I can't help feeling depressed at

the prospect of returning to the prevailing monotony of British

food shopping. On holiday in Normandy, we settled in the port of Honfleur which, like every small French town, bristles with high-quality independent food shops: charcuteries, traiteurs, patisseries, boulangeries and poisonneries.

Add into this seductive mix the small organic food market that's held each Wednesday morning and the large conventional food market every Saturday morning where the produce is 90% French, much of it local, and seasonal to boot.

The vibrancy of the local shopping scene in France reflects a culture where people enjoy food shopping because it is an agreeable occupation. It's the opposite of Britain, where it is seen as a mechanical reprovisioning of the same stale shopping list, week in, week out. 

France's small shops also thrive because the government has restricted supermarket development. In Honfleur itself there is a Casino and a Champion, small stores no larger than a Tesco Metro. If you want a hypermarket, you'll have to travel out of town to a zone industrielle. The French would no sooner dream of satisfying all their weekly shopping needs in the likes of Carrefour or Auchan than they would exile Catherine Deneuve. Like the rest of Europe, they recognise that supermarkets are handy for

cherry-picking special offers once every three to six weeks. But there is a consensus that the best food comes from the independents.

Back in Blighty, Tesco mono-culture is spreading like head lice through a nursery. In my arrondissement of Craiglockhart in Edinburgh, there is already a Tesco superstore and a new Tesco Metro within two and a half kilometres. In the weeks since the latter opened, already one newsagent has shut down. Meanwhile, Tesco is negotiating for a further site, equidistant between its two existing stores. Ironically, this is where a petrol station went bust after Tesco opened its fuel pumps just up the road.

Protesting residents cannot be dismissed as NIMBYs because, like the rest of the UK, we already have Tesco in our backyard several times over. When will enough be enough for Tesco? And when will the government and the Competition Commission reign in Tesco's apparently limitless sprawl, so giving independent shops a chance to thrive ?