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Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectator's Food and Drink podcast. I'm Lara Prendergast.

And I'm Olivia Potts. And today we are delighted to be joined by Alf Dubs.

Lord Alf Dubs is one of our most respected political figures, a child refugee who fled the Nazis before World War II and went on to become an MP, a minister for Northern Ireland and a member of the House of Lords.

He has a tireless campaign of refugee rights and now a patron for many charities working in the field.

Lord Dubbs, welcome to Table Talk.

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

I'm delighted to be here.

We're going to start where we always do at the very beginning

and ask you, what are your earliest memories of food?

I was, because I lived in Czechoslovakia in Prague until I was six years old when I came to Britain on a kind of transport.

I suppose my early memories of food was some of the dishes we had at home.

I'm not sure how much I normally remembers the food before one is six,

but I suppose I remember, it's not a very Czech dish, Vin a Schnitzel,

I remember some egg dishes, and I remember g it's not a very checked dish, she was in a schnitzel. I remember some egg dishes, and I remember

goulash. And those are the memories that go back and they've stayed with me because I still

eat those sort of things now. And do you have any memories of what mealtimes were like

when you were in Prague? Do you know, I have very few memories of meal times. Maybe the sort of shock

of coming to Britain and so on has raised the earlier

memories. My father was in business, small business. So, yeah, we'd sit around the table. I remember

that. In fact, I've been down the street where we used to live, and I have some vague memories

of that. I think I have better memories of when we went on holiday. We went to holiday either to

...