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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 9^th 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.

I’ve just delivered the manuscript of my latest book, Be Your Own Personality Coach. Well, that’s an old-fashioned way of putting it. I just clicked here in Spain and a few minutes later my editor in London was reading it. The internet has certainly changed the writer’s life.

It’s been a fascinating book to research and write but also a tremendous struggle because I’ve been working inside day after day, including weekends, while everyone else has been on the beach. What I need is a truly rugged sandproof and waterproof laptop with a screen that can be read in bright sunlight. Until that comes I’m stuck indoors. So I celebrated immediately by going for a swim and that set me thinking once again about the possible connection between the pleasure of swimming naked and unconscious memories of the womb.

Having waded through quite a lot of research I’m convinced the first nine months before birth must make a significant contribution to personality differences, especially as it’s proven that foetuses have a memory of sorts at 22 weeks. Wombs aren’t all the same nor are births. I’d love to hear from anybody who thinks they can remember life in the womb, or who has been through some sort of rebirthing experience. Click on the Comments button or send me an email.