britannia portrait

Well, rule me ragged. It’s nice to be the centre of attention I suppose but when your suitors consist of rival clans of inbred Etonian toffs, Andy “turnaround specialist” Clarke and people of exactly the calibre of Nigel Farage then quite frankly, darlings, I’d rather stay in. Stay in and wash my hair, that is.

Now, The Grocer is as straight and incorruptible an organ as it gets; so I will studiously avoid taking sides or saying anything intelligent.

However, I feel it is only fair to remind everyone that I and the garlic-scented continent did have, well, a bit of a connection in the not too distant past. By this I mean the glamorous Mesolithic period, when - I hardly need remind an audience as erudite as yourselves - the Storegga Slide finally cut me off from dear old Marianne France (we are both cousins of Lesbos).

Dear boys and girls, you may wonder how this is relevant to you. How sweet. Well, in creating the English Channel (soon to be walled off by Iain Duncan Trump), that Norwegian landslide also gave birth to Britain as a nation of shopkeepers. Some of them grocers.

I will leave you to decide whether security, employment, free trade and human rights are more important than waving a little flag on top of a hill in a big pond. But I do hear that Krankie Nicola Sturgeon has kindly sent all of her old independence campaign materials for use by the Leave-ites, whose leading lights fervently advocate close political union between London and Edinburgh (332 miles) but of course not between the UK capital and Brussels (199 miles).

Clearly Krankie’s ScotNats see something in this for them. Oh dear. I was rather fond of my pretty little head.