Sometime in about 1975 a young man called Simon – if memory serves – was attending university in Southampton. At that time, he was sharing a house with a young, impressionable student called Mary. Mary was a good cook, but it was Simon who taught Mary a rather unusual recipe for spaghetti bolognaise. She adopted it, and would later cook it for her husband, whom she also met in Southampton, and later her sons. In time, they would all cook it their selves, and thus the recipe would live on.

All save the middlemost, for whom cooking, let us say, would be a highly dangerous activity. Yet, thirty two years after it’s creation, roughly the same recipe was cooked at a university, by another Mary. For the middlemost son was cunning at instruction: he remembered his mother’s recipe, and, unable to cook it himself for fear of fire, calamity and explosion, he was able to instruct his friend about making the recipe. And thus it was, in the early spring of 2008. that same spaghetti bolognaise was made anew, and eaten again in halls, just as it was upon it’s creation.