An incredibly bizarre concept but one that seems to be universal in the life of every Brit I know. I'm not quite sure how the pink custard meme first managed to get a grip in the minds of the nation's school dinner planners, but once there it spread like wildfire.

Nothing more complex than ordinary Bird's powdered custard with the addition of pink food colouring, pink custard used to make an appearance on the dinner tables at my primary school at least once a fortnight and possibly more frequently than that. Not content with good old-fashioned subtlety the cooks used to put in enough colouring to ensure that the custard glowed with a stunning lurid pink colour.

Even as a pre-teen I could tell that something was wrong: food should not be luminous. The taste was normal, the texture was fine, the aroma delicious. But I never quite managed to persuade myself that eating pink custard was a sensible thing to do.