MAYBE it’s because the one courgette that has appeared in our garden this miserable growing year is smaller than the slugs which saw off the rest of ’em.

Or maybe it’s because it’s just that time of year again.

Whatever, I find myself irresistibly drawn to the story of Peter Glazebrook, who produced Britain’s biggest onion. (Eighteen pounds, since you ask).

And Britain’s biggest cabbage. And our biggest parsnip, come to think of it.

Along with running Olympic Games; growing humungous or obscenelyshaped vegetables is an endearingly British triumph.

It makes us laugh AND it brings a Wallace and Grommitish comfort to a nation brutalised by an excess of XFactor, and advice to wear fashions which appear to have been designed by misanthropes.

But growing huge veg – and tittering at comments about enormous marrows – is not all we Brits are good at. Oh, dear me no.

Following a summer of victory, royalty and general gaiety, here are a few other things which we Brits do best...

1. Putting up umbrellas

2. Going ‘ooh, sorry’ when someone steps on OUR foot

3. Looking disproportionately thrilled when we are offered a custard cream

4. Getting in a whole line-load of washing in three-seconds flat when the rain starts to pour

5. Unshakeably believing that no crisis is so terrible that it cannot be relieved by a nice cup of tea

6. Not freezing to death while wearing a pelmet skirt and sleeveless top during an arctic Newcastle night, after you’ve necked 10 vodkas

7. Travelling 20 miles, uncomplaining, to stand in someone’s back garden in the rain and eat a burnt sausage (it’s called a barbecue).

8. Pomp and circumstance

9. Eating foreign food

10. Joining in with nature surveys – just show us a bullfinch or a Duke of Burgundy butterfly that needs counting and watch us go

11. Comedy – well, can you name a German/French/Portuguese comic?

12. Helping – from the gallant gamesmakers to all our grandparents who laid down their lives during World War II, our national instinct, when asked for help, is to give it. (Even though we might moan a bit)

13. Quirky. How else can you account for Dame Vivienne Westwood, the Isles of Wonder opening ceremony and the continuing success of Boris Johnson?

14. TV – as anyone who’s had the misfortune to get stuck on the continent without Sky will have noticed

15. Just getting on with it.

  •  ‘FRENCH Women Don’t Get Fat,’ ‘French Children Don’t Throw Food’, ‘Why finding out that your husband is having an affair is no big deal for the French’.

The list of smug books, articles and internet discussion about how our French cousins are soooooo much better at all the sex and behaviour stuff is as tedious as it is incorrect.

As we now know, for all their talk about sophistication, about how French women who discover the old man knocking off the secretary are more likely to purchase new underwear than belt him with a frying pan, about how we are all too ‘hung up’ about public nudity, we know the truth.

And that is that whatever they say and do, French people like a good leer over a pair of celebrity baps as much as the next low-life. Yes, I AM referring to the on-going saga of those Kate Middleton pap-snaps.

So while I’m desperately sorry for her – Kate’s a modest young woman who will have been mortified to find herself at the centre of this kind of attention – I’m glad we’ve finally had the lid blown off the Gallic myth at long last. Sophisticated and relaxed they are not.

In fact, seeing nothing wrong with thrusting huge, telephoto lenses at young women in a private garden and then leering over the resulting shots actually makes them rather pervy. As is anyone who decided to search out these pictures on the internet for themselves.