IT'S been some time since I last visited Germany. But I suspect very little has changed since the 1970s when, for three consecutive summers, I travelled to the Rhineland.

Staying in a small village near Koblenz, the holidays were one long essen und trinken. It's true, I tell you - everything seemed to revolve around the next meal.

It was eat, eat, eat. Five or six fried eggs for breakfast, soup and sauerkraut at midday, assorted confections late afternoon... and then, a couple of hours later, the really serious business of dinner, probably featuring a weiner schnitzel the size of the Great Barrier Reef.

I rapidly became worn out. The gluttony came round so quickly that before you could say "mittagessen" it was almost time for "kaffee-trinken".

Ah yes, kaffee-trinken. For the uninitiated, the latter basically consists of people devouring cakes the size of miniature tower blocks. But instead of successive rows of windows in these sugary skyscrapers, there were alternating layers of fruit, cream or both.

Kaffee-trinken. The fastest route to the coronary care ward, believe me.

Thoughts of the Lorelei, Father Rhine and towels on deckchairs came to mind recently as I read an article about Germany's conversion to the euro. With stereotypical thoroughness, the Germans abruptly dropped the mark and took a great step into the fiscal black hole on New Year's Day.

Unlike the French - we shall come to them - our neighbours across the North Sea were forced to change overnight. Before the corpse was cold, the poor old mark was buried and usurped by the euro. Orders.

In fact, I am told the Germans, with their legendary Teutonic efficiency, grieved for a while and then held hands and leapt into the unknown.

Meanwhile, the French, with a more flexible deadline at the end of February, are quietly mourning and shrugging their woes away.

Oh, yes. Just in case you're wondering where this is going, just chew this one over. Within a very short time, Tony Blair will be spending millions of taxpayers' pounds to persuade us to make a similar leap of faith... saying "yes" to a currency with no track record whatsoever.

Putting aside matters of sovereignty for a moment - the most pertinent aspect of this whole issue - I have yet to see a single prominent, respected financial expert say a good word for the euro. Bland statements a-plenty but no one has yet said: "Why yes, take all my money and convert it into euros - I have complete confidence."

Anyway, look at it from the betting point-of-view - would you gamble your life savings on such a harebrained notion? Are the Government's front bench members falling over themselves to convert their pounds in anticipation of a "yes" vote in some future referendum? Is Gordon Brown going to lead by example?

However, back to the French. My spies across The Channel report that our Gallic cousins are trs hacked-off about losing their beloved franc. Among other things, it's to do with something called heritage - a concept that is, for all we know, now illegal in Britain under the new "xenophobia" legislation.

First of all, the focus of national regret has become the inescapable fact that the new money has great rip-off potential. In numerical terms, the change to the euro is not a clear-cut transaction - one euro is a messy 6.56 francs and the need to round prices up or down makes everyone suspicious. Absolutely.

The huge hypermarkets, with their stranglehold on the nation's retailing, have been gung-ho about the euro for weeks and the foyers are gaudy with banners proclaiming their enthusiasm. The post offices are also bedecked with euro posters and the clerks shove flashy laser-card converters into customer's hands.

Pause and reflect for a moment. Cast your mind back to the changeover to metrication in the early 1970s. Now, were prices rounded up or down back then? It's time to play Who Wants To Be A Euronaire?

The first euro coins, in "kits" worth 100 francs were issued by the banks just before Christmas but good news on the euro is hard to find. There is a general sense of futile regret, of an illicit passion being sadly and dutifully stifled, of people tearing themselves out of a lingering, farewell embrace. Such is the sense of loss for the beloved franc...

King Jean le Bon minted the franc in 1360 to pay a huge ransom of 12 tons of gold that had been demanded by King Edward III after the French monarch had been captured at the Battle of Poitiers.

Jean had been allowed home on parole to raise the money. Worried about France's then inflation-prone currency, the English were demanding fine gold coins for payment, so the royal monetarists invented a new piece. They dubbed it le franc.

The name was clever, with two senses.

One was "free" - an allusion to the King's newly-bought franchise, or liberty, and the other was the Frankish nation. But Jean failed to amass the full sum, turned himself over and died in London.

Down the centuries, the franc adopted many guises as wars and international crises made their mark - no pun intended. From my point of view, speaking as a regular traveller across the Channel, I must say the franc was a perfect currency - and especially in recent times when up until its demise, it exchanged at a comfy 10-plus to the pound.

As for the French, it must have been a tear-stained farewell. For the franc was certainly the most beautiful coin ever minted. Francs, so gorgeously heavy, so brilliantly silvery, were the last currency in the world to really look and feel like real money.

All the glory of France was expressed in that little disc of metal.

Embossed on the value side with the words Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, and on the other, with the figure of Marianne, symbol of revolutionary freedom, it reminded every French citizen of the national identity.

All of this brings us back to the British attitude to the euro.

The Germans and the French, for vastly different reasons, have decided to embark on the greatest monetary gamble in history.

Absolutely anything could happen during the next year or so, but I suspect that the Government's oft-repeated mantra about the "five conditions" is but a smokescreen. Tony Blair will try to bounce us into acceptance at the euro's first sign of life.

Vast sums will be spent on advertising and there will be so much Whitehall spin that New Labour flunkeys will be flying about like so many autogyros.

But it's so unnecessary. For the pound is stable, Britain is still one of the leading financial centres of the globe and the world's businessmen love our competitive industrial climate.

So do we really want to upset the applecart and do the bidding of a handful of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels? No.

We must keep the pound. And perhaps we should, for once, look to the Europeans... if only to learn from their folly.