Long before I was able to come to Carlisle I had to go to Cardiff.

Cymru had to precede Cumbria. Leek land had to come before Lakeland.

It is 25 years this summer since I first visited the Welsh capital. I was spending a year there on a postgrad journalism course and went looking for somewhere to live.

It was a much more pleasant and attractive city than I’d expected, or than many outsiders expect. In that respect it was rather like Carlisle and Belfast.

All the signs were bilingual, which gave the place an exotic, cosmopolitan atmosphere. You feel as if you’ve travelled somewhere.

However I remember the bitterness of the first words I ever heard from a Cardiff resident, a taxi driver.

He asked me where I was from, and when I told him he said: “I don’t mind the Irish, don’t mind the Scots. Hate the English.”

That fervent anti-Englishness was regularly encountered. I of course wasn’t a victim of it ,but many of the other students on the course were English and found it uncomfortable.

What puzzled me, though, was how resentment of England didn’t translate into political separatism.

When the devolution referendums were held in 1997, Scotland overwhelmingly voted for a Scottish parliament. Wales only narrowly approved a Welsh assembly.

The assembly now has widespread support and there’s no chance it could be abolished. But it almost didn’t happen.

The Welsh language is far more widely used in Wales than Scottish Gaelic is in Scotland. And yet nationalism is much stronger just north of Carlisle than it is just west of Chester.

There is some anti-English sentiment in Scotland but more often it seems a kind of cheerful rivalry. In Wales anti-Englishness it is much more bitter.

Yet it works both ways. Some English people are happy to sneer at Wales.

I once had a girlfriend who lived in Wrexham. Someone asked me: “She’s not Welsh, is she?”

When I told him she was originally from Yorkshire, he said: “Thank goodness.”

I can’t imagine anyone saying something like that about the Scots or Northern Irish without getting in all kinds of trouble, or even being accused of inciting racial hatred.

On the day of the 1992 general election, The Sun warned its readers against supporting “a bald, ginger, Welsh bloke with two Ks in his name” – as if the fact that Neil Kinnock was Welsh was a reason not to vote Labour. I doubt it would dare to be so offensive towards another nationality.

Boris Johnson looks set to become prime minister and a no-deal Brexit is perhaps four months away. He is hated in Scotland in much the same way that Margaret Thatcher was. An independent Scotland will inevitably follow.

The prospect of an independent Wales has always seemed more far-fetched. Until now.

When I lived there, Wales on Sunday once carried an unusual front page. Normally it featured Tom Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Shirley Bassey or weather girl Sian Lloyd, seemingly on a rota basis.

But one Sunday it bore a fluttering Welsh flag and the headline “A Free Wales!” It claimed to have found widespread support for independence.

But it wasn’t to be trusted. It came from a phone-in poll. Only those most exercised by the whole issue were likely to call.

Maybe now views are shifting. A march in Cardiff organised by pro-independence group Yes Cymru has drawn a far larger crowd than anyone expected.

The former Labour leader in Wales, Carwyn Jones, is against independence but finds that “people who I wouldn’t have thought” now say it’s worth considering.

He puts it down to disenchantment with the politicians in Westminster, which is understandable. Watching the TV debate between the Tory leadership contenders, I felt like I was watching The Addams Family. The scariest part was that one of them is going to be prime minister.

But could Wales go it alone? Some may say it’s too small, but it has 3.125 million people. That’s more than Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – and far more than Iceland, Luxembourg and Cyprus.

Others dismiss it as sentimental patriotism rather than economic practicality, and argue that Wales would be poorer outside the UK.

Then that’s exactly the case with Brexit. It hasn’t stopped sentimental English people voting for it.