Would we go to the barricades to defend suet pudding?
There is a photograph by Henri Cartierbresson of a little boy running down a sunny street, clutching a baguette almost as large as himself. It is hard to think of an image more quintessentially French.
France is, of course, a realm entranced by its own iconography, and the symbols of Gallic nationhood are legion: the cockerel, the Tricolore, the Eiffel tower, Marianne – the female embodiment of liberty and reason – Brigitte Bardot, not to mention the rock star Johnny Hallyday, described by President Macron in his funeral eulogy last month as “part of France”.
The creep of globalisation has not spared some of France’s treasures: the croissant spawned a dire mutation: the repulsive Cronut; while even Champagne has begun a drift into the terroir of perfide Albion: near my mother’s house in Kent, former orchards have been replanted with vines by the house of Taittinger.
The baguette has been a particular victim of this process of cultural degradation. All sorts of torpedo-shaped loaves now pass themselves off as baguettes, but a single bite is sufficient to unmask the imposture. The national loaf is so firmly embedded in the Gallic spirit that President Macron has announced his support for it to be added to the United Nations’ annual list of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
That honour was conferred last year on the Neapolitan art of pizzamaking, which joined Malawian nsima and Azerbaijani dolma as the edible treasures of 2017. But the United Kingdom’s distinguished culinary tradition is a notable absentee from the list. Time for lovers of the bloater, the jellied eel, and that noble and sustaining comestible, the suet pudding, to start campaigning. In a childhood richly populated by fictional animals I dimly recall Tufty the Squirrel as something of a dullard, easily overshadowed by the insolent charm of Squirrel Nutkin. Poor Tufty bore a heavy responsibility: he was the furry figurehead of the Tufty Club, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents’ road safety campaign for children.
Of late Tufty has faded from view, though according to ROSPA’S website he is still with us – biding his time, presumably, like the King under the Mountain, until his nation’s hour of need. A recent survey claims that we have forgotten how to use zebra crossings, with a fifth of pedestrians reporting a near-miss with a car at a crossing, while half erroneously believe that cars must stop for pedestrians waiting at a crossing. With hapless iphone zombies and selfish petrolheads each volubly blaming the others for the confusion, Tufty Resurgens could teach us all a lesson.
The threat of imminent nuclear destruction is the stuff of countless fictions and real-life drills (as the battered appearance of the Trident nuclear button alarmingly attests). But for half an hour in Hawaii this weekend the emergency drill seemed real, as text alerts warned of an incoming ballistic missile, with the ominous message: “This is not a drill.” It wasn’t a drill, but a human error – one of a dozen such false alerts or close calls since the 1950s.
If the many reactions to what seemed a real and imminent threat, perhaps the coolest was that of Joshua Keoki Versola, who opened an expensive bottle of whisky, intending, as he said, “to go out in style”.