I bought a potato in Marks & Spencer. Just the one. It was not the first potato I had ever bought. In fact, though I may not look a gift potato in the eye, I fancy myself a shrewd judge of potato flesh.

When the world was golden, Marks & Spencer was no place to buy potatoes. I would buy them in the market. That meant you had to watch out for the stallholder smuggling in specimens with blackened stumps or green gills and shovelling lumps of earth into the bowl of the scales. But they were better and cheaper than supermarket potatoes.

Alternatively you could go to the greengrocer’s. Down my way, they’ve all gone. When I was a boy, a rather bad one called Chitty’s was run by Mrs Chitty because her husband, Basil Armistice Chitty (born 1918), was usually in the Plough public house. The Plough, a wealth of fake oak beams, was a step up from the Railway Arms (nowhere near the station), which I think had until recently only possessed a beer licence and could not sell spirits. Mr Howley the butcher drank in the Plough, too, and in the afternoon often chopped his big red fingers instead of the neck of lamb on the block.