In the new order of our living – swapping and sharing tasks to make life easier for us both – whoever is fit and going in the direction of the shops picks up whatever we need.

April and May are the months in which I am fortunate to have three celebrations close together – my birthday, Mother’s Day and our wedding anniversary.

I know of old that it is not much use asking the Moth to choose a special dinner. He is hard put to say even what he would like for an ordinary meal; sometimes he fails to identify what he has just eaten.

I have given up quizzing him; it is unkind.

But I did think that, given my own inability to stand over the stove for any length of time, and the fact that two of those events landed on the same day, that he would have a look around the supermarket and come home with something that was both pre-prepared and a little above the ordinary.

It is, after all, remarkable that the Moth is doing any of the grocery shopping at all.

I have done it for fifty years. If there were degrees in the art of shopping for food, I would have passed with highest honours.

I know a genuine bargain from a fake one, and that a reduced price for buying twice as much as you need, or food that you are going to have to bolt down that evening or risk food poisoning, is false (and dangerous) economy.

I know that a small quantity of high quality food is better than a large quantity of low quality food, even if it does cost a bit more.

The Moth is the complete opposite – hence if you send him out to do the shopping he will return with milk the consistency of water, tomatoes that have no smell and even less taste, and vast quantities of items that have been reduced by 75% because their use-by date is in half an hour.

Still, I thought he might pick up a ready- stuffed, roasted chicken, or a dish of lasagne.

Instead, he presented me with a cauliflower.

It was a very fine cauliflower. Had I been doing the shopping, I would have picked it up too. Its huge head of tightly packed, white buds had no discolouration, meaning that it was freshly grown and picked.

But I hadn’t counted on celebrating with a cauliflower; although perhaps, on reflexion, I should.

Ubiquitous in every greengrocery department, the vegetable dates back from time immemorial – there are records of cauliflowers in Cyprus as early as the 6th Century.

Descended from wild cabbage it is a relative of Kale and other members of the Brassica family, its main feature being that what we eat is the undeveloped white flower buds which, tightly packed and protected by wrap-around green leaves, never develop – not if we have anything to do with it.

It is not easy to grow, preferring a relatively cool, moist climate; astonishingly, I once put in a punnet of cauliflower seedlings and had each one develop into a perfect cauliflower. The miracle here was that virtually nothing grows where I planted these – it was like condemning seedlings to death, and I had no expectations of the leggy little plants. But they not only put roots into the dusty, dry soil they grew and became adult cauliflowers. They were so beautifully formed – not a slug or snail trail in sight – that I didn’t want to pick them.

In the end, I gave one each as a gift to a party of friends, and ate the remaining one with some ceremony.