Why I judge a country by its markets.

Picture the scene: it’s Saturday morning and it’s drizzling. Not enough to get properly wet, but sufficiently to make you miserable. Oversized, greying pants hang limply alongside equally pale veg, and a hoarse-voiced hawker informs the non-existent crowds of their unintelligible prices. Next door, a gaggle of teenagers weigh up the risks of counterfeit make-up and pick over a selection of expletive-emblazoned t-shirts. Welcome to the Great British market.

                Thankfully, over recent years the British public has been making a stand. Farmers’ Markets are popping up like woodland mushrooms, tentatively proposing an alternative of artisan cheeses, fresh deli goods and a healthy supply of mouth-watering cakes. But here’s what I don’t understand – here in Blighty, these oases for the taste buds have become a privilege, whereas in many countries across the globe they remain a part of everyday life. How many Brits alive today remember that being our norm? My nearest town is named for its market, but the very thought of popping over to pick up my spuds makes me want to put my head in a rotisserie oven. While other nations throng on a bi-weekly basis, ours seem to carry with them a whiff of pretention or poverty.

                When I’m abroad, the local market is invariably one of the first things I check out and I will happily spend hours meandering through aisles of seductive, voluptuous fruit and drooling over wheels of unknown cheeses. For me, a healthy market shows a healthy mentality (and appetite, though I consider them to be much the same thing), community spirit and, most importantly, care about what goes in your food. Surely the weekly shop could be transformed from harassed parents balancing babies and bread, toddlers and tissues to hunting down the best bargain in the fresh air and communicating with real people, rather than a label on a shelf? From a financial perspective, yes, it is a bit pricier, but get down at the end of the day and you can get some great bargains. Beside, there’s a lesson to be learned that looks aren’t everything, even when it comes to bananas. Anyway, I’ll be taking quality over quantity every time.

Why I no longer consider myself a ‘British’ citizen.

On the day after the highlight of the European calendar and as the elections draw ever nearer, the relationship between Britain and Europe is under close scrutiny. Naturally, that makes me want to chuck my two-pennyworth into the mix and publicly stick two international fingers up at that party in the purple and yellow.

                We in the island nation of Great Britain have a history of considering ourselves as being a little bit different to our European neighbours, something that may be due to the puddle of water between us and the rest of the world, or possibly because of what my mother would call ‘small man syndrome’, but it’s about time we recognise that we are a product of Europe and the wider world perhaps more than anywhere else. Everything which we consider as part of our unique British heritage has been given to us, forced on us or borrowed/ adopted/ stolen by us; our language, our monarchy, our religion, even our beloved tea, it all comes from overseas. (Except perhaps Morris Dancing, about which the less said, the better.) There are of course some genius home-grown traditions – cheese rolling and tossing the caber spring to mind, but in general these are regional rather than part of our shared British culture.

                But this is one of the few things that I really love about Britain. We have so much that we are perfectly warranted in moaning about (the weather, naturally) but this hotchpotch of cultures is not one of them. If you want to find ‘pure’ British culture, I think you’d have to be looking back to pre-Roman Britain (and I thoroughly recommend you do, it’s fascinating) but let’s accept that we are the original melting pot and make the most of it. We’re no Madagascar, a strange petri-dish of oddities grown in total isolation; rather our Britishness was forged in the furnace of Europe over centuries, even millennia. Even those who have never got as far as those gleaming cliffs have roots that spread further than we ever stop to think about; we owe it to ourselves and the rest of the global community to recognise it and keep in close contact with our heritage. We have shaped nations across the globe, but let’s not forget just how much they have shaped us.