I've no idea whether they were unfashionable, Jack - too young to know at that time - but we ate them regularly up in Glasgow in the late 1940s. I remember them in the butcher's shop, paunched and hanging by their feet with the skins round their necks. When mum bought a couple, he'd chop the heads and skins off at the neck and weigh and wrap the carcases.

I wonder whether that still goes on in old-fashioned butcheries? On a minor thread drift, I also remember (from the same period) butter being cut from huge blocks, weighed and patted into shape by the grocer before being wrapped in greaseproof paper and tied with string. Also - most fascinating of all to a small boy - fish laid on huge gleaming blocks of ice in a fishmonger's window open to the street. Flies buzzing everywhere.

A bit of a far cry from the supermarkets of today...