Cold pork

"William and John left for Yorkshire at half past two this afternoon, cold pork in their pockets." Thus opens Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, and it inspired me, many years ago, to make a point of carrying a cold pork product of some description on a walk of any distance: a Scotch Egg, a Kabanos, Italian salami... Possibly the only thing I haven't taken is the remains of a joint of pork which is, presumably, what William Wordsworth took with him that Sunday afternoon, leaving his sorrowful sister behind him.

Greek barbecue

The whine of the engine lessened but this time it was not due to the dolphins which had put on a display for us about an hour before. We slipped into a picture perfect cove and some of us jumped off the boat into the Aegean below. It is a cliché but it was aqua clear.

The crew were doing nothing as frivolous as swimming or snorkelling. They had scrambled up the hillside where a barbecue waited. The smell of smoke soon pervaded followed by the words "Food is ready!"

On the table were: meatballs, pork kebabs, chicken pieces, roasted peppers, aubergine and courgettes, grilled sardines, Tatziki, potato salad with red onion, green salad with dill and tomato salad. There was also garlic bread. And pasta salad, which I rarely touch but which I am usually glad to see among other things because it fills others' stomachs. After we had helped ourselves and sat around eating, the proprietor sent round his crew to fill our plates with more and yet more. Protestations were ignored. The tomato salad was reduced to a large pool of juice but even that did not go to waste. The boatman dipped the remains of the garlic bread in the juice and offered it as "Bruschetta". And we discovered a post-meal entertainment: throwing the fish heads into the sea whereupon a swarm of furious thrashing tails would swarm towards and cannibalise it. It was the closest thing I have seen in real life to that piranha scene in "You Only Live Twice".

Nothing to be improved upon: just a reminder of how on a rocky hilltop with nothing more than a barbecue and good ingredients a better meal can be produced than the (presumably) fully equipped kitchen from the day before.

Long haul flights

These musings occur to me on a flight from Tokyo to Vienna - both excellent places but the parts in between, certainly on the current flight path, seem to me to be a little barren.

First, I am convinced that one of the two outer seats in the bank of four is the best to aim for. There is always a chance that the passenger next to you will choose to clamber out on the other side if you are asleep. The other two passengers are almost bound to do so.

Airline food is almost always disgusting: Victoria Wood once summed it up well when she described the passenger next to her who ate everything: "He ate the salt and pepper. He ate the little towelette thing for wiping your hands on. He even ate the thing I thought they only put there for a joke, you know the tinned pear and the dream topping." When comedians make you realise how we've always thought something but never dared to say it out loud.

The meal just served by Austrian Airlines fell, I am afraid, into the disgusting category. There was a choice between "Asian Chicken" and "Western Pork". I plumped for the chicken, on the grounds that we were in Asia and the food was likely to have been made there by people more experienced in putting together Asian food than Western food. The chicken had been so finely minced that it was indistinguishable from the insipid sauce surrounding it. Remind me, on another occasion, to write an entry on the western style sliced bread they give you in India.

The only exceptions to the rule about poor food are, in my view, when snacks are purveyed. Air France provided a perfectly good baguette filled with Mountain Ham on a flight from Paris to London once. Fortunately there was no time to heat up any food. A different kind of ham but none the worse for it was given to me by the staff on a USAir internal flight. I recall a particular awkwardness: I wanted a tomato juice to go with it. How, though, should I say tomato?

Porc

The summer of 1980 was one of those golden periods between one school and the next. That year, as usual, we went to France. Early in the holiday, we ended up at a campsite where our tent was pitched next to the caravan of an English couple called Gladys and Alan.

For some reason, my mother took an instant dislike to them. In fairness, it was, initially, nothing that they had done wrong. Her feelings stemmed from a prejudice against the Brits abroad. When in France, save for her own family and friends, she preferred to forget the existence of the Anglais.

And, to my mother's horror, Gladys and Alan were only too delighted to have an English family of four staying next to them. How they first introduced themselves I do not remember. I speculate that they offered us cups of tea on our arrival; my mother couldn't stand tea. Before we had been their neighbours for long, Alan had made a wooden boat with metal fittings for my brother. It was almost as though we were surrogate grandchildren.

One evening, Gladys came over to our tent and told us in a state of high excitement that she and Alan were going to a telephone box for the purposes of finding out their daughter's O-level results. "Have fun!" said my mother briefly. After they had left, my father, presumably thinking her hostility had been ill-concealed, murmured a mild reproach to my mother: "They've been very hospitable." No doubt he was referring to the tea.

Later on, the couple returned, having failed to negotiate the workings of the French telephone system. It turned out that they had been dialling the area code for Brittany rather than the international code for Britain. My father lent a hand and, in the process, discovered that although they had been coming to France for many years, Gladys and Alan had not picked up a word of French. We learnt that when it came to shopping for food, they would simply march into the butcher's and say: "Pork!" which, out loud, has the same meaning in both languages. They ended up eating casseroled pork, pork chops and roast pork. But always pork.

Thus it was that we ended up being invited to a barbecue with them. Gladys returned to the campsite after a morning's quest for food: "Success!" she announced with a beaming face to my underwhelmed mother, who at first indicated puzzlement. The couple had found, it must be admitted, a rather magnificent cut of pork for cooking on the barbecue, cylindrical in shape. That evening, they roasted it for us on a spit and I can remember nothing about what there was to go with it. But the meat was memorable.

We duly moved on from the campsite. Gladys and Alan sent us Christmas cards for a few years and then stopped. Exactly ten years later, my school days had come to an end and I was now in that period between school and university. We no longer went camping; my parents had bought a house in the south of France. One day, my mother decided on a whim that we would have supper in a playing field next to a river where there were some barbecues. There she roasted pork chops. During the meal, we reminisced about Gladys and Alan, that couple we had met at that campsite years ago, who thought Brittany meant Britain and only ever ate pork. The banal can often make the greatest memories of all.

Hot sausage and mustard

Red Dwarf's Lister once mused, "Why do intelligent people buy cinema hotdogs?" No doubt he would agree with the existence of the rule that states that a hot dog stall should sell sausages as rubbery and lacking in any flavour other than that of stale oil, which should be contained in soggy white rolls and served with slightly burned onions or, worse, onions tasting as though they've been boiled for a very long time.

Is it something to do with the need for a sense of danger about the experience? Enid Blyton's Snubby is one of her more engaging child characters, certainly next to his insipid cousins Roger and Diana. He was prepared to refuse the sausage sandwiches on offer at Rilloby Fair, choosing instead "tomato sandwiches of which he was inordinately fond". A sensible child. His cousins got food poisoning.

In my first job, I recall the sausage sandwiches provided by a white faced and overweight cook; he would cut each sausage in half horizontally. They were average but not bad sausages.

I reject the thesis that bad food should emerge from a hot dog stall and that one should simply learn to appreciate it. My recent encounter in Bromley demonstrated my point. On offer at the butcher's stall, along with meat for cooking, sausages were sizzling. Three kinds of sausages - ordinary, Cumberland and pork and apple. I went for ordinary, with onions. The sausages themselves were described as organic, no guarantee but a promising sign. What further reassured me was the sight of the stall holder poking the sausages carefully with a meat thermometer. When I saw this, I said to the stall holder, "You do this properly, don't you?" He looked pleased or maybe he just felt that would be the politic response to my eccentricity. The bread rolls themselves did not look cheap and nasty. It all augured well. I added some mustard and set off, eating along the way. I was not disappointed. Sausage so hot that I had to chase it around my mouth breathing heavily. A meal to cheer.

Another memorable sausage sandwich was provided to me by a family friend. Andrew Reid took my order the night before, very carefully and methodically taking my instructions: whole grain mustard, bread rather than toast. We had to set off very early in the morning - an icy morning - from rural Buckinghamshire. Keeping me warm on that coldest part of the journey were the contents of the package handed to me by Andrew, wrapped in silver foil.