I also had problems with my tax status because I was away from home for so long.”By the end of my stint as an Eurocommuter, I was begging them to bring me back to England. I still had to make up the lost hours in my working week.”I don’t think that Eurocommuting is a long-term option. I had a partner in London and all my friends and family were there. I also have an identical twin brother, John, and we are quite close.”I really enjoyed Eurocommuting because I loved Paris and I had a fantastic time there.

That said, my relationship in London broke up because of the strain of the travelling My friends started drifting away too. There are only so many special events that can take place on the weekend.”After Paris, I was sent to Belgium and then Luxembourg I commuted between Luxembourg and London for three years. It was supposed to be three months but it stretched on and on. I stayed in a hotel for six months and then I got my own apartment.”I did start to feel that I was not in control of my own life. It was stressful trying to keep things going in two places at once. Every Friday, I would be travelling for six to eight hours just to get home, and then the same again on Monday.

(Blunderbuss Antiques) (Gordon’s Medals) (Westminster Collection)’Items from special forces are expensive’John Henscher, from Birmingham, began collecting militaria as a teenager “I’ve always had an interest in this material. I ended up staying in Paris for eight months and commuting back to my home in London every weekend. The company paid for me to have an apartment in Paris, but I wanted to go home on a regular basis. On Monday morning, I would be flying to Luxembourg, on Wednesday it would be Paris.

Then a contract came up and I needed to be in Paris for several weeks.”It was my first experience of living out of a suitcase. When I joined ADP as an IT consultant, I thought I was going to be living full-time in the UK. But then the company started getting lots of contracts abroad and I had to do a lot of travelling. He was an Eurocommuter for four years for a data-processing company, ADP, based in Sussex.”I never expected to be a Eurocommuter. That said, we sat down and decided that we could manage on less income and have a happier life if I lived at home full-time.”Mr Jaggee will still be pitching for lucrative international contracts, but in future the whole family will stick together.’It was very stressful trying to keep things going in two places’Stephen Jones, 38, is a vice-president at Deutsche Bank and lives in London. I had to taper off my foreign assignments for the sake of my family life.” His wife, Helen, is relieved too “She knows that I have to go where the work is.