BRUSSELS: It was one of those moments that seem to sum everything up: I was in Brussels and on the phone to my native Sheffield, ordering a gift. The chatty bloke with the familiar accent asked me what I did over there. "Well,"I said, "I write a lot about the European Union."
"Oh," he answered, with slow, withering Yorkshire sarcasm, "riveting". No one needs polling evidence to know that most Brits dislike the EU, mistrust it, are bored by it and know little about it.
Occasionally they are beaten by Danes or Swedes but usually they are at the bottom of the Euroclass in all categories: least likely to join the single currency, to trust the European commission or parliament; and highly unlikely to vote yes in a referendum on the EU constitution - with or without Peter Mandelson to help.
But here's the surprising thing - and one of the strongest impressions I will take away after four-and-half-years in this job: despite profound hostility and apathy at home, fed by a corrosive combination of the EU's very real faults, media demonization and government timidity - the UK is largely getting its way in Europe's changing union of states and peoples. Mandelson is not about to arrive in enemy territory.
It's been true for a while that the EU no longer revolves round the old Franco-German axis. But May's "big bang" enlargement, a long-standing British goal that brought in 10 new members from Estonia to Malta, changed the dynamic for good. Poles, Slovaks and Cypriots don't defer to Paris or Berlin. (And, infuriating the French, they use the language of Shakespeare, not of Molihre.)
The row over the new president of the commission - running along the Old Europe/New Europe faultlines exposed by the Iraq crisis - demonstrated that clearly. "What we all now have to accept is we are operating in a Europe of 25, not a Europe of six or two or one," Downing Street gloated.
The impending decision to launch membership talks with Turkey promises further transformation - and a timely message to Muslims that they are not excluded from a "Christian club".
In the Netherlands, stalwart founder member of the club, mild Euroscepticism is no aberration. Dutchmen are fed up paying for bloated, trade-distorting subsidies for French farmers. Portugal's Jose Manuel Barroso, the new commission chief, will not be walking in the footsteps of Jacques Delors.
The constitution is sadly not the model of clarity and simplicity it was billed as being, but it does keep the key levers of power in the hands of national governments.
The dreaded "blueprint for tyranny" was always a tabloid and Tory fantasy; no one actually wanted the "federal superstate" Tony Blair boasted he had seen off. In the short term, the government did achieve its goals.
But if ever closer union is now little more than a pious aspiration, the new rules will - if the constitution ever comes into force - allow groups of integrationist-minded countries to forge ahead at their own pace. Europe may end up operating at many speeds, not two.
That may not be a big talking point in the Dog and Duck, but Europhiles fear Britain will be doomed to stay on the fringes as long as it remains outside Euroland and the Schengen passport- free zone - the two areas where millions of people are acquiring a tangible sense of the meaning of membership, and which the newcomers are keen to join.
In current economic conditions, prospects for UK euro membership are clearly poor: thus the importance attached to underlying structural reforms. Mandelson's mantra will be "delivery" and "efficiency" - and it will be intriguing to see what happens when he has to choose between Blair and Barroso over the commission's ability to promote growth, jobs and competitiveness across the union.
Arguments for UK withdrawal, in vogue after the low turnout and Eurosceptic gains in the European elections, ignore Britain's advantages as well as the web of trading, regulatory, environmental and political interests that link us to the continent.
Some 50 per cent of all national laws now begin life in Brussels and Strasbourg. Semi-detachment may be manageable - for a while. But quitting the club would reduce Britain to the status of Norway - obliged to follow EU rules but powerless to influence them.
Too many Brits, afflicted by what Chris Patten calls "self- contempt", still tend to see Europe as something inflicted on them by wily foreigners. But others fight their corners too: the French and Germans flouting budget deficit limits and protecting their agriculture and industry.
Few countries did not raise objections to the first draft of the constitution; the Spaniards and Poles battled as hard as Blair did to protect his impassable "red lines".
Little of this is known in Britain, certainly not to readers of the Sun and the Mail, with their nauseating diet of Europorkies, exaggerations and xenophobia. Upmarket, the Times and Telegraph are platforms for higher but no less destructive forms of scepticism.
Even the Guardian, if truth be told, is sometimes less than fascinated by some of the detail that makes up the big picture. The blunt-speaking man from Sheffield struck a familiar chord.
None of this is to say that there aren't serious problems with the EU (too big, too complicated, too remote, too little reform of the CAP, too damned hard to understand). If the European parliament, for example, is incapable of cleaning up its "gravy train" image, it will (almost) deserve the wrecking tactics Ukip has promised.
Blair came to office pledging to bring Britain to the heart of Europe. No honest observer can disagree that he is a more comfortable and influential player than his predecessors.
But he has dismally failed to bring Europe any closer to the hearts of Britons. One way to do that could be to tap into concerns about a unilateralist US by forging stronger EU foreign and defence policies - areas where the UK, ever the loyal Atlanticist, manages to be both deeply involved and extremely cautious.
For leftwing critics of the EU who dislike little Englanders of the right, pooling more sovereignty in Europe - to cooperate over the Balkans and the Middle East - is surely preferable to blindly doing Washington's bidding.
Trouble looms over the budget rebate. But even without the complications of that totemic issue, winning the constitutional referendum will require a far greater effort than Britain's pro- EU camp has ever made before.
The message, though, could be quite simple: unlovely and labyrinthine the EU may be, but after 30 years it is now enormously important to all our lives - and we're doing quite nicely thank you. -Dawn/The Guardian News Service.