My lovely daughter-in-law is Japanese, she and my son have been together for 10 years, married for 7 and they have two gorgeous daughters. My daughter-in-law is the main breadwinner as her job with a Japanese Investment bank provides a deal more income than my tree-surgeon son could hope to earn.
The work that she does is quite complicated, but I hope she won't mind me telling you that basically she sells European shares to Japanese investors. In order to do this, the company that she works for (and incidentally any other UK or international company that does the same thing) needs to be situated inside the EU, which means that at some not too distant point in the future the company and all its employees will need to be relocated to an EU country. If I remember rightly, the options available to them are Dublin, Paris or Frankfurt. So, instead of them being an hour's drive away, they will be heaven knows how far away. And, worst of all, my daughter-in-law, being a foreign national, had no say in the process, despite having lived in this country for many years, being married to an English man, having two half-English children, and having a mortgage on a house in England.
To say that I am sad is an understatement, but I guess that now I'll at least have the opportunity to travel to wherever they end up, as long as my pension holds out!
This is not a complaint or a whinge, just an individual viewpoint of how suddenly several lives can be impacted so severely. These two brothers, who have always been close, will now be separated, as will the four cousins who all get on so well together.
