Another gingerbread house

In 1982, my brother, Will, had an au pair called Lotta. She was from Stockholm and introduced us to gravadlax and Swedish meatballs. We, in turn, introduced her to marmite, which she could not bear or even comprehend. We put a small jar of it into her stocking and my father filmed the look of horror that crossed her face when she unwrapped it.

The same Christmas, she had made a traditional gingerbread house for us. It had wooden figures, toadstalls and candles. Cotton wool snow. I arrived home from school to be told of these wonders and my mother took me into the dining room to inspect it. She struck a match to light the candles; but the head of the match flew off and hit a collection of Pampas grass that was in a vase behind it and the Pampas grass started blazing. My brother burst into tears; my mother picked up the roaring Pampas grass and carried it through the hall and out of the front door into the garden. Crisis averted.

Back in the dining room, standing next to a patch of scorched brown flowery wallpaper, Lotta was surveying ruefully the remains of her gingerbread house: collapsed walls; a strong smell of melted sugar; charred cotton wool snow, singed figures and blackened toadstools. A combination of the Wizard of Oz and Hansel and Gretel...

Hot cross buns

The mistake I used to make was to toast these until brown. In my view, they should be toasted until hot and no more. Then spread thickly with butter. The best hot cross buns I ever encountered - full of fruit - were in Hyderabad, India (one of the largest Moslem centres in India), on a Good Friday.

There is a wonderful episode in Frances Hodgson Burnett's "A Little Princess" where the ravenous heroine, Sara Crewe, discovers a silver sixpence dropped in the gutter, asks at the baker's whether anyone has lost it, then, reassured, buys six currant buns warm from the oven and, finally, gives five of them away to a beggar girl who is "even hungrier" than she, Sara, is.

Chip buttie

My mother introduced me to these in Coventry. I wonder how she discovered them. Our local chippie was at the bottom of Earlsdon Avenue. I do not remember whether we acquired the butties in the shop itself or whether they were made when we got home. At all events, it proved to be a wonderful and curious mixture of fats and carbohydrates: butter, salt, vinegar, bread and chip.

Many years later, I overheard two of my teachers at prep school talking in surprised disgust at the conduct of a visiting teacher from another school - there for a football match presumably - about how he put his chips between bread and butter. I was longing to contribute to this adult conversation by explaining that this was a chip buttie but was frostily excluded.