There are golden beaches fringed with palms. There are mountains, blue-green, purple and gold, their high sunlit pastures rainbow-bright with flowers.

There are houses in ochre and pink and cream ranged beside water so intensely blue it hurts the eyes. The weather is always perfect, the views endlessly clear into the far distance; the few elegant people gathered around pools, lounging on beaches, sipping cocktails on sunny verandas, always utterly contented.

It's the world of the holiday brochures. Fat and glossy, they thud through the letter-box at this time of year. As the rain batters on the windows, on days so dark with cloud and fog that you need the light on all day, the brochures offer dreams. Warmth, relaxation, worries left behind...

Who wouldn't be seduced? My husband is an inveterate sender-for-holiday-brochures. At this time of year he spends hours browsing through them, occasionally emerging to draw my attention to some especially tempting cottage or hotel, some blissful package of dreams. He marks pages, adds excited comments in the margins, lists possibilties. He ignores price-lists so dizzyingly high that you'd need to be a lottery winner to consider them.

And we both know this is probably as far as it'll go. It'll be months before either of us actually gets round to booking a holiday, and then it'll be at the last minute and from some quite different brochure, or none at all.

But that's not the point of the brochures. They're not practical things, to be taken seriously. They're like those light-boxes you can get to counteract the depressing darkness of winter - they bring cheer to gloomy days and long nights, make you feel better, give you something to look forward to. And don't we all need daydreams, especially at this time of year?

There's an ad currently on TV for Spam - with black pepper. How can you have black pepper with Spam? It just doesn't go. The point of Spam is that it's a nostalgia thing, revived for people who recall its taste with pleasure and regret that it ever went away. Surely they're not going to want it served with new-fangled stuff like black pepper, which wasn't even dreamed of in most kitchens in the heyday of Spam, in the 1940s and 50s?

But then I can't imagine thinking of Spam with anything but disgust. I find it hard to imagine how anyone would want to go back to the food of those dark days of wartime shortages and rationing. It wasn't so bad if you could grow your own vegetables, or find food in the countryside. And many women knew how to cook good, plain wholesome food, of the sort that is sadly missing from many homes these days. But the processed foods of those days were truly horrible.

Then again, I guess nostalgia food is nothing to do with taste or quality. It's to do with memory. Those who long to taste Spam again remember family teatimes round the fire, or long-ago seaside picnics. That's what they want to recall, rather than the taste itself.

Maybe we all have some food that's so bound up with our past that we've long since ceased to taste it as it really is. We didn't eat Spam much when I was young. But spaghetti hoops in tomato sauce, that's another matter. And HP sauce. And do they still make caramel Instant Whip?

Published: 26/01/2006