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Bassinet, I say, because it sounds the closest to a basket – all I want is a chicken – and minutes later she comes back pushing what looks like a small two-storey greenhouse without glass on wheels. I must look confused, because she explains: “You put the carry cot with the baby on top, shopping you have already got underneath at the front and the groceries you’re going to buy now at the front.” It’s not worth arguing. Who knows, in this mega-market they probably sell babies in carry cots, so I’ll pick one up just to fill up the top shelf of my bassinet and dump it at the check-out.It’s at time like this I really miss the shop on the island, which has one shelf for fruit and veg, one shelf for tinned stuff and one shelf for cleaning materials.Excuse me, where’s the chicken, I ask a youth What sort of chicken, he says Frozen, pre-cooked, portions, boned, skinned, speciality .. A chicken to roast, I say. Standard, free-range, corn-fed, organic, ready-stuffed, self-basting, poulet de Bresse … See what I mean?Communist Russia was a desperate place, everybody knows that, but there were some advantages. If all they had in the shop was cabbage, at least you didn’t have to think about what to cook tonight.Personally I wouldn’t mind returning to the old post-war ration book system Life was hard, but at least it was simple.

When you produced your weekly coupon for two ounces of cheese, the man behind the counter didn’t ask: “Cottage, curd, goats, low-fat, pasteurised, mature, traditional farmhouse or with pine nuts?” He just gave you a lump of cheese – and very good it was too, I bet.Having praised the simplicity of the island shop I’m bound to tell you that changes are afoot Farmers and fishermen want choice, too I blame the commercials on television. Not so long ago I heard the owner’s wife, who was stacking shelves, complain to her husband just back from the cash-and-carry over on the mainland: “What’s going on David? We seem to have five different kinds of pesto and no brown sauce.” What indeed.. In the years that followed the Second World War, Lord Beaverbrook’s old Sunday Express would regale its readers with the secret history of the 1939-45 conflict: “What Hitler would have done if England was under Nazi occupation”; “How Ike almost cancelled D-Day”; “Churchill’s plans for using gas on Nazi invaders.” Often – though not always – the stories were true After war come the facts. It’s not so long ago, after all, that we discovered that Nato’s mighty 1999 blitz on Serbia’s army netted a total of just 10 tanks. Eric runs a magazine called Palestine Scrapbook, a journal for the old British soldiers who fought in Palestine – against both Arabs and Jews – until the ignominious collapse of the British mandate in 1948. In Mr Lowe’s magazine, there are personal memories of the bombing of British headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem – a “terrorist” bombing, of course, except that it was carried out by a man who was later to become Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin.Dennis Shelton of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps writes a letter, recalling an Arab attack on a British Army lorry in Gaza “We opened up on them, the ones who could still run away. We found two [British] army bods under the wagon, both badly wounded I went in the ambulance with them to Rafah hospital I was holding the side of one’s head to keep his brains in.

I often wondered if indeed they recovered.” Mr Lowe has asked for information about the soldier whom Dennis Shelton tried to save.But he’s probably wasting his time, because the British Army’s first post-World War Two war – the 1945-48 conflict in Palestine – has been “disappeared”, sidelined as something that no one wants to remember. According to Mr Lowe, many of the British campaign medals for Palestine were never issued. Dennis Peck, of the Sherwood Foresters, only realised he’d been awarded one in 1998. Until two years ago, the campaign was never mentioned at the Armistice parade in London. There’s not even a definitive figure for the British troops who died – around 400 were killed or died of wounds. And it took over 50 years for British veterans to get a memorial for the dead: in the end, the veterans had to pay for it from their own pockets.But in the late Forties, all Britain was seized by the war in Palestine.

When Jewish gunmen hanged two British sergeants, booby-trapping their bodies into the bargain, Britons were outraged. The British, it must be added, had just hanged Jewish militants in Palestine But now – nothing. Our dead soldiers in Palestine, far from being remembered at the going down of the sun, are largely not remembered at all.So who are we frightened of here? The Arabs? The Israelis? And isn’t this just a small example of the suppression of historical truth which continues over the 20th century’s first holocaust? I raise this question because of a recent and deeply offensive article by Stephen Kinzer of The New York Times. Back in 1915, his paper – then an honourable journal of record – broke one of the great and most terrible stories of the First World War: the planned slaughter of 1.5 million Christian Armenians by the Turkish Ottoman government. The paper’s headlines, based in many cases on US diplomats in Turkey, alerted the world to this genocide. By 16 September, a New York Times correspondent had spoken of “a campaign of extermination, involving the murdering of 800,000 to 1,000,000 persons”.It was all true. Save for the Turkish government, a few American academics holding professorships funded by Turkey and the shameful denials of the Israeli government, there is today not a soul who doubts the nature or the extent of this genocide.