London jolly leaves me a little sad...

YOU can kinda understand why the Instagrammers all shop online,” observes the teen, and I nod sagely (though to be honest I don’t know any Instagrammers at all, so this may or may not be true).

We are elbowing our way along London’s Oxford Street through dense crowds of shoppers that make progress slow.

It’s still early and outside Selfridges a queue has formed before the doors open that is headed by three women in burqas.

“They’re wearing Uggs!” hisses the teen as she points to their just visible toes. They are also carrying Louis Vuitton bags. We are not in Kansas (or Dublin) any more.

London, it turns out, is a shopaholic teenager’s dream destination. We spend two hours in Primark (“Omigod it’s HUUUGE”) and at least three in TopShop, a shop so intent on wooing youngsters there are multiple cafés and food stalls and they employ an actual real DJ at weekends.

And, yes, I was tempted to boycott this one after allegations of abuse about its owner, Philip Green, but I can’t bear to; my 16-year-old duly wanders around to a pulsating beat of 90s music with a quality of rapt expression last seen on her face when she was two and watching ‘Disney on Ice’.

There are chain-mail jeans, peacock blue faux fur coats and boots with heels shaped like door knobs. It is a certain kind of paradise.

In Liberty, we exclaim at treasures that are comically unaffordable (an ugly skirt for £2,500! A single towel for £200!) and pause at one point beside an ornate gilded lamp.

The sprog’s jaw drops.

This is, she tells me reverentially, the very spot from which her current favourite Instagrammer recently filmed a segment. Hallowed ground.

For a bit of culture we check out the mummies at the British Museum.

For a bit of retro we venture over to Spitalfields market.

For a touch of quirky we visit a

Cat Café with a Peter Pan-themed basement and 12 actual felines – a venue staffed by some of the trendiest looking cat obsessives I’ve ever seen.

For the Halloween time that’s in it, we see ‘Phantom of the Opera’ and are blown away by the skill and spectacle.

Mostly, though, we walk, mile after mile through lovely West End streets and funky East End lanes. I relish the wonder and delight on my daughter’s face. “It’s a bit like Dublin,” she says, “but bigger and better.”

When we travel home, we exit automatically via the blue channel, the one you take when you’ve come from the EU. I wonder if that’s the last time we’ll ever do that after a trip to London. It’s a sobering thought.

There has even been talk of visas. And yet our jolly reminds me that Britain, at its best, is an utter joy – friendly and exotic in equal measure.

We will be so sorry to lose you as an EU friend.