At my birthday dinner in a glitzy restaurant, my family take their time over a menu of sophisticated stuff such as pollock with romesco sauce and roast rhubarb crème brûlée. My choices, as always, are instant and infantile – pea soup, cottage pie, cheesecake. “That’s your whole childhood in a meal,” my daughter Jessica rightly observes.
When my parents divorced in the mid-1950s, I was sent to a small private boarding school on the Isle of Wight. Like many such places in that era, it believed that keeping little boys hungry, cold and terrified was character-building. The food was dreadful: overcooked cabbage, grey and gristly meat with bits of white windpipe in it, shrivelled prunes, “frogspawn” tapioca. The one nice thing that the school gave us, presumably by mistake, was cottage pie.
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