Twitter these days is generally regarded as a disaster, infested by verified Nazis and narcissistic man-children threatening nuclear war. I continue to like it: hugely useful if you have any kind of, ah, niche interests. And every now and then it throws up the perfect way to lose an afternoon. Recently, the writer @laurenbravo asked: “What’s the literary/cultural reference you use most often despite not having actually read the book or seen the film? Mine’s Miss Havisham” — which resulted in confessions involving Kafka, Pinter, mad women in attics, portraits in attics, madeleines, Lolitas and Catch-22s.

What was mine? Not literary fraud, I realised, but culinary. Despite frequently using it as shorthand for all that’s bad about “British” food and chain catering, I’d never eaten