Where's the fun in strawberries when you can have them all the year round?

These days we've lost one of the pleasures of summer - the flavours. We also seem to have lost summer, but we'll let that lie.

Once upon a time strawberries were a delicacy to be enjoyed for a brief period of the year when the sun shone, Test Matches were in black and white and British tennis players fell at the first Wimbledon fence with depressing predictability.

Grandad had an allotment, which meant that strawberries featured large on our diet for their brief season, and made jam to cheer up the winter. Brussels sprouts, peas, tomatoes, cauliflowers and spring cabbage all had their seasons, too. Of these, only peas came in tins and could be regarded as a year-round vegetable. For the rest you had to wait.

And tinned peas came in two varieties, 'garden' and 'processed'. The actual 'process' used to turn the delicious seeds of the pisum sativum into a sickly, green, over-sweetened mess remains a mystery, but you still find them on the supermarket shelves, next to the tinned mushy peas.

Now there's an innovation. Thousands of years ago the only way to preserve any pulses through the winter was to dry them, then soak and cook them when needed. Now the manufacturers dry them, then soak them, then cook them, then put them in a tin - all to save the time it takes to boil a kettle.

With the advent of the deep freeze, pea-eating changed. As the late cookery writer Jane Grigson pointed out, frozen peas were so like freshly-picked and podded peas that people got out of the habit of buying the real thing, at the same time losing the chance of doing one of the more therapeutic jobs in the kitchen - running your fingers along the pod and hearing the peas lollop into the pan.

At a time when we seem to be running faster and faster to stay in the same place, these old, time-consuming but undemanding jobs are a sad loss.

Come to think of it, you rarely see the real thing in the shops any more, and when you do the pods look grey and ashamed, as if they hadn't made the grade. What's more they're expensive and, if you do buy them, younger shop assistants look at you as if you had asked for eye of newt and toe of frog.

Once upon about that same time, Britain's favourite three-course meal (dining out) was tomato soup, roast chicken and ice cream (at a time when chicken was a rare treat, while roast beef was the bog-standard Sunday lunch).

Nowadays, Britain's favourite night out ends with chicken tikka masala, an Anglo-Indian invention which you are fairly sure not to find on any menu on the Sub-continent. Mind you, you are highly unlikely to find the citizens of Karachi wolfing down pie, peas and black pudding after a night on the town, either.

Pie and peas, of course, was for years the only truly late night food to be had in Bradford. In the days a nightclub was what Alan Ladd met Veronica Lake in at the cinema, most fish and chip shops stopped frying at about the same time that the pubs shut. After that you were left with the rare - all too rare - establishments like Pie Herbert's in Carlisle Road, where the peas simmered in huge vats, pies hissed on the counter and two varieties of black pudding - stick and berry - hung on the back wall.

It could be a bit lively, particularly after closing time at the pub on a Saturday, and the odd bout of fisticuffs was not unknown - but if it was after midnight and you were hungry, Herbert's was a welcoming sight.

Nowadays you can eat out just about 24 hours a day in Bradford and enjoy food from four out of the six continents (Australia and Antarctica are a bit backward about coming forward), but in food terms we've lost the rhythm of the year.

Chicken tikka masala might be highly seasoned, but it isn't highly seasonal.

Alfreda's Siamese 'dream'

Did Alfreda Oates dream of Siamese twins - or did it really happen?

When she was at the old Gregory Central School for girls in Bradford in the early 1930s, the then Alfreda Laycock remembers Marks and Spencer opening their new store in Darley Street.

"It was announced that the store would be opened by Siamese twins," she recalls. "On the day, I ran down Church Bank after school to go to the opening as I wanted to see this unusual event.

"I remember watching them coming down the staircase from the top floor, linked to each other by their thighs, and they walked almost back to back.

"Since that time and many years after, I have recalled this happening but cannot find anyone who remembers.

"I'm beginning to think I must have dreamt it!"

Does anybody else remember this rather bizarre opening ceremony? Do drop me a line so we can put Mrs Oates' mind at rest one way or another.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.