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Some mornings, on the way to work, I used to buy a bacon butty at a cafe, joking with the fiftysomething Cockney who handed it over.
He was born in a council house in London's East End to a hard-working dad who believed that the dole queue was shameful – and a stay-at-home mum who would turn the leftovers from the Sunday roast into a shepherd's pie for the week ahead.
I, meanwhile, am the daughter of a middle-class Conservative father who invented the cat flap at his Lancashire factory. Peter Reid captained a minesweeper in the Second World War with a crew of loyal Liverpool merchant seamen and, for the rest of his life, proudly flew the Union Flag from a pole in our suburban garden – something that might invite a police visit today.
Class, the English affliction, might seem to divide me and my Cockney friend. But we have much in common. Our families attended church at Christmas and Easter. We both had the three Rs drummed into us at school, where Christian prayers were recited at assembly.
And today he and I despair equally that the world we grew up in – our capital city and our country at large – has been hollowed out so profoundly that we barely recognise the place we have always called home.
Along with so many Britons – regardless of creed, age, sexual orientation or skin colour – we weep for the country we have lost.
Recently, a landmark survey revealed a 'frightening increase' in division and decline in the UK over the past few years.
A clear majority of people, according to pollsters Ipsos, agree with the statements, 'I would like my country to be the way it used to be' and 'The culture in the UK is changing too fast' – compared to a mere 21 per cent who disagree.
Those who continue to insist that it is a realistic goal to 'integrate' millions of strangers from distant lands into the British way of life might consider that a comprehensive 86 per cent believe there is a tension between immigrants and those born in the UK. That number has risen sharply in just two years.
As this survey was being published, more than 1,200 mostly young men sailed here illegally over two days on 18 traffickers' boats from France. Around 50,000 have crossed the Channel since Labour came to power in July 2024 – although the Home Office points out that almost the same number of failed asylum seekers, foreign criminals and other immigration offenders have been removed from the country during the same period (plenty, I am told, hailing from Albania and the Far East).
Meanwhile, at least 1.2 million illegal migrants are at large in Britain, according to Reform's Zia Yusuf – though others dispute the figure.
Is it any wonder such huge numbers of arrivals are unsettling to millions of Britons?
Alec Penstone, the 100-year-old Royal Navy veteran, captured this sense of loss and uncertainty a week ago when he told the shocked hosts of Good Morning Britain that he believed his comrades' sacrifice during the Second World War 'wasn't worth it', due to the state the country is in now.
'I can see in my mind's eye those rows and rows of white stones and all the hundreds of my friends who gave their lives – for what?
'We fought for our freedom, but now [Britain's] a darn sight worse,' he said. It's not hard to guess that plenty of his heroic generation feel the same way.
The truth is that importing millions of outsiders, the majority of whom do not share our national faith, is rapidly and inexorably changing these islands.
Recently, at Aston Villa's Europa League game against Maccabi Tel Aviv in Birmingham, Israeli fans suffered the foul indignity of being put in what they described as a 'Jew cage' (a guarded basketball court).
Meanwhile, rival demonstrators – many masked anti-Zionists – were allowed to 'wander free' around Britain's second city, some of them yelling: 'Allahu Akbar!'
As one Maccabi fan – who happened to be an Israeli Christian – said: 'This feels like going back to the 1940s all over again.'
Yet the trajectory seems set. For more than 20 years I have written in the Mail about the mass-migration crisis undermining the European and British way of life.
I have talked to hundreds of migrants – almost entirely Muslim men – in France, Greece, Turkey, Spain, Denmark, Germany, Serbia, Hungary and the Netherlands, as they headed towards Britain.
At the port of Piraeus in Athens, I asked a Middle Eastern youngster, who was looking longingly at the ferry to Italy, where he was going. He told me confidently: 'London.'
In northern France, I have found only four Christians (apart from a few Eritreans) among the huge numbers of migrants I have spoken to there.
Three of them I met in Calais a few years ago: a Chadian, a Zimbabwean and a man from South Sudan. They were hiding their crucifixes beneath their T-shirts.
I found a fourth Christian, again in Calais, only a month ago. Behram, an Iranian 28-year-old, was bravely displaying his cross (in an ear piercing) and living under plastic sheeting in a hedge near the French port.
'If I showed my face in the main jungle migrant camps, I would be killed in a day,' he said.
I am not alone in fearing for the prospect of social unrest – indeed, we saw glimpses of it only last year in the riots following the Southport atrocity, and in the local protests in Epping outside the Bell Hotel, after a migrant staying there sexually assaulted a teenage girl in the town.
As Elon Musk said at the 'Unite the Kingdom' rally in London in September: 'This is a message to the reasonable centre, the people who ordinarily wouldn't get involved in politics, who just want to live their lives... If this [mass-migration crisis] continues, violence is going to come to you: you will have no choice.
'You're in a fundamental situation here... You either fight back or you die. That's the truth, I think.' Hopefully he is wrong, and Britain will somehow assimilate all these new arrivals.
But the prospects look less than encouraging. As we import millions of devout young men from a different faith, our church pews sit empty even at Christmas and Easter.
Those who have dared to talk openly of the dire consequences of unfettered illegal immigration have been met with an angry backlash, both on social media and in the flesh. I was linked to fascism by the Left-wing New Statesman magazine when I exposed the so-called 'grooming gangs' scandal as far back as 2010.
I had reported, for the first time, that white English and Sikh girls were being routinely raped by Muslim men, many of Pakistani heritage, as police, social workers and even charities stayed tight-lipped for fear of being called 'racist'.
The same concern now appears to have been a factor in the monstrous death of Sara Sharif at the hands of her despicable father. As a report this week said, both her neighbours and some of those in authority did not want to intervene despite their suspicions, for fear of being labelled as bigoted.
I also found 'racist scum' painted on my doorstep in large yellow letters in a succession of attacks at different addresses over three years, after reporting on the large numbers of migrants waiting on the French coast to get into Britain.
On social media, the same crude two-word term, much loved by illiterates of the Left, was thrown at me only last month when I reported on the injustice of giving free social housing to those who sail in on boats while British families, who have paid their taxes, languish on waiting lists which in some areas, at current rates, will take 100 years to clear.
This profound and justified sense of unfairness lies at the heart of so much that is making this country feel socially and culturally dislocated. When strivers and taxpayers – those of us who make up what is now dubbed 'Alarm Clock Britain' – read about migrants who have entered the country illegally on small boats and are immediately given free bed and board, it's no surprise that the famed British sense of fair play is stretched to breaking point.
When we read that these migrants are bussed to Hilton hotels, or four-star country mansions, we wonder whether the world has gone mad – and that's before the details drip out about what the Government is offering them.
Free health care, dental care, university courses, driving lessons, football tickets and, yes, even hair extensions – all of these have been granted to asylum seekers, few of whom, as we well know, ever leave Britain once they have made it to these shores.
And we are the ones left to pick up the bill. The Government now spends £2.8billion a year supporting asylum seekers and refugees, which is one fifth of Britain's overseas aid budget.
Even those who may have come here legally seem to find ways to exploit our ever-generous benefits system. Take my encounter with Rudi Ion, a Romanian who invited me into his Nottingham terraced house a few years back to give me his view on life in his adopted country.
As I recorded the interview in his kitchen, Ion told me: 'I love England and its benefits system. It's like finding a bag of money on the road, picking it up, and no one saying I shouldn't.' His ten relatives in residence nodded their heads in agreement.
The Home Office has told me, more than once this year, that everything I write touching on that department requires a response.
A few weeks ago, a civil servant went further. I was asked to submit my investigation (again on the injustice of prioritising newly arrived asylum seekers for housing ahead of Britons) with this newspaper's headline before publication.
When I objected, telling the official that there couldn't be a media outlet in the land that allowed the Government of the day to vet stories, he responded with the words: 'You would be surprised.'
Which is why I doff my cap to patriots like the centenarian hero Alec Penstone, whose comrades died to preserve our freedom of speech and our right to criticise any religion, cult or belief, if we wish.
Britain was not always perfect. Change comes over time to any society. But those millions of us who feel the same way as Alec Penstone must raise our voices in defence of a country built on liberal values and cultural integration. If we do not make a stand, then we'll find ourselves in the years to come watching the nation we once loved and respected slip away from us.
I fear it has already started doing so.