This used to be an HTML tutorial. Now it's recipes. Errm, why? I've swapped recipes over the Internet since I first got online: everyone has favourites. I can still remember the night my wife Sue turned up with a piece of salt beef and said, "cook this". I called mum. She didn't know what to do. Someone eight time zones away was online and replied to my post almost immediately with his favourite sauce. Mum, then aged over seventy, thought that was great.

The HTML tutorial was written several years ago. In order to convince people that everyone has some content that others might want to read, I used my mother's recipe cards as an example. If no one posts their favourites, there'll be no one to tell me what to do with salt beef. The layout looks and feels a bit dated, but my mother liked the way I'd used elements from the "recipe tin". I could improve on both the HTML and the images but I don't quite want to change any of it. I'll write a new web tutorial some time.

Mum used to teach domestic science (she trained at Atholl Crescent) and when she died, one of the few things I took from the cottage was the tin of recipe cards.

Maybe they're nothing special to anyone else, favourite cheap meals (we never had a lot of money), treats cut from magazines, comfort food I remember from when I was little. Treat it as an historical document; a snapshot of what a not-very-well-off British family ate in the nineteen-sixties.

Or cook some of the recipes. Remember the marvellous woman who served trifle and custard to my friends for New Year's breakfast; who was fascinated by the green pepper sauce with the Magret of duck on our last meal together. The mother who sent me over to measure every last d*mn thing my grandmother put in the custard tart, and still couldn't make it work. The lady who blagged the recipe for the prawn pithivier for me from the chef at the Hume, despite being allergic to seafood. Enjoy. Or don't. One thing she'd have hated would be to think of anyone eating something they don't like.