On: Sovereignty, farming and fishing: Iceland votes on its future with the EU

A nation at the ballot box today, and the question printed as if it were one question - Europe, yes or no - when I suspect every voter is answering a different one at their own table.

The paper quotes a farmer, third of his line to work the same soil. He had begun to hope: better prices for meat and milk, debts no longer the price of holding land. Now he cannot tell whether his future belongs to his island or to a larger parliament he has never seen. I know something of running a farm while the men debate elsewhere. The cow does not inquire after treaties. She wants milking at dawn, the milk wants a fair price, and the fair price depends on rules made in rooms the milker never enters.

What moves me is the cause. Not trade, not fish - not first, anyway - but the temper of a great republic across the water, making threats toward Greenland. I feel an old resentment stir: small nations learn their geography from the ambitions of large ones. When the neighbor’s dog grows loud, one considers fences, and a fence shared with friends costs less than a wall raised alone.

Here is what I would put to them, were any near my pen: who in your household cast no ballot, yet must live inside the result longest? The children on those farms, for one. The fisherman’s wife who keeps the accounts, next - she knows what a quota does long before the minister does. Sovereignty is a fine word for a monument; supper is the finer test of it. A nation may be free and still go hungry, or joined to others and eat well. The ballot cannot settle which. Only the ledger, kept honestly at the kitchen table, can say.