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Hello. Now, although D.W. Redding describes my weekly newsletters as displaying an unhealthy

infatuation with my own past, I'm not at all fond of hearing other people's reminiscences.

So many memories summoned up by friends seem self-serving, stories of how despite her series of

historical setbacks that would have given con-d deed pause for thought, they managed to emerge

just fine upstanding characters. But I remain intrigued by purely sensory memories, my friend Dave's memory of the taste of the fat on top of the

citicatura's meat pies they used to serve up in the boy's pen at Anfield, or the smell of evening in Paris, which is forever a neater

fielding, or the wiff of patulae oil that instantly summons up in equal measure the horrors

and the delights of the early 70s. So I was excited to come

across a research paper that applied what the author called a Proustian anthropological

approach to its subject matter. An approach in other words which relied upon Proust-Magglin-Biscuit revelation that although taste and smell may be fragile, they endure. They remain like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping amid the ruins of all the rest.

Well, that Madeline Duskit eventually prompted seven volumes of Proustian reminiscence.

My next guest, rather more modest use of sensuous memory occupies

only 17 pages of the Irish Journal of Sociology where it appears under the title,

The Sensuous Secrets of Shelter, how recollections of food stimulate Irish men's

reconstructions of their early formative residential experiences in

Leicester, Sheffield and Manchester's author who now joins me is Angela May Banbury, who's principal lecturer in housing and social history at Sheffield Hallam University.

Angela, you use a so-called Proustien lens through which to examine the memories of Irishmen who moved to England

in the late 50s and in the early 60s.

But I think when you began this study of these people arriving, your interview technique didn't focus on the topic of food explicitly.

Hi, that's absolutely right. In fact, what we have been focusing on was what we we

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