Crossing borders

This is not the best picture I'll ever take, but I did want to capture for the little Gs the engineering brilliance of being able to drive a car onto a train under the sea. It's easy to get blase about such things, but it really is fantastic.

We left our funny little Belgian seaside town bright and early on Saturday morning, drove the few kilometres to the tunnel and were back home again by lunch time.

Since leaving home the previous Sunday we had crossed several borders : UK-France-Belgium-Netherlands (a tiny bit)-Germany-France-Luxembourg-Belgium-France-UK. Most of these were marked by nothing more than a sign bearing the EU stars and country name by the side of the road. The France-Luxembourg crossing still had the vestiges of a customs check point, but mostly you could blink and miss them. The same currency worked in every country we stopped in (barring the UK, of course). The only time anybody asked to see our passports was as we checked in for the tunnel crossing back to the UK. It seems we are now alone in our obsession with our borders - no doubt because of our island status - but it did give us pause to reflect, particularly as so many of the borders we crossed have been so often contested and changed through history.

I don't really know what I'm trying to say, except that we are so very lucky that it is all so easy these days. And it really was all very easy. I hope this will just be the first of many such trips - and I hope I can bring my children up with a sense of their Europeanness, as well as their Britishness.