HE UK leaving EU looks similar to a 20-something leaving home to live on their own for the first time.

The young un’ may chafe at their “lack of sovereignty” while living with the family and believe life will be better out there, doing things much more their own way.

Yet even if they have some savings and move to a job that pays well, they’ll probably find the wide world gives fewer freedoms and asks for more payments than they expected and they sail near, or into, debt before that first good pay-cheque hits their bank.

The UK is the first leaver from the big customs-union/common market where we’ve lived for 35 years.

Starting now, we must decide many of our own, vital arrangements to “earn our living” and thus sleep dry and warm and keep eating – all without the accustomed help of the family home, fridge/freezer, etc.

UK governments, present and future, will discuss and negotiate agreements with other countries and the EU27 about fishing, food and agri-flows, truck transport, information on suspected and proven criminals, air travel, passports, tariffs on cars and car parts, pharmaceuticals, to name just a few.

Every country we talk to will try to get itself a better deal than they currently have with UK-in-the-EU.

Our need for early agreement will encourage most of them to push for the “adjustments” they want and could not get from the EU.

Yet when you leave a (family) group to go your own way, you lose some bargaining power and you meet all your own costs.

The next three, or seven (or 17?) years will show how well successive UK governments can wheel and deal for the country and make some of the broad gains desired by 52 per cent of the voters in June 2016.

I really look forward to reading a full list of the early benefits of Brexit from any one of the 17.4 million who backed it.

– Neil Forrest, Mitcheldean.