just hoping she wasn’t beautiful. Living with attractive girls was my Achilles heel. However it was mitigated when there were large mixed houses and groups. Adulthood would bring smaller houses, smaller groups and the probability of more intense relationships. Both good and bad.

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I got the Eurostar high speed train, making my way back to this familiar city I loved and had already loved in. Getting off at south station.

I remember getting to the house, talking with my new housemates and eating burgers. It was a pretty good evening all round and nothing of note happened. I didn’t find the girl especially attractive, she wasn’t my type. Very pale with a pretty face, she resembled Audrey Hepburn, a Dutch woman.

I came to find out she was half Dutch and half Belgian so it figures. The only thing that was different about her was the pitch of her voice, it was like music to me. I could have listened to her talk all night. But she went to bed early and one of the guys dropped me back to the train station for a very late train back to London.

The one thing that struck me is that when she’d retired for the night, she’d come down to say goodbye in her dark blue dressing gown. Blue as the dark deep ocean.

I was lying back on the big leather sofa in a food coma from the giant burger I’d eaten and staring up into the high ceiling of this fancy duplex.

A former chocolate factory split into 20 huge living spaces.

She walked up the metal stairs to bed and as she got halfway up she stared down at me. That moment was odd… she had very dark brown eyes that were almost opaque. Strange given that she was so white. When she looked down at me it was as if her gaze was burning into my soul.

We found eachother. A carbon copy of some unknown Central European farmers, a copy of some famous Anglo Dutch woman on the surface level. Human faces drawn from a finite pool of genetic code and an infinite cosmic ocean of souls.

The following years would be everything glimpsed in that brief moment. High, lows, love, hate, joy, passion, tears and almost tragedy.

True love is an intimacy that’s as primal as fighting. My favourite fighter once said ‘I take people into deep waters and they discover themselves’.

So it was with us.