In my house, I wear the Chancellor's trousers

When my wife was leaning towards a pale green, I had to deploy ruthless filibustering techniques

As the Prime Minister reassures us that the draft constitution agreed at the European Union summit last week suggests no threat to Britain's sovereign rights, and as the fuss about the euro rumbles on, it is worth reflecting that no decisions are as significant as those we take for ourselves.

The jobs we take, the friends we choose, the homes we buy, the people we marry, our instinctive acts of courage or cowardice, of selflessness or selfishness, all that is the real essence of life, not whether or not we replace the pound with euros, dollars or shiny chunks of petrified wood. And yet over none of those truly life-changing decisions do we dither one thousandth as much as our policy-makers have dithered over the issue of European integration.

Which is not to say that Europe isn't important, and is not to say that the rest of us don't dither. We all apply our own parochial equivalents of the Chancellor's fabled five tests for judging the economic climate for entry into the eurozone.

In our house, for example, we conducted debates stretching into the small hours on the subject of what colour to paint the hall. Sometimes, when my wife, Jane, was leaning towards a pale green, I even had to deploy ruthless filibustering techniques. And we didn't just consult colour charts before making our choice, we consulted the chief Sibyl in her cave on the lower slopes of Mount Parnassus. The decision took a month. We opted for hay, if you're interested, from the Farrow and Ball range.

I suspect that most of us are the same; making swift, bold decisions about the important stuff, but deliberating for ever over the fripperies. Maybe that's why we tend to run our lives better than governments tend to run the country. At half-term, as I prepared to join Jane and the children who were holidaying in Sardinia, the thought occurred to me that I have remortgaged houses without the mental pendulum swinging as it did during my selection of a book to read on the beach.

But then another thought occurred, that since one's perception of a holiday can stand or fall according to the quality of the book one takes, and since one's perception of an entire year can depend on the quality of one's summer holiday, the choice of reading matter really does merit some euro-style attention.

Even now I think back gloomily to a fortnight in Portugal, 14 years ago or so, the gloom brought on by the recollection of taking the wrong book. It was The Glittering Prizes, by Frederick Raphael; an acclaimed novel, I know, but I loathed it. I can't remember why, but I know that I did. And that I felt bitterly resentful towards my girlfriend, who was getting along fabulously with Margaret Forster.

It is essential to make friends with the book or books one takes on holiday, arguably even more essential than remaining friends with the friends one takes on holiday. Which brings me back to Sardinia, and a late-night discussion - with our close mates Ali and Chris, with whom we were sharing a rented house - about the merits of the book Jane was reading, Any Human Heart, by William Boyd.

She loved it, she said. It was the diary of a fictional man born in 1906 into whose long life were woven encounters with lots of real people, among them Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Picasso, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Ian Fleming. "That sounds to me," snorted Chris, who hadn't read it, "like literary masturbation." "What the hell is that supposed to mean?" shrieked Jane. A narky argument raged, with Ali and I making encouraging and sometimes alarmed noises, like spectators at a prize fight. Admittedly, a considerable amount of Chianti had been taken. And we all laughed about it in the morning. But the episode clearly showed that a relationship with a holiday book is more emotionally charged than with a book read at home.

And those emotions extend, too, to the books others are reading. While no kind of literary snob at home, I get quite affronted beside foreign swimming pools, watching those who have limply succumbed to the holiday-book cliché: reading Captain Corelli's Mandolin on a Greek island, for instance, or Walking Over Lemons in rural Spain. That said, I sheepishly broke my own rule in Australia earlier this year, buying Picnic At Hanging Rock in the very shadow of the eponymous outcrop.

Normally, my holiday-book rules are sacrosanct. And one of them, of course, is no hardbacks, which is why I am so relieved that we took our annual foreign holiday before the publication on Saturday of Harry Potter and the Sixty-Four Million Words. On which subject, when JK Rowling next embarks on an interminable saga featuring betrayals and illusions, resourceful goodies and preening baddies, not to mention golden snitches, she should perhaps invent a new hero and call it Tony Blair and the European Dilemma.

b.viner@independent.co.uk