I imagine Nick sweating over his iron, laminating the card. I once helped my daughter laminate a message for her special school friend, with an iron, too. Her card said, “Best Friends Forever”. The friend was half-Moroccan and half-Korean. She could speak two languages. Oh, and English, too.

I then re-read the message on the card. Vermin.

The card is on Facebook, but I don’t believe it is real. I still have high hopes for Nick. We all do. The entire Polish community in the UK wants to like Nick; we understand him after years of watching him watching trains; we want to come with him to the station. We want to meet his mother. What is his mother like? A lady, surely, with two little Union Jack flags in a basket above her front door. She waters her geranium and her flags every morning, hoping Nick finds himself a nice girlfriend, and a job. Watering is like a prayer. Immigrants. Please, please take them away, she prays. They are watching Nick watching trains. They are laughing at him. They are taking away his girlfriends, his jobs, his trains.

No, we are not laughing. We are sorry for Nick. I share Nick’s card on Facebook. I am not offended. I want to turn it into a joke: “I am so offended I expect a five-book deal from a top British publisher, immediately, so that I can feel a little better.” Nobody likes it (or offers me a book deal), but people comment as if the card had arrived on my doorstep.

“Agi, this breaks my heart,” says Geezer in Hat. He produced my short story on BBC Radio Four last September.

“So sorry this is happening.” An Englishman. A man.

“Just awful. I’m sorry.” A Scot named Scott.

“So sorry, Agnieszka, that we’ve all somehow let this happen.” A fellow writer. From London.

Sorry? I thought. But why? It’s a joke, right? Why are Polish people, in Poland, not writing to say they are sorry, only the Brits? Some English. Some Scottish. Some I-don’t-know-what. Slovenian Brits. Slovakian Brits. Slavic Brits.

More sorry messages. I could feel tears. Embarrassment. Deep embarrassment. Tribal embarrassment. Emotion. Lots of emotion, as if somebody died. Grief.

“My first thought was: who laminates a hate card?” One writer on how it feels to be Polish in a UK facing Brexit