... continent cut off. This week's issue of Nature includes a report on how two megaflooding events came to separate Britain irreversibly from the European continent.

That's the geology sorted, then, but I'm still grappling with the psychology, i.e. why Brits never ever see themselves as European. On the map of the world as seen from the UK, the Channel must have experienced a few more megafloods, making it wider than the Atlantic.

Funnily enough, the Guardian preferred to report an "old news" story (human origins in Africa confirmed) from the same issue of Nature instead of this one. Presumably, the idea that Britain was once linked to France is too much to swallow.