I love Paris, Rome and Berlin. But I won’t reach for my hanky over Brexit

WELL, how are you bearing up? Did you bury your face in your hands when the moment came? Did teary rivulets run through your fingers?

I hear those really getting into character wore black for the occasion. There was talk of candlelit vigils.

They say we never truly know how we will react to traumatic events until they are upon us – and now this one is. We really are leaving our political and economic union with 27 other countries, including Estonia, Slovenia and others with capital cities and native tongues many of us would struggle to identify.

We are leaving France, Germany and Italy too. Well, not so much leaving as no longer being members of the same club. We will still bump into them at parties. We will always have Paris – as the French will always have London, Edinburgh… even Weston-super-Mare if they want it.

I am sorry for the flippancy. I know many hankies have work yet to do. Yes, for those, like me, whose preference was for the UK to remain part of the European Union, this week’s triggering of Article 50 was always going to be a thoughtful time. I would not take issue with European Council president Donald Tusk’s analysis that Wednesday was ‘not a happy day’.

But are we really plunged into the pits? It is early days but I cannot see my resigned sigh registering on any meaningful scale of grief. The readings I have taken suggest I am still capable of laughter.

‘Today, the PM will take the UK over a cliff,’ declared Nicola Sturgeon on Brexit Day and an involuntary giggle squeaked out of my person.

It’s the way she tells them. Miss Sturgeon’s entire career has been dedicated to pushing Scotland over just such a precipice.

‘What is happening today does represent something of a leap in the dark,’ she told the BBC. Badum-tish! ‘The Prime Minister still can’t answer basic questions about what Brexit will mean.’

Oh, do stop Nicola, there are people trying to mourn. Who would ever have imagined our own FM as the whoopee cushion at the funeral?

There was cheer to be had, too, in the grandstanding hysteria of some of the Twitter ravings. ‘One of the saddest days in the last 200 years of British political history,’ chuntered Swiss-born author and chin-stroker Alain de Botton. Really? There were world wars in that time. Switzerland seems to have bumbled along OK at arm’s length of the EU.

Another Twitter user emoted thus: ‘Every time my nine-year old asks a question about Brexit I start crying when I explain.’

Is there, then, something the dry-eyed among us are missing? Or are we simply made of sterner stuff than the political snowflakes inconsolable over changes in our trade and reciprocal arrangements with other European nations?

Well, I suppose it helps that some of us have stared down the barrel of more devastating blunderbusses. In 2014, the UK faced an existential threat. Scots like me, with roots in more than one of the Union’s nations, lived with the prospect of losing their very citizenship of the land they called home. Somewhere up the road, we still might.

HOW odd London would have felt to us in such a scenario. Those buildings, the iconic landmarks of our Britishness – Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace – suddenly estranged from us, mere tourist hot spots in a foreign land.

Do any of us seriously believe that the Champs-Élysées, the Brandenburg Gate or the Trevi Fountain will seem any different to us as we take our leave of the EU? And, if we do, isn’t it time we dropped the grief-signalling long enough to consider the facts?

We are, against the better judgment of many, getting out of a political arrangement. For those who enjoy discourse on this kind of thing, the debate on the rights and wrongs of that decision will rage for decades.

But the essence of our relationships with these European countries will change little, if at all. France is and will remain the place where I spent a year as a student, travelling widely and loving it – while discovering for the first time in my life what it really felt like to miss home, to miss Britain.

When next I see the Eiffel Tower, I know I will gasp again at its magnificence. The national motto – Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité – will still be glorious; the traffic around the Arc de Triomphe bananas. Nothing changes between me and France.

The foothills of the Tramuntana mountains in Majorca will remain my special place in Spain. A Unesco World Heritage Site since 2011, the place is part of me. I will be back there in a few weeks and Brexit will be the last thing on my mind.

Berlin, Barcelona, Rome, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Krakow… so many great European cities I can hardly wait to see again. Ljubljana, Riga, Vilnius … undiscovered treasures still, but then, no one is taking them away.

There are consequences to defeat in politics, and in referendums, these can be weighty. But, like children stamping their feet when the world doesn’t turn their way, the shrill Brexit mourners are not yet focused on consequences. They are focused on making a scene.