Tastes of home

Huw Williams | 22:35, Wednesday 11 July, 2012 | Turin, Italy

"Is there anything we can bring out for you?" is the question we always get asked when friends come to visit. And we appreciate it very much. These kind people are sensitive to the fact that there are certain tastes of home that you can't find in a different culture. Torino is famous for its chocolate, but for Brits there's something about Cadbury's that the Torinese will never know. Sometimes when we feel like a treat (and when we can procure the necessary tin) we sit down at our kitchen table to beans on toast, and feel like we're eating the food of kings.

Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying this for sympathy - much less to hint for food parcels! - we'd be the last to complain about the local food here. Of all the difficulties of adapting to our new culture, the food isn't one of them in this neck of the woods, believe me. But of course our senses are powerful things, and there's something about the taste of home which is very special.

And it's all five senses too. The music of Vaughan Williams is even more precious to me now (I hadn't thought it possible), I read Housman and Carr's A Month in the Country with a new sense of appreciation for home (however soggy the British Summer may be). Only the other day, I got inordinately excited by a parcel arriving through the post with the latest volume in my P.G.Wodehouse odyssey.

But of course if our senses are powerful, then nostalgia is also dangerous. I never lived in a world remotely close to A Shropshire Lad, or Jeeves and Wooster's escapades, however charming their re-creation on the page may be. But I've learned that even the art we discovered in one place, or at a certain time of life, can carry it's own contextual pull on the heartstrings.

And this is an ongoing process. As we pushed the pram around the corner this morning, and sat outside the bar enjoying a cappuccino and pastries to die for, on a beautiful Summer's day, I knew that we would miss this too. Perhaps, just slowly, Turin is becoming a place of setting down. A staging post on the journey. Or a bookmark. Home? No, but that is to come.