Tuesday Ten

Ten foods I eat regularly now that were exotic when I was a kid

1. Cloudy apple juice.

2. Squash. We weren't really allowed it as children. I still mostly drink water but there's still something faintly illicit about drinking a big glass of lemon squash. The same used to go for diet Coke but I'm sort of over that now.

3. Kettle chips. They were the height of fancy-ness when I was young. Up there with Monster Munch.

4. Bagels. I was obsessed by them as a kid and they were almost impossible to get hold of. I loved living in Golders Green as a student because you could get them everywhere and at almost any time - bakeries full of aging, arguing Jewish men at 3am on a Saturday night and as much fresh bread as anybody could want after a night out on the town.

5. Really big muffins. Father Hand used to bring us CostCo muffins back from his trips to the US and a dozen would go in the freezer. One would feed me and my closest friends for a breaktime. They were about 7 times the size of anything you could buy here at the time. I don't eat them regularly now, but they are much more common.

6. Blueberries. They weren't really around back then, as far as I can remember.I think there is a much larger selection of exotic fruit than there was back then.

(This is hard.)

7. Fancy coffee shops. Bit of a cheat this one but I'm sure there weren't any, or I would have hung around in them, even though I didn't drink coffee. We used to go to Three Cooks in Southsea, or Snookies, which did better cakes and hot chocolate but which was dearer.

8. Gin. I felt very exotic drinking it - I remember trying it because I read an interview with Kate Moss in which she said gin and tonic was delicious, and what overweight 90s teen didn't want to look a bit more like Kate Moss and a bit less like a Snookies addict?

9. Curry. My parents were big curry fans and used to have biannual curry parties for all their friends. This seemed to involve a week of preparation, grinding spices, grating cucumber, making place cards and putting fresh candles in their large collection of dusty Matteus Rose bottles that lived in the shed. For a long time I thought all curry involved a massive effort, rather than a quick phone call and a payment to a delivery driver.

10. It's too late for me to think of number 10.

Nearly half mine are drinks. Should I be worried?