I’m saddened by the news that the number of immigrants to Britain from Eastern Europe is dropping. Everybody (except some plumbers) appreciates that the male immigrants do the jobs that indigents won’t do, yet I am more concerned about one of the lesser discussed benefits of the large female influx. In snack bars, in sandwich shops, anywhere the staff have some degree of discretion, Slavic women give you more food. Yes indeed, the socioeconomic impact of a globalised labour market on portion control is a neglected area of study.

Up until recently, the rule was that the farther you got from any large city, the bigger the portions. Following extensive research over the years in London, and then checking the results of this work against findings over the past fortnight in Pembrokeshire, I would say that this rule has now been precisely inverted.

Taking the filling of the humble jacket potato as a constant, I discovered that on holiday, I received an identically sized dollop of tuna and sweetcorn as I have in each of my last dozen or so visits to the principality. That is, goodly, without ever quite proving goodly enough. It will be noted that in the farthest reaches of southwest Wales the migrant inflow is not yet statistically significant in the jacket potato game.

At home in London, however, provided the waitress hails from the wrong side of the old Cold War divide, which she usually does, only one word can describe the generosity of the filling, and that word is lashings. I have taken to shopping around between competing cafés, sniffing out the disparate accents. A whiff of Budapest, the Balkans or the Baltic and I’m in there, scoring extra baked beans, mayonnaise, grated cheese, whatever. It’s great.

Interestingly, female friends get given less filling than I do. Also, I find I get more if I’m dressed casually rather than in a suit (a lot of variables to have tested I agree, but then I have eaten a lot of jacket potatoes). I thus conclude that the enduring prevalence of heavy industry and agriculture in the young women’s home countries has predisposed them to dole out bigger shares to men.

Fair play: if you’ve been hard at it in a shipyard in Gdansk or down a Silesian coalmine all day, you need the lion’s share of the calories of an evening. Thanks to immigration, this legitimate sexism is working to the illegitimate benefit of men like me, whose labour consists of nothing more physically arduous than typing and making the occasional cup of tea. And now it’s all coming to an end.

Or is it? No! A saviour is at hand. The Polish and Czech surge may be slowing, but what was a trickle of Turks is fast becoming a flood. And many of them women. What goes for shovelling in a Silesian coalmine goes double for herding goats on an Anatolian hillside. I reckon I should be able to continue filling my boots, and my potatoes, for some time to come.

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