Yogurt and Crisps

One of the reasons I like taking photographs of everyday objects is because they really demonstrate how things change.

The big food cupboard in our kitchen is built into the kitchen wall, backing onto the fireplace in the room behind. The kitchen was only built on in the 1920s, and it has both the feeling of an afterthought and the feeling that it's falling over, because the builders didn't join it on properly and it's been trying to escape from the rest of the house ever since.

And the big cupboard probably, in the 1920s, wasn't a food cupboard, because it backed onto the fireplace, and anyway there was a nice, cool larder next to the kitchen, which is now where the back hall and back door is.

But it's been a food cupboard since the sixties to my knowledge and I wish I had a photograph of how it was then.

All those brands that have gone! All those new ones that have come!

It's the crisps and the yogurt that always demonstrate it to me.

In the Olden Days there were Smiths' Crisps, potato flavoured (what else?) with a little twist of blue paper in the packet containing salt.

One day, in Pisa, Italy, when I was seven, my parents bought me a packet of crisps from a stall and they had a strange new flavour. Aniseed.

The aniseed flavoured crisps never really caught on and never made it to this country. I suspect that the reason was that they were totally vile.

But soon afterwards, I was at Flamingo Park Zoo, as it was called then - now Flamingoland - with Lesley Ball, who was a friend from school, and her parents. They bought some crisps in a thrilling new flavour. Cheese and onion! Fantastic! We each had our photos taken with a parrot on our shoulder and cheese and onion crisps in our hands. It was an iconic moment.

In those days, hardly anyone ate yogurt, which was a kind of Foreign Food. We had some friends who ate it - it was plain, and you put cucumber in it.

Then we discovered that Sixties Heaven - sugar. And we put sugar in it. And it was delicious. And then - another iconic moment - Ski brought out an exciting new flavour. Apricot. And that was it for what seemed like ages. Apricot yogurt, a taste of the future!

Then, one by one, more flavours crept in. I don't know why they took so long. Nowadays everyone takes them for granted, but, because of my sixties roots, I don't like the mixed flavours quite so much - you can keep all your passionfruit-and-melon nonsense. Give me apricot every time. Or raspberry. Or gooseberry. Proper fruits. On their own. In yogurt. That's enough progress for me.