PARSNIPS FOR THE PARSON.

BRITAIN'S VEGETATIVE STATE.

19th century Smugglers landing brandy from France.

            We here in France are naturally sympathetic to the produce problems being experienced in Britain this spring. It seems supermarket fruit and vegetable shelves are bare, and panic-buying rampant. A woman was stopped at the checkout of one market trying to buy a hundred cucumbers. She claimed to be a personal trainer who needed them to make health drinks for clients, but everyone confidently expected that they'd soon have been offered at stratospheric prices on eBay.

             Britain was, of course, until recently part of the European Union, which supplied almost all its fresh fruit and vegetables. But continental growers have stopped thinking of the UK as a customer, given the new taxes and restrictions imposed as part of Brexit.  “We’ve been warning about this moment for the past year,” said an officer of its National Farmers Union, with that very British gloomy satisfaction at being proved right. (Told you so!) “We’ve been completely reliant on imports. But a lot of glasshouses that would be growing the tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and aubergines are sitting there empty because the growers in Europe simply couldn’t take the risk to plant them with the crops, not thinking they’d get the returns from the marketplace."

I won't say that we on the other side of the Channel actually gloat over the plight of our former neighbours. On the other hand, it's natural to recall No.98 of de Rochefoucauld's Reflections or Sentences and Moral Maxims ,ie "Dans l'adversité de nos meilleurs amis, nous trouvons toujours quelque chose qui ne nous déplaît pas" - usually translated as "In the adversity of our best friends we always find something not exactly displeasing" or, more simply, "It isn't enough to succeed. Your best friend must fail."

So what now? Already some smart operators in Normandy and Brittany must be thinking about how earlier generations dealt with the problem before the EU existed.

Some will remember the French onion sellers known as Onion Johnnies, about 1500 of whom used to roam the country lanes of Britain. Wearing black and striped jerseys, with a Gauloise Disque Blue glued to the corner of their mouths, they pedaled bicycles festooned with plaited strings of onions. Most came from the Breton port of Roscoff, the soil around which produces a particularly aromatic and dense onion, with a light pink flesh perfectly suited to cooking. The trade peaked around 1929, and dwindled after the war, but given the present incentive, ambitious Bretons may be dusting off their bikes and wondering what their grandparents did with their sweaters and berets.

Selling onions from a bike is the lower end of the cross-channel trade. At the other extremity were the smugglers of the Napoleonic era, often local land-owners, even aristocracy, who enjoyed giving a fingers-up to HM's Customs and Excise. Rudyard Kipling called them, respectfully, "the Gentlemen."

If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse's feet,

Don't go drawing back the blind or looking in the street.

Them that ask no questions isn't told a lie.

Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by.

              Five and twenty ponies

              Trotting through the dark -

             Brandy for the parson, 'baccy for the clerk,

             Laces for a lady; letters for a spy,

And watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by!

            Back then, it was cognac and cigars; how long before it's cauliflowers and courgettes?