He managed to persuaded the other kids it was ‘The In Thing’ like ‘Shabby Chic’ and they were all doing it with their own Wuffy bits of fur. If he insisted on sucking his thumb with the Wuffy, when we were in a shop I’d look at him and say, “Haven’t you eaten all the meat off that yet?”

I was brought up on tinned food – mam on Sunday recreating the Biblical feeding of the five thousand by mixing a tin of salmon with half a loaf of bread and a dash of vinegar.

We always had a tin of condensed milk which we’d bash two big holes in the top of so it would pour. The holes were handy for sucking the stuff out when Mam wasn’t around. We used to put it on sandwiches.

We’d never heard of boiling the can to make the toffee for the exotic banoffee pie. Aunt Zillah always had a tin handy so she could stick her fire place tiles back on.

We never had corned beef Dad was convinced it was horse meat. It was because of corned beef cans that I met the page three model Samantha Fox.

We did a spot together in a large London kitchen. I was there to talk about safely opening cans, specifically corned beef cans, which apparently cause more accidents than any other.

Interestingly corned beef was the second meat of choice for some cannibal descendants because they liked the corpsy flavour.

They actually prefer Spam which apparently tastes just like humans, which has made me look on it in a completely different light. I can now enjoy the cannibal experience with out all the fuss and bother of getting the ingredients.

My only bad experience with cans was when Mam put me on the tinned spaghetti diet every day and of course the grass soup. But you can’t go far wrong if you.

1 Stick to a tinned food diet.

2 Don’t eat cereals that change the colour of your milk ie chocolate.

3 Don’t drink anything that turns white when mixed with water. I learnt this very early in life with granny’s milky diluted Dettol washing water. That she kept in a half pint milk bottle.

4 ‘Never drink anything off the top shelf and you’ll live longer’.

I thought this applied to dodgy liquids put out of the reach of children. I was told this by an old Guinness drinking Irish guy in the Junction Pub, Marsh. So I think he meant something else.

5 The wise man washes his hands before going to the toilet after eating wasabi nuts.

6 Finally, but it’s now too late for me, don’t antagonise lobsters as you could meet them in the afterlife.

l PS Good news on the coffee crème famine. I’ve just got a complete box of coffee crèmes from Sugar and Spice my favourite sweet shop in the covered market.

I was reading about the forced rhubarb trade. Forced rhubarb, if you don’t know, is grown in dark sheds so it grows fast, desperately trying to get to the light which isn’t there. Sad really. It grows so fast you can actually hear it. You can do the same if you keep your rhubarb in the dark.

All this reminded me of when Kath Evans accused me of forcing her rhubarb on the sly. I said: “What makes you think it’s me?”

She said:“Well someone’s put a red bucket over it?”

It wasn’t me and we never did find out who the Rhubarb Rustler of Greenhead Park was.

l Wilf’s autobiography to the age of elevenŠMy Best Cellar can be purchased at Waterstones or via his website www.wilflunn.com