LEEKS AND MORE LEEKS

A couple of years ago, when I was going through one of my periodic and futile attempts to lose weight, I came across a little book which appeared to offer hope. It was ‘French Women Don’t Get Fat’ by Mireille Guilano, sub-titled even more beguilingly, ‘The Secret of Eating for Pleasure.’

It is one of those lovely composite books, part memoir, part recipe book, part a philosophy of all things French. The author is head of the Veuve Cliquot Company’s New York operation. She has lived many years in the United States and the book is the result of trying to teach American women the French way of eating and staying slim.

Sadly for anyone hoping to lose weight there isn’t anything here that any reasonably intelligent person cannot guess for themselves. Losing weight, she says, is all about eating sensibly, cutting out those fattening foods, like bread, that one eats to excess and eating half measures - half a glass of wine, half a banana. For the pleasure is always in the first half of something, she suggests, rather than in the second. Apart from that, if you want to weigh ten stone then just eat like someone who weighs ten stone and not like someone who weighs 28 pounds more.

So in all the book there is only one dish to which someone like myself who believes in Fairy Godmothers can possibly cling in the hope of some alchemical transformation. Mireille Guilano even qualifies it with the preface ‘magic.’ It is Magical Leek Soup. And there is a diet that goes with it - a 48 hour diet - which, she implies, will kick-start your life-changing regime and bring all manner of wonderful benefits to boot.

Now I’ve had a nagging temptation to try this diet ever since I bought the book. It’s very simple. You buy a kilo of leeks; trim off most of the green bits; slice the leeks into mouth-sized bites; cover these with water; and boil them for 25 minutes. After this you drain off the water into a jug.

You do this on a Friday evening and for the next 48 hours whenever you feel hungry you eat some of your boiled leeks - hot or cold according to taste - which you are allowed to drizzle with olive oil and flavour with salt and black pepper. When you are thirsty you drink the water you have poured off, which now brims with leek goodness.

And you watch the weight fall of your body, the toxins evaporate from your skin, your hair become sleek and your fingernails glossy, your muscles toned and your wrinkles smoothed. True, she doesn’t actually promise these benefits in so many words, but if you qualify a dish with the word ‘magic’ then surely expecting a few of these benefits isn’t asking too much, is it?

Well, last weekend I tried this diet. And I stuck to it even though I had a sore throat and felt quite awful.

My energy simply evaporated. All I could do was lie on a sofa and read or watch television. Having no energy means not only that you can’t move, but that you can’t think either. So writing is out, decision-making ditto. I found myself on the Saturday evening watching two back to back episodes of ‘Poirot’* (most appropriate I thought) and then half an episode of ‘Taggart.’

I ached on the inside. I’ve never had chemotherapy but, from the descriptions, the effects of 48 hours of leeks seem well on the way towards an approximation.

You wouldn’t believe what I would have given for a cup of tea, or how awful a tepid plate of leeks, even drizzled with oil, tastes at half-past seven in the morning. Despite my raging hunger I found them impossible to finish. I sat there like a child compelled to swallow some disgusting meal long after the family have departed. Then there was the abiding smell of leeks which seemed to exude from the very pores of my skin.

Determined to get to the bitter end all I could think of was the phrase that trips so happily off the tongue of my French neighbour. ‘Il faut souffrir un peu pour etre belle.’ (You have to suffer a little to be beautiful). It gave me little comfort.

And for this suffering what did I get? Well, certainly not beauty! But I did lose weight. Two and three-quarter pounds in fact. And my buoyant blood pressure fell by 15-20 points. Did I feel cleansed, de-toxed, raring to go when the whistle blew at 5 o’clock on Sunday evening and I could permit myself a cup of tea? Answer no, not really, and sadly in the few days since then my weight and blood pressure have reverted to what they were.

No magic then. But the tea did taste beautiful.

(*Poirot is the French word for Leek)

THE OLD JETTY

We went to IKEA - to buy coffee and batteries - two things that IKEA doesn’t do in flatpack but which come at a flatpack price. The quality of both is excellent. I’m an IKEA fan.

They also do pictures. Meandering through the store I stopped at a picture of an old jetty by a lake, similar to the one above.* This jetty appears to be somewhere warm and sunny; the IKEA photograph looked to be of northern Sweden.

Both pictures are evocative - who used the jetty last and why? Where did they go? Why is the jetty now ruined?

Next day I began a story, imagining what might have happened and working into the tale my own experiences of setting off in the gathering dusk from a jetty in Shetland - with the wind and swell getting up on the open sea.

Now I’ve never done much fishing - I’m unlucky. I’ve had the humiliating experience of being in a boat fishing for mackerel and catching nothing while a friend beside me pulled up three or four fish at every cast. When we changed tackle and places; I still caught nothing. I wasn’t born to fish, I concluded.

But at the time of the jetty incident I hadn’t learned this lesson. My sister in Shetland had invited me to stay. She knew a local fisherman and suggested he took me out for monkfish. This involved descending to where the voe was no longer a sheltered inlet but the Atlantic ocean proper. And it involved going at night. It all sounded rather exciting.

The fisherman was stocky with a dark, untidy beard. He was an experienced boatman and so I had no qualms as we set off from the wooden jetty, into the gathering gloom in his small wooden boat, powered by an outboard motor.

Towards the mouth of the voe, the wind picked up and the water sloshed unpredictably over the side and over us. He didn’t speak; his face was fixed on some point on the horizon. Eventually we stopped about 500 yards out. The boat bobbed like a cork. The lights of the houses seemed a very long way away.

He anchored, cast the bait, and we waited in the darkness. Nothing of course happened. I was already wondering why I had embarked on this absurd enterprise. I had at least taken the precaution of donning a waterproof anorak, but my jeans were soaked. I was shivering.

He was dressed in fisherman’s trousers of some oily cotton and an old sweater, yet seemed impervious to the wet or the cold. I started to bail some of the water; he stopped me, saying the scrape of the bailer would disturb the fish. What fish? I began to feel sick.

He started the engine and my heart leapt at the warm safe prospect of home. But to my disappointment we headed two hundred yards further out. The sea seemed even choppier. “I have my marks,” he said, squinting at the black outlines of the cliffs against the sky. “I know just where we are. This is another good spot.”

In this vast, angry, tossing swell, cold and featureless, it was hard to believe there was anything below at all.

Again we drew blank. Superstitious, like all fishermen, I knew he felt me a bad omen. He yanked viciously at the cord to start the engine again. The three pulls it took seemed like thirty.

It was now totally dark. He ran the engine very low; fearing losing traction, he said. With the water slopping mightily over the sides we only inched back towards the land.

Then the engine coughed and stopped. He pulled the cord, but it wouldn’t fire. He opened the cap on the little petrol tank on top and peered in. “Got a match,” he shouted to me over the wind.

I was fumbling in my pockets; in those days I still smoked. “Here you are,” I said.

He rounded on me. “Didn’t I know you shouldn’t look at a petrol tank with a lighted match? Did they teach me nothing at university?”

The words stung. I’m suppose he meant it as a joke. But perhaps this was my punishment for ruining his luck. Yet with a stalled engine and the wind blowing us out to sea this was no time to be second guessing his instructions. I counted he knew what he was doing.

Standing in the boat he stuck a finger in the tank. Smelt it. “We’re out of fuel,” he grunted.

I began to panic. But he was already reaching for a red can below his seat. I heard the comforting sound of petrol sloshing. He screwed the lids back and pulled the cord. Reluctantly the damp engine burst into life and we raced home again across the sea.

Never was I so happy to set foot on dry land.

*The picture is by vestraphotography.com publishers and framers of fine prints

'UH-HUH'

People say that the tones on the horn of an Inter-City 125 are set a musical fourth apart and so with a bit of electronic tinkering you could make the train play the opening bar of Beethoven’s 5th symphony as it hurtled across the countryside and through unmanned stations. Ba-ba-ba-bom!

Now I realised during an exceedingly long afternoon this week that this descending fourth was just the sound made by my little grandson, Theo, whenever he was discovered amid the wreckage of some new household disaster. After he has pulled books from the bookcases or thrown down a carefully stacked pile of labels, he stands in the middle of the carnage, holding his hands out with the palms upturned in imitation of a revered saint performing some penitential act of supplication, and sighs, ‘uh-huh,’ the ‘huh’ being a perfect fourth below the ‘uh.’ The effect is totally disarming.

Where he learned this trick - and I have to keep remembering he’s only 18 months old - I don’t quite know, but it ought to be marketable, and at a hefty premium too. If Tony Hayward, the hapless BP chief executive, held responsible by the US Senate for the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, had just greeted his inquisitors with his palms upturned and a hesitant smile and simply said, ‘uh-huh’ in a note that contrived at once to express boundless regret and also astonishment at the inexplicability of natural disasters, then he might have had an easier ride.

‘Uh-huh!’ As a substitute for an explanation, as a device for turning away wrath, the descending cadence of ‘uh-huh,’ uttered with a sigh to break a thousand hearts, reigns supreme. Especially, when one is at the height of one’s young mischief making and otherwise can’t say much more than ‘biscuit’ and ‘mine.’

Still eighteen months is a difficult age and hence my long afternoon filling in for his mum. It is hard to find constructive activities with which a toddler does not easily become bored. There’s football, of course, played down the long corridor, at which young Theo excels. Not only can he kick a ball with surprising force (and remain upright) but he can direct it too. Then there’s building towers with Lego, though as he enjoys smashing them down more than he enjoys building them up, the towers become shorter and shorter as his attention span wanders. Eventually he gives up.

But, I remembered, water is what Theo liked best of all. So around three o’clock I had the brainwave that we should mop the kitchen floor! He could splash water and mess it around with his feet and perhaps even the mop. ‘Uh-huh,’ he would say as he created yet another puddle and the water ran everywhere, ‘Uh-huh!’

I cleared up. Naturally. Mopping up isn’t his favoured activity. For the ‘uh-huh’ absolves its utterer from any responsibility for a clear-up - another reason why Tony Hayward might have found it useful. I had to slide him around the floor on a old towel.

What else, I wondered, during the course of that exceedingly long afternoon might involve water? The garden beckoned.

We have an old watering can and Theo was about to learn that water came out of garden taps and that it could be used to fill a watering can, though in practice he found it more fun to jiggle the can about so that the water splashed on its lid and ran down his trousers. The little fellow was having such fun with this new way to wet himself that I hadn’t the heart to stop him. For the moment anyway my piles of labels were safe enough.

But now the watering can was too heavy to lift. ‘Uh-huh,’ he said helplessly, with his outstretched arms and his butter won’t melt in my mouth smile. ‘Uh-huh!’

I tipped some out. Somewhere he’d lost a shoe so he paddled in the puddle with his stockinged foot. What is the fascination that small children have for water? Did I once have this fascination, too? The thought made me wince.

We went to water the garden, Theo, humping the big watering can as best he could with me making encouraging noises from behind.

After a few steps he spotted an unassuming weed growing in a crevice between the wall and the path. He took a step back to consider it. Then drenched the weed with the entire contents of the can. The can was now empty. Theo couldn’t quite understand this. He obviously thought that somehow he had broken it for he handed it back to me and raised his outstretched hands. ‘Uh-huh,’ he sighed. ‘Uh-huh.’

It was still only four o’clock.

VERBENA

I arrived at the house of my illustrator clutching a pot of Verbena. At least I call her my illustrator, though she is not mine, nor is she an illustrator for that matter. Or not yet anyway. This might be her opportunity and if it is hers then it will be mine also. I will be her writer and she my illustrator. The pot of Verbena is irrelevant.

I didn’t know she was going to illustrate my book when she rang me on Wednesday afternoon. She’d been away and come back again as nineteen year olds sometimes do. I thought she was inter-railing around Europe. But no, she rang me up asking if I had a scanning machine. To make digital images for her portfolio, she said.

I replied that I had that very article on my desk where it shared a casing with a fax, a copier and a printer. It’s called an ‘All-in-One,’ and the fact is that the machine is not very competent at any single one of those functions. On the one occasion when I tried to make the scanning function work I wasted an hour with leads and wireless link-ups, succeeding in putting my otherwise delightfully temperamented computer into a state of high dudgeon and the ‘All-in-One’ into a fiendish sulk. If either had a voice it would have said, ‘you don’t expect me to work with that!’

So I never tried again. But then I remembered that I had a second scanning machine which has sat in a cupboard ever since my daughter moved to the West Country and passed on ten years worth of miscellaneous belongings. I didn’t know whether this worked either, but it was portable and I had a lead and a plug; the necessary drivers could be obtained via the admirable services of Google, and - I told Kitty - Bob would be her uncle.

It was then that I had the idea that she might become my illustrator. ‘Could she draw flying carpets?’ I asked, and Persian Kings upended on their bottoms? And a garden with cats and bonfires and mysterious forbidden books and charred pieces of paper with Arabic script; a house shaking in a earthquake and Granny’s best china falling off the dresser?’

‘Of course,’ she said, with the confidence of a budding Quentin Blake, for illustration is what she has always wanted to do and how many nineteen year olds get the opportunity to start their careers by illustrating a story that has as yet only been rejected once?

‘Share proceeds?’ I suggested optimistically?

‘Wonderful! I’m so grateful.’

And she was. Though whether for the opportunity of illustration, or the scanner I wasn’t sure. I would deliver both script and scanner that very evening, I said.

Kitty lives close to an Edwardian mansion, built from the proceeds of the shipping trade, and now in the ownership of the County Council. The 55 acres of gardens are open to the public and in them the Council hosts events that range from Shakespeare and opera to lesser drama such as this week’s summer evening tour of the flower beds, to which, somehow, I had been invited.

Now when it comes to gardening I am still in the nursery (if you will excuse the pun). Foxgoves and nasturtiums; geraniums and marigolds. Bright colours and plenty of them. So I wasn’t quite sure why I was joining a party of fourteen eager gardeners to study Amaranthus Aurora and Alcea Rosea Nigra and discuss the usefulness of Lysimachia as edging or Coreopsis Sunshine as infill. These long words floated over my head as serenely as the clouds in the sky.

Nevertheless, it was all rather fun, doing the tour and occasionally muttering ‘but not against a south wall, I think,’ should I be required to speak.

Then, in the herbaceous border, I found found a plant suited even to my base levels of gardening skill: a perennial sweet pea, with beautiful pink flowers, growing with bindweed vigour up a twenty foot wall.

Perennial! So none of this business of starting a handful of cripplingly expensive seeds in damp trays that clutter your windowsills. I must have expressed fierce approbation at this cross between a triffid and praying mantis for the Head Gardner immediately plunged into the border returning with four seed pods.

‘If you really want them,’ she said dubiously. ‘They’re terribly invasive.’ But I did. Oh yes, I did!

Afterwards we were all given a Verbena plant. I still haven’t understood why. Perhaps it was so that we could make our own tisanes and so be guaranteed a good night’s sleep without worrying whether Torenia Purple edging would clash with an infill of Geum Mrs Bradshaw. I must warn Kitty when she’s illustrating the book.

I appear to be taking the picture one handed. The evening sun makes me look rather large!

GREEN TEA

On my way back from the post office I called at the Health Shop. It’s a narrow little shop with a big plate glass window. Once in you can’t hide and so it’s difficult just to browse without buying anything. You have to pass the till. I'm uncomfortable in shops like that.

I wanted to buy some Green Tea. People are always telling me of its benefits. Anti-oxidants is the word they use, but it also tones up the immune system and makes you lose weight apparently. I thought it might be worth a try.

So I entered and looked around. If I couldn’t find the tea I would disappear. Perhaps they didn’t stock any. Perhaps I should have looked first in the supermarket. But there in front of me was a whole display of tea. Boxes and boxes of it - herbal teas and tisanes and fruit teas and confections of every sort.

The proprietor appeared from a back room, a small slim woman in a blue top and jeans. She gave me a pleasant smile, tilted her head to one side, and asked soothingly if she could help me.

I muttered about green tea. She smiled broadly and without the slightest hint of being patronising indicated a cmplete row of green boxes at eye level in front of me. I had discounted these because on each one was written the word ‘CLIPPER’ in large white letters, rather than ‘GREEN TEA’ which was written in smaller italic script underneath.

For good measure she pointed out more green tea on the shelf above and on the shelf below and began enthusing about how useful it was in one’s medicinal armoury.

In her eagerness and general humorous demeanour she reminded me of Felicity Kendal. She even looked like Felicity Kendal, or at least she could have been Felicity Kendal’s sister gone into the Health Food trade. I imagined her as Mrs Good and this Health Food shop her kitchen somewhere in the Surbiton suburbs.

She suggested I try white tea, which actually I did once, concluding that it spoilt the taste of the hot water. All the same I was flattered that she should have taken me for a ‘white tea’ person, surely a species of superior and more delicate being. I reached for a box of the Clipper.

‘Why don’t you try this one?’ she said, pulling out a brightly coloured green box from the shelf below. ‘It’s what I drink. It’s milder and less bitter than normal green tea, with the same quantity of anti-oxidants.’ Clearly, my ‘white tea’ personality had taken root. I needed protection from bitterness.

So I agreed and together we made the long journey of three steps to the till. ‘One eighty-nine,’ she said. I handed over a ten pound note. ‘Ah!’ she said, opening the till and letting me see that it was quite empty of change save for two pound coins nestling forlornly in a corner pocket. ‘Have you anything smaller?’

Jointly we examined my change. We found a fifty pence piece, and a few coppers. ‘Ah!’ she said again, in a Felicity Kendal tone of voice. But then playing Mrs Good, the mother of resourcefulness, she added brightly ‘but you can pay by card.’

She had a big notice on the till to say that card payments would not be taken for purchases of less than £10. ‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said.

But of course I did worry about it, standing there in her little emporium surrounded by all manner of goodies with a pathetic purchase of a few tea bags of Green Tea. So I did a quick whip round. A bag of Brazil nuts, some organic jumbo oats, some dried apricots, a jar of honey and my tea. I put them on the till.

‘I adore Brazils,’ she said.’They’re very good for you if you’ve got type 2 diabetes. I’m not suggesting you have type 2 diabetes, you understand, but if you have and you eat a couple of Brazil nuts then they get your metabolism going without triggering an insulin response.’

Now it was my turn to say ‘ah!’ and then I said ‘ah!’ again in a different tone of voice when she said ‘£17.44.’

I had been trying to get to around £10, taking pity on the empty till and knowing the ferocious fees charged by card companies for the privilege of taking your money.

The pot of delicious local honey, pure bottled sunlight, was £7.00, which miserly me thought a bit steep. She kindly allowed me to put the honey back.

‘I would have taken your card just for the tea,’ she said sweetly, looking out of the corner of her eyes.

‘I know you would,’ I replied in my best white tea voice.

SEX AND HORROR IN THE DOLL'S HOUSE

For reasons that needn’t detain us here I found myself last Saturday in a doll’s house shop. Inside, arranged on shelves, were numerous houses ranging from the simple and inexpensive to the complex and monumental. All with large windows - to see what goes on inside, obviously.

Some of the houses could apparently be built from boxed kits. Those, easy to construct were described as suitable for children; more challenging boxes carried the sobriquet ‘Adult Collection.’

No doubt this referred to the difficulty of making up the kit, but so much these days is labelled ‘adult’ as a limp euphemism for puerile eroticism that I wondered for a moment whether these ‘adult’ doll’s houses might be representations of Amsterdam’s Rossebuurt, where girls ply their trade from great neon-lit picture-windows, whose enticing lights reflect exotically in the dark waters of the canals below.

If so that possibly could prove a new avenue with which to spice up the rather staid conventions of the doll’s house trade, because the one terrible and frustrating conundrum about doll’s housery is finding plausible explanations for what actually goes on behind those plywood walls and in those rooms so beautifully decorated with plates and dressers and ranges and sofas and miniature fire-irons.

Beatrix Potter had a go in the Tale of Two Bad Mice who, if you remember, invade the doll’s house belonging to Lucinda and Jane and in disappointed rage smash up the plaster fish and ham, laid out on the dining table, and run off with the furniture as well.

But well-ordered houses in the 21st century are not usually infested by mice with ASBO qualities, so the problem of constructing a convincing existence for the doll’s house inhabitants remains, even for those of an imaginative disposition, as Jane Shilling regrets in her memoir, ‘The Fox in the Cupboard.’

“The doll’s-house game was a kind of rolling soap opera, except an awful lot more soap than opera..........There were no incidents in my doll’s house, no domestics, no house fires, no lost children or broken limbs. The most exciting thing they did in that house was the housework.....It was a world as tight and safe as the inside of a nutshell.”

Model the house on the charming 14th century architecture of Old Amsterdam with its canals and winding, narrow, cobbled streets; fill its windows with ladies, or indeed gentlemen, of the night and you begin to create something that could at last become more opera than soap. Certainly rather less safe than a nutshell. Something for children to grow into as they get older perhaps, rather than leaving forlorn and abandoned at the first approach of the mystic passions of teenagery.

Certainly I continue to feel a subdued hankering for doll’s house drama and seeing now in the shop those rows of dark empty windows I turned to my companion and asked, “of course, you remember the classic doll’s house tale?”

She didn’t apparently and nor, surprisingly, did the shopkeeper. They had never heard it. Which left me wondering whether this was actually something that I had made up myself. So I ask readers to let me know if you have heard a story like this somewhere before, perhaps on the radio, perhaps as you were lying in your child’s bed, blankets pulled up to your chin, the lights out, your doll’s house perched on your bedroom table, a winter wind moaning about the eaves........

“Then she heard a noise, a scraping, and a yellow light went on in the bedroom window of the doll’s house and she felt the grip of fear. She couldn’t see anyone, but someone must have been in that house for the light flickered and she could see a shadow against the internal wall. Now she discerned voices, the words at first fumbled and lost. The shadow moved against the back wall; with horror she saw an arm raised and, at its end, something sharp and pointed. A frightening odour of doom and despair filled the air. She heard a muffled scream but she could only watch, mesmerised, as the arm and its dagger rose and fell, rose and fell until the screaming stopped.

For a moment she saw him then, tall and hatted, standing silhouetted in the doll’s-house window. Then the light went out.”

That, or something like it, is the core of the story. There is no doubt a prequel, and possibly a sequel too. There may well be some interaction with reality, with the young heroine recognising the house on which her doll’s house is modelled, up for sale, and seeing in the street a tall man, dressed in black wearing a hat, standing...........

You can see where this sort of thing can easily lead. Answers on a postcard, please.


The photograph, lest anyone should get the wrong idea, is copyright free from the official City of Amsterdam website.

SIX PINT JUGS

At the Emma Bridgewater factory in Stoke-on Trent even the Agas are covered in polka dots. We observed this when we arrived, cakes in hand, for the Open Day and Factory Tour. As we checked in at a wooden table in the yard with everyone in summer garb, bunting and flags abounding and excited children running about, it felt more like we had arrived at a rural village fete than at a working factory in an industrial metropolis.

‘How do you spell pistachio?’ asked a lovely girl who might have been called ‘Poppy’ and who rolled her eyes in respect at the inviting green speckled meringues that Elder Daughter was presenting. Poppy was writing labels. Behind us a woman handed over a cake still in its packaging, no doubt on the principle that when in doubt go to Marks and Spencer. A young lad in a polka dot pinny laid the cakes out on a big table in front of the Agas. ‘You’re just in time for the factory tour,’ he said, calling to someone else with a floral name to escort us.

Emma Bridgewater started this enterprise 25 years ago and is intimately involved with everything that goes on. The style is relaxed, informal, polite, courteous, the staff like long lost cousins met at a wedding. Style rather than money drives the business. Of course, you could make pots more cheaply in China, but you’d be selling your soul.

So they manufacture in England, still by hand, in this old Stoke factory, solidly built of brick and iron a century or more ago. Yet such has been the success of the Bridgewater brand - the growth rate is some 20 per cent a year - that the factory is already becoming too small.

I have always loved factory tours. I enjoy seeing how things are made, stored, finished, transported. Most of the 25,000 pieces that the factory produces each week, so the factory manager told us, start life as a grey slurry of clay-in-water called ‘slip’ which they use to fill plaster of Paris moulds. Far back in the mists of time someone apparently discovered that plaster absorbs water and that if you make a depression in your plaster, and fill this with slip, then the plaster will cause the slip to solidify from the outside in. So after a time you can then pour away the liquid slip and be left with a bowl, or a mug, teapot or whatever adhering to the sides of the mould. This you remove and bake in a kiln. Simple really.

Those that made the pots all seemed to be men. They worked very fast and with great accuracy and wore, for a reason I never did discover, a kind of white surgical gown. By contrast the decorators all seemed to be women, also working with great accuracy. Some decoration is applied using lithographic transfers; some with sponges finely cut from upholstery foam and dipped in colour. It seems an odd and time-consuming process, but the results are truly unique. Each decorator puts her own mark on the underside of the piece; for some collectors will only purchase pieces decorated by the same person.

A beautiful lunch followed. And it was beautiful because perhaps only on long refectory benches can you really appreciate the crockery. We might have expected to eat our hog roast and salad from paper plates and to drink from plastic beakers laid on tables with covered with paper. But no! Style comes first. The food came on Bridgewater plates; we drank from Bridgewater mugs and the tables were covered with Bridgewater oilcloths; a cumulative effect that could only be described as magnificent.

We had just about finished when a voice behind me said, “shall I take those?” I started to stack the plates. “Oh, don’t worry about stacking them,” she said. “We’ll see to that.”

“Oh fine!” I looked up and nearly dropped the plates. It was Emma Bridgewater herself, helping to clear the dishes. Now that’s style, I thought.

After lunch we found the factory shop. I had told myself that I wouldn’t be buying anything; my funds at the moment resemble the Government’s. But I chanced upon a rack of six-pint jugs in the Black Toast range and thought to myself what magnificent pieces they were and in my mind’s eye conjured up how good one of these jugs with its lettering of ‘Daisies and Cow Parsley‘ would look full of Pimms on a summer afternoon. They were marked down to £42. A snip, I thought. And an investment too, I persuaded myself. Pity about the lack of funds. But then, weakling that I am, I kept thinking of Pimms and summer afternoons and maybe I thought, too, of Emma Bridgewater clearing the dishes, and eventually I pulled out my card.