Extraordinary and brilliant!!

My friend Andrew Simpson and I might be over two hundred miles apart, but we are in constant contact about various things, and at the moment it’s food, recipes and cooking. I hesitate to mention how long we have been friends, we first met as students at Manchester Polytechnic, but my first word to him was “sorry” as I almost bumped into him as we rounded a display of magazines in W.H.Smith’s in Withington in Manchester. The shop has long gone and the business is also no more, however our half a century-plus friendship endures. Recently Andrew has become a little, dare I say, obsessed by cooking and experimenting with different things to cook and different ways of cooking them. We exchange photos of our different dishes, and when we chat on the phone, we witter on about what we’ve been doing in the kitchen as well as in our everyday lives.

I received this from him the other day, “So Lo, quorn mince, mozzarella & peas, with green beans and tomato sauce and Basmati rice,” which I must say does sound very appealing. When I first got to know Andrew, he told me all those years ago, that he had an O-level certificate in cooking and food technology. Now this was in the days when few schools were co-educational, and I imagine even fewer offered cookery/needlework/domestic science etc. to boys, and woodwork/metalwork/technical drawing to girls, so for him to say he had O-level cookery was extraordinary and brilliant!! It was many, many years later, and after I had boasted about his cookery and domestic science prowess to countless friends, that Andrew confessed it was a fib – he had said it as a joke and I’d been so impressed that he somehow omitted to tell me it was as a tease!!

My featured image is not of one of Andrew’s inventions, but one of my salads, however you can see what he wrote about spaghetti here:

https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2026/08/a-bit-of-history-on-beech-road.html