Honeysuckle, Chilean potato vine, Nigella, hosters, Cotoneasta and umpteen other varieties working together. This is how all gardens should look.

Don’t hold your breath, but summer may have arrived down here. The Meteo says there will be minimal cloud and temperatures creeping up to…wow, 25 degrees! So there will be a summer and people will swim in the pool, Cinderella. Just make sure you have a defibrillator handy.

Today was one of those really satisfying days when quite a few things went right. I took the tractor mower’s carburettor apart, cleaned it…and the machine worked. As this rarely happens when I collide with engineering, that’s the kind of result that has me putting out more flags. Then I rearranged my bedroom, and after fifteen years finally got it exactly how I’d always seen it in my head. And last but not least, I made a tajine chicken with apricots that filled me up without the use of fat….and tasted terrific.

But the arrival of warmth (assuming it’s not yet another false alarm) took me back to wondering just how far behind schedule Europe’s crop production is. Normally by this time, the cherries are turning pink and the maize is four feet tall: today, they are green bullets and seedlings respectively. The problem isn’t going to be one of starvation or anything like it. Rather, it’s the price of stuff until it’s available in season, the cost to the State of importing it from warmer climes, and the hugely raised fuel bills that now face both farmers and households alike in France. On top of the country’s budgetary and banking instability problems, it doesn’t feel good. But to read the newspapers and sites both here and abroad, you’d think everything to do with food was perfectly normal.

Cruising the usual sites – and searching further afield – I’ve seen little or nothing in the way of reasoned concern about this temporary gap in the home-grown food supply chain. The Irish Farmer’s Journal noted the March British milk supply running 8% behind last year, with Europe’s largest producers, France and Germany, also lagging far behind 2012. But I’m talking more in terms of wheat and fruit…and what all this might be doing to the all-important French wine crop. Or whether British maize will ripen at all.

Type ‘European food contingency plans 2013’ into Google, and to be honest the lack of substance in there isn’t terribly reassuring. The EC’s Food & Veterinary Office (FVO) is predictably concerned with ensuring that requirements in the areas of food safety, animal health and welfare, plant health and public health are being rigorously enforced by Member States. Research shows that most starving folks prefer some food that’s edible to no food that’s perfect in every way, but as usual the Sprout inspectors are displaying precious little in the way of common sense.

Among farmers in my region, there is much shrugging, and whispering of “Que faire?”, but no sense that there is A Plan, and little hope at all of a B Plan. This year the FVO will carry out 249 audits, but guess what: not one of them will be concerned with shortages and how to cope with them. That would, presumably, mess up the colour scheme on somebody’s wall-based, flow charted critical path analysis in a Brussels Ministry. Better a clean sweep of famine than untidy scribbles in Belgium, eh?

Some new courses for contingency planning came on stream on 19th March this year. On September 12th last year new legal requirements for contingency planning were approved. And twelve days ago, a new paper on how to gauge what cyclone contingencies should be came out. But there has been no flesh put on the bones of, as it were, actually having contingency plans. The reason for this is primarily that as yet there are no bones either, and one thing we don’t want to do is get ahead of ourselves here. So to summarise, we have ways to learn how to do it legally and then apply it to cyclones. Beyond that, the doing part seems to be negatively operative going forward.

In the EU climate change space however, the emphasis remains very much on excessive warmth, and water running out. The fact it’s been pissing cold rain from Cornwall to Corfu for the last three months has not, as yet, been fed into the computer model. “Data and models are subject to a certain degree of uncertainty”, the latest climate adaptation paper says. For those reading in 1973, it adds helpfully that long words will be used, and outcomes will be “influenced by various factors like behaviour, social determinants, demographics, policy decisions, etc. The stresses created by climatic fluctuations add another layer of complexity to this already very intricate matter”. Damn those pesky climatic fluctuations which, by the way, we are experiencing right now.

Look, we’re laying complexity on intricacy here without a policy decision in sight, so this could get pretty hairy. You have been warned. Nobody but me seems to be worried in any way though, so I’m going to end it there. I just hate being out of step on this shit: if you’re wrong, everyone remembers – and if you’re right, hardly anyone remembers except the odd anally auditing troll who stops by only to tell you that you were bound to be right about something sooner or later.

Earlier at The Slog: More reassurance about the safety of our kids