I am half Welsh, half English, and my chief loyalties are to Wales, but I cherish nevertheless the old traditions of Englishness. They are fast fading now, as the English deliberately discard many of them, and as England becomes ever more multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. Coffee rivals tea as the national drink, curry is more popular than roast beef, they serve California Chardonnay in pubs and for every spectator at a cricket match a hundred are down the road watching the soccer.

Still holding out as a national talisman is Marmalade. I give it a capital M because I am not thinking of the sweet sticky stuff served up in plastic packages at freeway cafes, but of the dark tangy marmalade, preferably made of oranges from Spain, which possesses in my mind a figurative quality – Marmaladeness, perhaps. I once saw a film clip of the last of the aristocratic British Prime Ministers, Alec Douglas-Home, eating his breakfast before attending some vital conference, and was almost converted to Toryism by observing bang on the table in front of him, with a spoon in the top, a proudly labelled pot of Cooper’s Original Thick Cut Oxford Marmalade.

I myself like marmalade just as much with a dinner beefsteak as I do on a breakfast slice of toast. But then for me it has become as much a symbol as a preserve, and wherever I go in England I scour the marts for good examples. All too often I am offered fancy hybrids or substitutes: orange-and-lemon marmalade, marmalade with whisky or brandy in it, or elder-flower flavouring, jam-like marmalade imported from France, supermarket marmalade with artificial colouring or numerical additives, marmalade more like fruit jelly, Ye Olde Teashoppe Marmalade made in an industrial estate somewhere...

The full version of this article appears in the latest issue of Cambria