Britain should stop demonising Albania
From our UK edition
At a formal dinner recently, an aristocratic English lady asked about my experience of the UK. I told her I had loved it from the moment I arrived from Albania, aged 17. I then paused and mischievously added ‘as a stowaway’. I expected that to be a conversation killer. Instead, her eyes lit up. ‘How wonderful! My brother left England for Canada 45 years ago. As a stowaway too. What an adventure!’ The Albanians shut out of a legal route into Britain are lured by conmen who tell them not to bother with visas. Some end up in cannabis farms, then in prison I arrived in Britain hidden in a lorry from Belgium, by way of Italy, which I had reached by boat. For the first four years I worked in a restaurant and at Sainsbury’s before unexpectedly entering Oxford to study maths.
