As the UK election results played to an end and leaders stepped up to podiums to resign - numerous other little ceremonies were taking place all over France.

At the mairies in all our villages, the maires, sashed and solemn, poured drinks for all after a few dignified words.

Glasses were raised in a toast to 'Victory'.

Seventy years ago, the Allies of the Second World War formally accepted the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany's armed forces.

VE Day (Victory in Europe) has been celebrated ever since, and nowhere more strongly than in France, the trampled land of so many invaders.

Around the same time of the surrender, across the globe in San Francisco, representatives from 50 countries met to look beyond the carnage to carve out a means of avoiding another world war.

They tentatively began drawing up the foundation of the United Nations.

The dream then, soon to be augmented by the Common Market and the EEC, was of a united Europe and beyond.

But particularly of a Europe where old hatreds and rigid borders would no longer fuel land grabs or nurse the tensions that explode into war.

Although the horrors of the war years were never far away, there was a fervent, desperate desire, demand, for peace and unity.

Europe, the graveyard, was to emerge a true linked landmass where national identity would be preserved but with the common purpose of the common good.

Nationalism in its most tainted form, as witnessed in Italy, Spain and Germany, would be starved of the resentment, which fed it.

Nations would merge in both economic and cultural empathy and so would be born a continual future of peace and prosperity.

The expansion over the years of those initial simple, even Utopian, ideals, reached into every aspect of our lives.

In my teens, my convent boarding school boasted a language laboratory so advanced it was visited by other schools.

In tiered rows we learned French, Spanish and German to be capable of integration in this new Europe we would stride confidently across for work and pleasure.

Latin still remained, but now used as a new exciting tool to explain the development of language and the romance of its forms.

There was a real feeling of casting off rigid adherence to one country and one culture.

A glorious, if slightly frightening, expansion of both mental and physical boundaries until they ceased to exist.

And, although passionate and proud of my own country, Ireland, while being schooled in the land that had shackled it, I equally yearned to be European.

Many of us did if taught by enlightened, optimistic teachers and urged forward by parents who'd seen the brutal consequences of xenophobia played to an unimaginable end.

Perhaps that's why so many of my generation take easily to transplantation and do it neither as conquerors nor reluctant settlers.

And perhaps it was why, sitting under my French beams, glancing out on olive and fig trees as temperatures climbed in the 20s, I watched the election results with both detachment and mild apprehension.

There was a supreme irony to realise that down the road glasses were being raised in memory of a day that was to finally end all the divisions now seemingly again before us.

As Scotland turned yellow and appeared to strain at the very border; the Tories were returned with no impediment to implementing a referendum, which could see the UK out of the EU.

This morning French media were obsessed with both the SNP rout and the referendum. Obsessed with how the two in their different ways would affect all our joint endeavours in a supposedly fluid Europe.

Already threatened by terrorism; in economic meltdown; increasingly right or far right leaning; France is shaky and seeks a return to stability.

It does not need or want its neighbours to be engaged in any form of turmoil that could change the hard won status quo.

Ironically again, the SNP leadership has stated clearly that they see the EU as part of their future, but that leads the French to fret in print as to how that would work if the referendum vote went badly.

Unless of course Scotland was independent and then...and so it goes on.

Meanwhile many ex-pats are already planning their exit strategy if the UK withdraws following the 2017 in/out vote and the two-year notice period.

Even before David Cameron had had his audience with the Queen, they were penning their fears on the online forums; fearing for their pensions, their health care, their rights.

Intelligent, well thought out reassurance from better-read members has so far done little to quell the growing panic...years in advance.

And lurking like jackals in the shadows are the increasingly violent and growing far-right groups which are infesting every member EU state.

UK?

So it is little wonder that the results unfolding through a sultry French night were watched from France with such intensity.

For all around seem to be intent on separation of some kind. And this hoped for united Europe is once again lurching towards divided, squabbling, dangerous territory.

Or perhaps we only momentarily dreamt it was ever otherwise.