HAS it really come to our last week in the European Union? Since the 2016 referendum result (which was announced on my birthday – a terrible present to wake up to) it’s been easy to feel numb and detached from Brexit.

It has seemed such an absurd proposition, that we would eject ourselves from a club we’ve helped build – but here we are. It actually seems to be happening. For many, this is a time of mourning.

Mourn not just the job losses, the loss of structural funding, the increased uncertainty for traders, the economic self-harm of this decision.

Mourn not just the appalling damage it’s doing to families wondering how they will be able to be together, where mum or dad is an EU citizen, who had every right to “treat this country as their own”.

Mourn not just the rise of rise-wing rhetoric and xenophobia being litigimised at the highest levels. But also – mourn the things we’ll only know by their absence, like the loss of oppo-rtunities this means for young people in Glasgow.

At school we had a brilliant French teacher who encouraged us to apply for the Euroscola project, run by the European Parliament by invitation only to member states. Young people from all over Glasgow won a place, and we climbed on a bus together towards the most wonderful, eye-opening, future-shaping trip to Strasbourg.

There were street surveys of shoppers to practice our French. There was a trip to a school and a local business (a distillery! We were very excited!) and the cathedral and the markets. And then the big day in the Parliament itself.

The morning was about getting to know and working with young people from all over the EU. It was fascinating, humbling, thrilling – and the initial wariness of all the other students to our British badges immediately warmed up when we said we were Scottish really.

In the afternoon we were mixed into groups with all the nations to discuss an issue and collate a report to feed back.

Some of us even got to chair of our sessions which was enormously exciting, and as rapporteurs got to sit in the proper seats in the debating chamber and make our speech in French.

I had no idea I’d end up in another debating chamber in Glasgow, but that day was an important part of my journey.

EU institutions are far from perfect, but that experience revealed how much you can learn from others, the importance of hearing

different perspectives, and

how the beauty of the European project is the way it brings

those differing voices

into one collectively agreed

note.

There will be no more invitations for Scottish schools to Euroscola. Growing up should be about your world getting bigger, more exciting, more expansive.

Brexit will be a disaster on every level, but today we should mourn the invisible doors this closes for Glasgow’s young people.