The Brits were always too swashbuckling for Brussels

It was with mixed feelings that I read that thousands of people will be attending a beach party to mark our departure from the European Union on October 31 at a seaside village near Amsterdam. This will involve “sitting in a deck chair with Dutch chips, French wine and German beer, watching Britain as it closes itself off ”, according to the organiser, one Mr Toekook, who added spitefully: “It will be a nice goodbye to a good friend who is going on an exciting adventure, but is perhaps not too bright.”

On the one hand I felt pleased by this, seeing it as proof that Europe is no longer in denial about Brexit. On the other hand, there was the familiar flare of modernist superiority that anyone with an ounce of love for pop culture must have when they regard mainland Europe; not so much “If not for us, you’d be saluting the swastika, sonny!” but “If not for us, you’d be doing clog dances to oompah bands, mate!”

I don’t particularly feel proud of my country – it seems foolish to be proud of something one was born with, like

having green eyes – but I prefer it to most other countries, especially the European ones whose behaviour throughout the 20th century bears very little examination.

The way the French subjugated their poor empire long after we changed ours into Commonwealth chums is mind-boggling; did you know that in 1961 the Paris police killed between 100 and

300 pro-independence Algerian demonstrators? (It took them until 1998 to admit to it.) The French empire was outdone in murderousness by that of the Belgians, who were proud of their Human Zoos (living African adults and children exhibited in enclosures) right up to the Fifties. Belgium is now the seat of a new empire, of course – and they have the cheek to accuse us of pining for ours! It’s the EU that is steeped in nostalgia.

I suppose it’s all to do – as in our individual lives – with the yawning gap between what we think we are and what we really are. Make this a national thing and you have a recipe for misunderstanding which, as in our case, has now built irretrievably to a sundering of the European Union, too many cruel things having been said by both sides.

For many decades we’ve seen ourselves as mild-mannered and practical (a nation of stuffy shopkeepers, as a Frenchman once told us), while mainland Europe sees us as sex-mad and booze-crazed (a nation of slutty shot-drinkers). Either way, they’ve looked down their noses at us and found many willing allies among our number, like the ghastly Emma Thompson and her “cake-filled, misery-laden grey old island”.

To think that all the unpleasantness could have been avoided if only we’d listened to General de Gaulle! OK, so he fled to London to be a radio star, rather than stay in his own conquered country and lead the Resistance, but he knew his stuff when it came to European mindsets. All through the Sixties he vetoed our application to join the EEC, warning the fellow friendly

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion members that our joining would lead to the break-up of their union.

Knowing the British as he did – the only European leader who had lived among us – he knew what a long shot it was that a bunch of swashbuckling mavericks would knuckle down and roll over for the greater good.

We know that we are small. We don’t have delusions of grandeur. But we also know that we have done impressive things and we do mind that France and Germany – by virtue of being big – were so dumb that they thought they could treat us like Luxembourg.

As in many relationships, our membership of the EU was a case of mistaken identity; they thought we were finished and we thought they were the future. We were both wrong. Such unions may take years or even decades to unravel, but once they have, there’s no putting the cheese strings back in the tube.

Once we were seen as malleable – now we are seen as mad. I know which I prefer as we leave them behind, not waving us off but drowning on that docile Dutch beach.