Stuff in tins is generally superior. I'm keen to buy a nuclear fallout shelter just to store it. Tuna and – especially red salmon – in a can is vastly superior. My cats agree, Bad Cat will go mental if she even hears a tin opener being warmed up. Another highlight of my childhood was salmon sandwiches. The salmon would be mixed in a bowl with butter and then applied to buttered bread (the double butter was important) and layered with cucumber and onion that had been soaked in vinegar. I could have eaten a million of those, though sadly red salmon was precious and consequently rationed, so there was never enough. I can only gather during the late 1970s and 1980s that it was the most expensive food known to humanity. Seriously, in my first job as dogsbody general at the the local COOP, we kept the tinned red salmon under lock and key behind the ciggie desk and I had to stock-take supplies weekly.
The only fish-in-a-can I didn't get on with was pilchards. Once, at junior school, to get out of eating them (seriously, this was a glorious age before chicken nuggets and pizza), I feigned stomach ache. So successfully, that after an hour on the school's camp bed of recovery, I'd worried everyone so much they called an ambulance and I was rushed to hospital. You know how it is, once the lie was set there was no way to get out of it. Nope, I've never confessed, and yes, it caused something of a panic as worried teachers expected the kids to start falling en masse as the merry lumberjacks of food poisoning worked their way through the school. No one noticed that (a) I'd not eaten a pilchard and (b) the effect was curiously instant. I was a bit of a hero because that the last time pichards appeared on the dinner menu.
Anyway, I spent my recent holiday shovelling tinned fruit into my face, to my wife's distress. 'There's fresh fruit!' she'd declared foolishly as I chomped my way through another peach.
