THE FISHY TALE OF THE NORMANDY LEMON

What is the world coming to when you go to France for the weekend to see some very old friends and all you can find to write about that is remotely unusual is a fish swimming on its nose.

Admittedly it was a very fine fish. I am no expert but I think it possibly bore a connection to the Carp family. And it was swimming in the clear water of a pleasant moat attached to a manor house set amid rolling Normandy orchards, full of apple trees and those lumbering Norman cows of mottled brown.

As it happened we were on our way from Le Havre to Honfleur via the scenic route that crosses the Seine over the Pont de Tancarville, which had just opened when first I came to France almost 50 years ago and on which, as a homesick fourteen year old I was made to compose my first ever French 'essay.'

But back to the fish that swam on its nose. We first noticed it by its great tail, standing proud of the water, swishing slowly from side to side. Gradually it criss-crossed the moat in methodical manner, head down as if searching for someone's car keys. Never, I thought, have I watched such seemingly ordered behaviour in a fish.

I will not say anything about Honfleur, except that it seems full of shops selling expensive art of dubious quality. If you really want to know about Honfleur no doubt Wikepedia has a very fine entry on the subject. Though I will say that this was the port from which Champlain sailed one April day in 1608 to found the sad and forsaken city of Quebec, from where, in a sort of migration in reverse, one of my ancestors is thought to have come.

At the inevitable dinner on Saturday night - long even by French standards - we celebrated both my birthday and that of my host and wondered how France might fare under its new boot camp President. Everyone there seemed to have voted for Ségolène Royal and were consequently in something of a 'we wuz robbed' mood. The unanimity and the passion rather surprised me, as did the widely held belief that many French women had actually refused to vote for her on the grounds of gender.

Maybe things will have moved on in five years time for I must confess to having become, from the comfortable distance of this side of the Channel, something of a Ségo fan. In the meantime, perhaps, lest I inflame the passions of our Gallic contingent, I shall revert again to the Normandy countryside.

For it can't have been far from where the giant fish splashed lazily about in its moat that one of Fennie's greatest fabrications was concocted a few years ago as we hurried through lower Normandy en route to catch the ferry. Sharing our car was a young woman in her twenties, the friend of a friend who, for a reason now lost in the mists of time, we were escorting back to Blighty.

"Are those orange trees?" asked Harriet, feigning an interest in the foliage of some passing orchard.

"I don't think oranges grow in Normandy," I said politely.

"Oh." Harriet seemed so disappointed that I felt driven to compensate.

"But of course, they might have been lemons," I hazarded.

"Lemons?" Harriet's interest quickened, but then a note of doubt crept in. "But these looked orange."

"That's quite possible," I said getting into my stride. "The best Normandy lemons do have an orange tinge. It's the soil here you see - gives them their special flavour."

Harriet wasn't wholly convinced. "But I've never seen Normandy lemons in the shops," she said.
It was time for boldness. "Haven't you?" I exclaimed, and by now well into my fictional stride I continued, "But I suppose that's not altogether improbable. You see they are much sought after and the season is very short and there aren't many left over by the time the top restaurants in Paris have taken their share."

And so in this vein did the conversation continue like a sketch from Monty Python with me deploying one outrageous reason after another to explain why she had neither seen nor heard of these lemons with their magical taste and culinary properties.

In the end I longed for the penny to drop; for her to say ruefully but playfully "You've been winding me up." But sound of dropping pennies came there none.

And so, if somewhere, someday, you should meet a personable young woman who tries to persuade you that the zest of an orange tinted Normandy lemon represents the supreme jewel in the citrus crown, you may safely lay the blame at Fennie's door.