You don’t quite get fresh-faced maids a-milking at the farmers’ market off Marylebone High Street on a Sunday morning, but almost. I spotted three peaked tweed caps in my first three minutes. Freshly baked breads, hand-made jams and home-churned butter jostle for space with lavender and angelic apples and the purest of pears and very clean-looking cuts of meat from pigs who have had happy lives running wild in Wiltshire.

The market packs in the punters. Smartly scruffy dads out with tots in buggies. Elegant couples of a certain age (more Madonna-esque tweed) with the New Yorker under one arm, placing a slab of rosemary focaccia neatly under the other. An orderly queue of the politely affluent waiting for the deliciously crusty-looking buffalo cheese.

Marylebone High Street has been London’s equivalent of the poshest bits of Greenwich Village since sometime in the Nineties; the clientele today looks as though the ranks of the usual investment bankers and what-have-you from hereabouts have already been swollen by a good few of the East Coast bien-pensants who, if rumour is to be believed, are fleeing George Bush’s America and not planning to go back until sometime in November 2008. This yard is the perfect place for a little high-tone urban escapism meanwhile. Marie Antoinette, in her Petit-Trianon faux-shepherdess phase, would have felt right at home.

How sweet it seems. The shoppers are playing the same genteel game as English tourists taking their wicker baskets to a rural market in Provence: picking over the luscious local tomatoes, going slow, chatting with neighbours and friends and children. This hour on a Sunday morning is an instant holiday in dreamland. To a man, they have the same dreamy, innocent, if slightly, smug look of people who know how to source their simple pleasures without fuss.

There’s a political agenda lurking behind the contrived simplicity, of course. First, the names of practically every organic farm include the word “Manor” and the sales slogans are full of dated poshery (the tub of organic soup I picked up advertised itself as being “frightfully good”) or TV-inspired whimsy (the Larkin’s preserves are “Perfick!”). Second, the prices are unreal (I buy four small squashes and am politely relieved of a fiver). Third, everyone in this tweedy city crowd is not only affluent but white, if not grey. The happiness customers are buying so enthusiastically, and expensively, into is that of a virtual past, in which the peasants are happy and fruitful, the lords are being lovely and cooperative in their halls, geese will be eaten at Christmas, and foreigners are the folk from over the border in green and pleasant Mummerset.

Still, there’s a case for nostalgia and comfort eating these days that goes far beyond anxiety about E-numbers and mass-market slaughterhouse practices. Who wouldn’t want to be relieved of some of their vague forebodings about the state of the world?

More than three centuries ago, John Milton wrote the blueprint for resigning oneself to unwelcome reality. He’d fought to establish a Puritan paradise on earth during the Civil War. It hadn’t worked out; eventually a king returned to the English throne. The compromise Milton made with himself in old age was to believe that you could, at least, find a paradise of the mind.

Subconsciously, perhaps shoppers at the farmers’ markets around London are looking for a similar way to reconcile themselves to all the bad news they read in the papers. Whether you’re finding your brand of democracy or religion or business harder to spread across the globe than you expected, or you’re a defeated liberal feeling helpless as you watch the politicians you despise conquer the world, crusading doesn’t seem to help.

A far easier way to find solace – if you’ve got the dosh – is by retreating into a foodie fool’s paradise. So order your Dickensian Christmas goose from one of the happy manor farms now, while stocks last. I’m the one just ahead of you in the queue, with the very new tweed cap.

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