SHAKESPEARE ONCE described the English Channel as a sort of moat to guard England against the "envy of less happier lands." Now they've built the Channel Tunnel, and there goes the neighborhood.

"This blessed plot, this earth, this realm" so lauded by King Henry V is now chockablock with curry houses, pomme frits and BMWs, illegal immigrants, waiters who speak no known language and Germans who grab all the deck chairs around the pool.

I would have thought nature was sending out a very clear message when it split the British Isles away from all those Gauls and Huns and Etruscans and shifted them a few miles west toward the saner shores of America 8,000 years or so ago.

(Admittedly, it left us slightly more exposed to the influences of the Golden Arches, Homer Simpson and Jerry Springer, but as infections these are as sniffles and hay fever to the plague and crotch rot that are Europe.)

Had England remained, as Shakespeare put it, "this precious stone set in the silver sea," the less happy lands like France and Germany and Belgium could have been held at bay. That notion went down the tubes when the Channel was breached, or perhaps undermined by the wretched tunnel.

Now that the doors beneath the sea are ajar, we find ourselves awash in alien ideas and concepts, the most ghastly of which to my mind is something called the euro.

The euro is a form of money, the forthcoming common currency of what started off as the European Common Market but has now become a conglomeration known as the European Union, which for unity rather resembles a dozen or so pissed-off ferrets in a gunny sack.

As of the end of this year, the French and the Germans and the Italians and the rest are going to have to give up their francs and Deutschemarks and lire and other foreign foo-foos and start paying for their toadstools and blitzkrieg goodies and Chianti rotgut in euros.

So far, Britain has been spared this nonsense, but politics being as they are there seems a certain inevitability about it - and based on my rather unfortunate difficulties with things monetary in the past, I am filled with about 127 euros' worth of dread.

It started during my days as a combat correspondent in Vietnam. First off, I find it difficult to take any currency known as the "dong" seriously. It also was known as the "piastre," which at least was free of sexual imagery.

Then there was the matter of calculating the ever-changing exchange rate between U.S. dollars, several mountains' worth of the Vietnamese official and black market dong, and the American military's Monopoly money, the MPC (military payment certificates).

As luck would have it, I got shot up, which freed me shortly thereafter to head for England, where I landed in a nightmare of pounds sterling, shillings, farthings, tuppence, tanners and pence, with assorted nicknames such as guineas, quid and bob.

For the next two years, I lived on the little red 10-shilling (half-pound) notes that I insisted on being paid in because they were each worth about $1.20, the closest thing I could get to a dollar bill and some peg for my fiscal sanity.

Then, just as I got this all sorted in my head, Britain went off LSD ("L" for pounds, "S" for shillings and "D" for pence, from the old coin, the dinar) and adopted decimal currency - the stuff Americans, including me, grew up with.

So now I was left with converting decimal British money into LSD, then into U.S. dollars and cents. Working from a base of $2.40 to the pound, I found myself operating with a margin of error of roughly plus - or minus - 26 percent.

I was either reasonably well off or on the verge of abject poverty. I was never sure which.

Anyway, I have long since become accustomed to and comfortable with my British pounds and pence, with Queen Elizabeth II's profile on the banknotes and coins, and I do not look joyfully upon the prospect of exchanging all that for some funny money dreamed up by a bunch of kirsch-swigging bureaucrats in Brussels.

Plus I've just discovered that one euro is today worth about 85 U.S. cents. Now how am I supposed to convert that into good old English dosh? The reason I am sitting here writing this plaint instead of out smashing atoms or something is that I failed mathematics at dear auld Duke U.

While I wait to see what Britain's euro fate is, I find myself almost feeling sorry for the French - almost, if not quite. The Frenchies cook dreadful food, they eat toadstools or mushrooms (you never know, do you?) and they can't fight a world war to save their lives.

Now they are getting to ditch their franc at the year's end and replace it with more than 100 billion bucks' worth of euros, all to be delivered to the nation's 47,000 banks and post offices, just in time to make a shambles of paying the Christmas bills.

To get the money to the banks, says one union official, "they're talking about armored trains, armored cars, military bases being requisitioned..." And the finance minister says the police, the gendarmerie and the army are going to be mobilized.

It sounds as if the French are going on a war footing. If their previous war record is anything to go by, France should be broke by January 3.

Now I'm told that to get their own euros into the bank tills, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg are thinking about calling on their armies for help. I didn't know Luxembourg even had an army. It's got about enough space for 37 pup tents.

That's my view of this fiscal fiasco, for what it's worth. Which should be about two euros.

Thought for the Week: Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which you can die.

"Notes From A Tangled Webb" is syndicated by: