Foxes, cheese, all that

This is not a French-bashing post.  A French-bashing post is, as any scholar of social history will tell you, a pole that existed in many villages during the Napoleonic wars to which suspected French spies or sympathisers (anyone smelling of garlic), was tied for their beating.  Today only a few exist as relics, historical curiosities and gallows for foreigners with beards.  Or for passing historians who cannot explain why the Napoleonic wars are called the Napoleonic wars when we sodding won!

Today, Britain has a much healthier relationship with the Continent, so good in fact that when teachers run off with under-age schoolgirls, France is the country they choose to flee to.  Amazing that you can get to 30 years of age, be a teacher and yet still not capable of basic research such as Googling ‘what do they do to peados in prison?’ followed by ‘What countries do not have an extradition treaty with Britain?’.  Of course, not everyone can afford the ferry fare to Equador and, to be fair, Mr Forrest may have Googled ‘Equador’ after Googling ‘what do they do to peados in prison?’ and made an informed choice.

My favourite quote about the Continent comes from Peter Mandleson, who once remarked ‘don’t talk to me about the French social model…the whole country’s in flames’.  Glossing over the events of last summer, Lord M had a good point – maybe it’s because as we are always being told fuel is so much cheaper on the Continent, but bloody hell do they love a riot and petrol bombs!

Possibly then the ‘rather a lot’ tax on fuel is intended to make rioting too expensive for the classes that want to riot, traditionally, ‘working’ and ‘under’.  Rarely do you see a couple wearing Hunter wellies on the forecourt filling up milk bottles with four star because they are upset about something.  This is because the middle classes are not upset enough to riot…yet, and because if you can pay a hundred quid for fucking wellies, then your sense of values are so totally warped you can pretty much put up with anything.

Britain does a lot of things very, very, well.  War and sport (which is just war with rules), that’s what we do.  And magnificent food.

Pardon?

Oh yes we do.  And here’s why – a popular myth has grown up that somehow or other Britain was less able than other countries in the cooking Department up until a few years ago.  Let me raise a point here – rationing.  We were an island cut off by Nazis.  Underwater Nazis.  Nazis in submarines.  No wonder we learned to do interesting things with offal. 

Also, we love offal. 

But I have to say fair play to Jamie Oliver (the man who taught me to love cooking as well as food).  What ignited, with his help, around the turn of the century was a passion for cooking. 

The passion for food had always been here because, with rationing people never got enough of it, and in the seventies prawn cocktail and Angel Delight were just scrummie.  They burned your mouth with chemicals, but what the hey.

Now, things are very serious indeed.  Austerity is biting and there are flaming riots in Spain, where people are annoyed, possibly at being charged so much for sun loungers because Christ knows that always annoyed me.

Luckily, France is currently exempt from this sort of thing.  I know this, because recently I was in a French restaurant (in England, obviously, what do you take me for?) and saw the delightful advertising that decorates this post, a fox and a crow advertising camenbert cheese.

Now, it’s obvious that there is some kind of story here. The fox wants the cheese, the crow wants the cheese, they share the cheese, the fox craps cheese, I have no idea.

All I know is this.  I had an excellent coffee in the French place but I had my dinner at Jamie’s.  It wasn’t (I hope) snobbery or xenophobia, or even that foxes are more likely to crap in my garden than plunder my cheese, it’s just that the Brits do food better than the French.

Epecially the paella.

This, by the way, is what a fox really looks like.