Food, glorious food, as the Lionel Bart song says.  As I might have mentioned before, I am a lover of the good stuff, a bit too much really - as Clare will often remind me when I try for another of her wonderful spuds.

The first meal I bought Clare in London was the old traditional cockney dish of pie 'n' mash - quite a challenge for a non-Londoner, and I must say I admired her gusto in taking it on. For those of you who have not had the delightful experience, pie and mash shops in London are usually places that have been there for 100 years or so.

They do a great trade in live eels, as well as having someone in the shop despatching them in front of the visiting public. I recall going with my grandmother into one famous pie shop and at the front of the shop was a man in the window. As I looked over he was chopping up live eels. Most of them were wriggling about still after being chopped. Nowadays, the trade is taken up by London’s multi-racial communities.

The main dish sold is pie and mash — a minced beef and cold water pastry pie and mashed potato. It is common for the mashed potato to be spread around one side of the plate and for a type of parsley sauce to be present. This is commonly called eel liquor sauce or liquor (although it is non-alcoholic) because it is traditionally made using the water kept from the preparation of the stewed eels. The sauce traditionally has a green colour, from the parsley.

Now Clare opted for double pie and double mash, or as we call it, “double, double”. I was impressed but she was not - as being a sound northern lass she was used to a decent pie with a decent crust. As she was tucking in after a long train journey I could not finish it and Clare left a bit. After, outside the shop, I asked her what she thought. “Bloody 'orrible Dan. They were meat paste pies - come up north and I’ll get you a proper pie.”

I should have known really as there was a look of horror on her face as they poured the liquor all over her pie. In answer to your query, yes I am still married to her after this - only just mind.

My Dad had worked for nearly forty years in London’s Smithfield meat market in a few shops with all the other men under the medieval titles of porter and bummaree. When he first came up to see us in Rishton we took him around the old Accrington market and when walking around such places he would be looking at the butchers shops and stalls.

He was amazed that a good number of them had the old fashioned bacon cutters: “You don’t see that a lot nowadays”.

He was quite entranced by the charm of the machines he had worked with from being a boy. Better would come once I showed him our local butchers. We got some bacon cut and then a couple of pound of pork sausage as he was searching London stores for a good breakfast sausage.

Once he had tasted the ones made in Rishton he was hooked. On his return to London he had told all of his mates about the bacon and sausage and then it started properly. Each time I travelled down to see my old man I had to give the butchers two days notice to ready a package of bacon and sausage to be packed properly so I could take them on the train.

So now, when I pop into my local butchers and ask for a big load of bacon and sausage, the chaps in there ask me “Is it for London export Dan?”