The EU may take our booze and our veg – but they’ll never take our freedom!
THE MISSUS texted me today:
Darling, can u pick up wine tonight?
12 cases shd do it.
I will get same so Brexit doesn’t b***er up Xmas xxx
Keeping a cool head in a crisis is often all about remembering what’s truly important.
So, with this country’s biggest cataclysm since Dunkirk gathering, Her Outdoors has moved decisively to ensure that we can still get properly pissed – no matter what happens on October 31.
She was responding, of course, to warnings from several retailers that essentials such as wine, olive oil, fresh fruit, and vegetables will be scarcer and more expensive in the event of a No-Deal Brexit.
This backs up recently (and grudgingly) released government documents confirming that supplies of ‘certain types of fresh food’ would be reduced after No Deal.
Those ever-splendid chaps at Waitrose have responded with appropriate patriotic brio by announcing that the Nice People’s Supermarket is already stockpiling the vino and aceite.
Meanwhile, with our piqued former amis from the EU likely to insist on drawn-out customs checks and kilometres of Red Tape once we crash out, some of Britain’s greatest food sector minds have been bending to a new task: ensuring that the man on the Clapham Omnibus can still get his mitts on a tolerably fresh melon.
One jib that I especially like the cut of belongs to Steve Murrells, chairman of Co-op, who has vowed to fly in fresh fruit to beleaguered Britain if necessary – like some kind of latter-day Berlin airlift – and ensure that this nation of Freedom Fighters gets its Five A Day.
Imagine the contorted, bitterly impotent face of Michel Barnier – that Strasbourg Stalin – as he gets a load of our legions of brave aeronauts, hot-sticking Faithful Annies chock-full of vital aubergines and mangetout safely onto the hallowed Blighty Tarmac.
And – given that our most Johnsonian former leader, Winston Churchill, maintained a considerable personal stash of premium hooch as he made rather a good fist of World War Two – ‘s only right that the Real Boris Johnson should have access to parallel perks.
So what if he dispatches his driver up to RAF Northolt to catch the odd crate of £180-a-bottle Tuscan Tignanello as it falls of the back of an aeroplane?
The man is carrying a Nation upon his shoulders and standing up to Federalist Fascism: it doesn’t mean he’s spoilt if he sups from a superior tipple at moments of Direst National Emergency.
Of course, not everyone is quite so convinced that we can have our Brexit and eat with it.
Doom-mongers like Kate Dalmeny, who leads the food and farming campaign Sustain, say they are “increasingly worried that a no-deal Brexit would be disastrous for millions of people on low incomes.”
The poor, Dalmeny told The Guardian: “would struggle with predicted food price rises of up to 10 per cent, with no means to stockpile food.”
I would say to her and her ilk: the lesson that interesting times like this teaches us is that it’s necessary to Get a Grip! Duck and dive! Improvise!
So when the balloon goes up, Mrs shit50s and I will be sleeping at the allotment 24/7 in order to defend our hard-grown leeks and Butternut Squashes – if necessary, at the point of a judiciously sharpened shovel.
Like Samuel Pepys during another nation-defining conflagration – the chaos of the Great Fire Of London – I will be burying the best Parmesan in the garden until it all blows over.
And when I say improvise, I mean I have fibbed to the Better Half – don’t worry, she doesn’t read this! – that I was stockpiling against the coming storm when I fucked up this week’s Ocado order and ordered three too many bottles of Filippo Berio.
Of course, a No Deal Brexit won’t be all plain sailing. Some of us will need to make sacrifices and we will need to find new heroes to inspire us through our suffering.
So, perhaps people who are not Boris but who did vote for Brexit should on principle turn into teetotal, salad dodgers for the duration of the crisis – and particularly in Hartlepool, where a Brexit Party-Tory Party coalition (!) has just taken control of the local council.
We had The Ration during the Second World War: surely, with a bit more pluck, some of us could subsist on a new kind of National Diet, comprised – say – of chips, crisps and white bread.
And if anyone happens to go irreparably blind from vitamin deficiency… well, at least they will be blind in a nation that is proudly independent and sovereign again.
theshit50s 