John Hillman laments the continental view of Albion

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Next time you head over to Rotterdam with P&O you might want to find out why on earth they think that the English are responsible for their bad weather.

Apparently a common enough slang for grey miserable rainy days is Engels Weer, English weather, which, when you consider that we get about half the annual rainfall that Holland does, is ever so slightly galling. We may as well start refereeing to our balmy summer evenings as Irish sunsets if we’re going to play by those rules.

Strange how much of a mistaken view of the English still exists on the continent, notably that we all eat bad food which, having lived in Europe myself, is another deeply irritating falsehood that you get fed up with hearing.

Even the tiniest village in the English countryside has a top quality Anglo-Indian restaurant and our supermarkets have more choice in them than any other I’ve been to from Berlin to Hawaii. The trouble is that we picked up a bad reputation about 100 years ago and can’t seem to shake it off.

There are few places in the world where you can experience as much gastronomic eclecticism as you can in England. For a nation that invented the pie, the steamed pudding and real ale to have such a bad culinary reputation represents a serious miscarriage of justice.

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