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This much-maligned matrix is the thing that gives dough its elasticity, allowing it to stretch into beautiful big, blistered bubbles in the oven, rather than staying resolutely solid, like one of those boxed supermarket pizza bases that passed for authentic in the 1980s, but now resemble nothing more than a Bath Oliver biscuit.

The three tall towers are two cocoa tins and a Bath Oliver tin, very brightly polished; the windows and doors and crenellations are of black passe-partout, that nice gummed paper which you buy in reels for binding pictures and glass together when you don't want to have picture-frames.

‘Have a Bath Oliver,’ said Dan, and he passed over the squashy envelope with the eggs.

A bottle of bovril embedded itself quietly there without damage, and a tin of Bath Oliver biscuits beat a fierce tattoo on one of corned beef.