JONATHAN YOUNG WRITES: If you fly out from Bournemouth to the eastern Med on a clear day, as I did recently, the Island falls away below you from west to east like a page in an atlas.

Barely 15 minutes later, having reached cruising altitude, the Channel ports — on both sides — come into view, the tiny dots of ferries, picked out by their wakes, getting people and lorries from here to there and back again on their never-ending shuttle. From 36,000ft it looks like no distance.

Most of us don’t remember a time when it was any different, and it’s tempting to imagine that it never was and never will be.

You’d need to be well into your eighties to recall the days when lives were being lost attacking and defending beachheads, shipping was being torpedoed, the Channel Islands were under Nazi occupation and our own Island was staring down the barrel of Hitler’s guns.

Quite how Britain dodged that bullet is one for the historians, but it’s a matter of record that afterwards the countries of Western Europe made determined efforts to bind themselves together and live in peace.

The centrepiece of that effort was called the European Economic Community. The belief was, and is, that peaceful trade and open borders generate wealth and can defeat xenophobia and destructive nationalism — and, in particular, the special brand of hatred sometimes reserved for one’s nearest neighbours.

The UK came late to that party but we’ve now been central players for 40 years. The EU, as it now is, has evolved — not necessarily very cleverly, but the intentions, the motives, are just the same, certainly on the part of leaders such as Merkel and Macron, whose countries lost more than we ever did through conflict and will again if Europe descends once more into tribal violence. And now we appear intent on leaving.

On the basis of absurd and dishonest promises, with the race card repeatedly played, we are, by a narrow majority and give or take the odd parliamentary spasm, going to turn our backs on Europe, unlearn the lessons of history and then, I daresay, blame anyone but ourselves for the resulting problems.

They are problems so wide-ranging and severe that even Brexit’s sober apologists, such as Phillip Hammond, have given up pretending it’s not going to be bad, it’s just a question of how bad.

As we drift apart from our foreign partners, and the billions Boris Johnson and Co promised for the NHS don’t materialise, who do you think will accept responsibility? Boris, or whoever’s pinched his place on the greasy pole? Not a chance.

Much more appealing to heap opprobrium on those we used to call friends and allies, who’ve had the temerity, with their visas and their import duties, to treat us as though we’re not in their club any more. When we’re not.

And when fishing quotas, and Gibraltar, and all the other things now settled through talking, flare up, what do we do? Send a gunboat? Great.

I voted Remain. I very much hope that one day, and the sooner the better, I get the chance to do so again, or perhaps to vote Return.

If I needed reminding that Europe’s too small a place to be squabbling amongst ourselves, then the 15 minutes’ flying time from The Needles to Calais — and on to Cyprus, a very hospitable EU country, by the way, as well as a warm one — served as the reminder.

But in truth I didn’t need reminding. I’m a student of recent European history.