What an amazingly versatile food an egg is. I well remember as a child the slogan of “Go to work on an egg”, the very successful advertising campaign of the Egg Marketing Board.

For some reason, we only ever had boiled eggs for Sunday breakfast after Mass or for tea after a day’s hunting. Eggs come in so many different sizes, the smallest being the quails’ eggs which, hard-boiled and peeled, are delicious dipped into truffle or celery salt and make a good canapé.

Bantam eggs are the next size up. We kept bantams when we lived in Port Said in Egypt. My father, a career soldier, was stationed there in 1955. The following year we had the Suez Crisis, and all wives and children had to be evacuated in the middle of the night. We were put on an army ship, which wasn’t allowed to stop, to take us back to England. My little sisters and I (I was six at the time) mourned leaving our bantams far more than leaving our dolls behind, one of which fell into the canal.