Feeding your family

Because of the new, faster-spreading strain of the virus which seems to have developed itself in London, most countries in the EU are not allowing British visitors to enter until further notice.

France has gone one step further and banned freight lorries from leaving or entering too. They know the quickest route to Europe is just over - or under - the Channel, and I think that banning lone British lorry-drivers is yet another petulant way of punishing us for Brexit. It won't last long though. The powerful agricultural and transport lobbies in France have more to sell to us than we have to sell to them.

If the French will not let us through on our way to Spain, then there will definitely be a shortage of green vegetables in the next few days. Prior knowledge of this impending shortage will cause another round of panic buying, and all those farmers in the USA,  Kenya and Peru will have a great time. So will the freight airline companies.

I always try to buy British food, but unless you want to revert to the winter medieval diet of root vegetables, this time of year Spain is the nearest place to get broccoli. Did you hear that UNICEF is dropping-off food in some Northern towns and cities here because of child poverty caused - or exacerbated - by the Covid problems of unemployment following all those years of cut-backs and austerity? That is shocking. Britain was supposed to be a wealthy country. What happened?

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine bought acres and acres of derelict glasshouses without knowing what he was going to do with them. He is normally a property developer, so I suppose the site may be covered in houses by now. In hindsight it may have been better to repair them and grow salad on a large scale again. Never mind the virus, we need to become more self-sufficient in food production if we don't want to be held hostage by Europe or go back to the diet of 19th century peasants. We need to get all those Eastern Europeans back to pick soft fruit this Summer too. We cannot realistically expect university Arts  graduates to do the job, and there are far too many of them in any case.

Have you seen the amount of massive Dutch flower lorries which pour into Britain every day, all year round? Have you seen how much a bunch of flowers costs these days?

There will be great scope for low-tech entrepreneurial investment here in the next 10 years. It's a shame it did not begin 10 years earlier.