What I would always have liked is a passport that said ‘Europe’. To have been a citizen of a fabulous country that stretched from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, and from inside the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean. A country that included Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona, Berlin, London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Vienna and many other great cities. A country that included the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Sierra Nevada, the Pindus, and the Carpathians.
Why would I swap that dream for citizenship of a tiny, wet, little country that has no good snowboarding, where you can only swim in the sea a few weeks a year, and where you need to wear oilskins to go sailing?
Far from seeing the European Union as a co-operation for mutual benefit, the British have viewed the whole thing more like a war. The talk has always been of ‘fighting’ for British interests, rather than working together to promote everyone’s interests. That’s not an attitude that promotes happiness, nor one that will make the world a better place.
Unfortunately, following the events of Friday 9th December 2011, the dream seems further away. If Britain leaves the EU I’d like to emigrate, not to Spain where I now live, nor to France where I once lived, but to Europe.
How many others out there would like to be Europeans? Leave your comments, please.