But while there’s moonlight and music and love and romance… No? None of those? Music, then – there’s always music. And rain. And sausage. And chips.

While there are good tunes and rain and sausage and chips, let’s face the music and dance.

Humble apologies to Irving Berlin for messing with his lyrics.

But Irving – not sure I can use his surname again, without inviting a storm of abuse – didn’t have our current troubles. He didn’t have our sausage either. At least, it seems unlikely.

There’s comfort to be found in a plateful of sausage. All can never be completely lost when there’s Cumberland sausage for tea. A proper, made in Cumbria, peppery, twirly banger with a hefty serving of chips. So long as they’re not French fries… stay safe, choose mash.

Oh, hang on. Sausage and safety can’t be guaranteed a hand-in-hand partnership any longer.

The Cumberland delicacy could end up being a Brexit casualty. Protected by EU law now, the genuine article could soon be safeguarded only in Europe and not here at home. How weird would that be?


Anne Pickles Good for soon to be negotiated trade deals perhaps.

All the finest quality, authentic sausages exported to be enjoyed hugely in Brussels with beer, leaving us with some inferior imitation – made in a Bernard Matthews factory in Norfolk.

Get a mouthful of that lot and you’ll know what buyer’s remorse is.

It’s doubtful the sausage issue would have been much of a deal-breaker in the EU referendum. But who knows? It’s now far from clear what would have been.

As one sage public servant confided this week: “In six months it’ll be impossible to find anyone admitting to having voted Leave. Senior Cumbrian councillors are already backing off.”

And the Cumberland Sausage Association is worried, as are protectors of Melton Mowbray pork pies, Wensleydale cheese and Devonshire clotted cream. Some suggest we need new pneumatic tyres for our handcart, as the road to hell will be long and hard. Others are trumpeting triumph, even if unsure what to do with it. To be fair, few are thinking about sausages.

Nobody seems certain what any of them are thinking. Or even if they are thinking at all.

Vodafone has threatened to move its headquarters out of Britain, as a result of the vote. That came as a shock. Having had experience of its service in Cumbria, I thought it already had.

All of relatively little consequence when compared to the truly tragic human fall-out of this ill-advised, angry business.

The rise of racist attacks and abuse is alarming and genuinely shameful. A dear friend, a respected broadcaster and writer of mixed race, has told of his distressing experience of being verbally abused in the street – something he hasn’t known for decades. Chanting “Vindaloo” at him, a gang of youths told him to “Go home”. Which is precisely where he had been going, having just spent an evening tending his allotment.

Not all who voted Leave were mindless racist xenophobes. Not all were motivated by hatred and vile, meaningless mob instincts.

But those who were – and are – now feel their insanity has been validated at the ballot box. And that is beyond tragic. It’s dangerous.

Citing an old pop music hit, a more optimistic pal posted a vaguely amusing script on social media. It read: “Bloody Foreigner – coming over here, demanding to know where love is.”

I might have laughed, had not the handcart been recently sent in for a tyre upgrade. Perhaps my reply should have been: if you want to know where love is, don’t ask us. We’ve lost it. But it wasn’t because – well, you know.

In some quarters, hope can still spring eternal. With luck and judgement to distance us from the mob, we may yet find love has been temporarily mislaid.