Re ancient Christmas puddings, (Letters, 22 November), during the second world war my grandmother sent a year-old pudding to my dad in the Royal Navy. The pudding turned up 18 months later while he was on HMS Victorious in the Pacific. By this time it had grown a covering of green mould. Undeterred, Dad shaved it and ate the remains seated on the mess piano (which was floating at the time due to a storm).
Jane Ghosh
Bristol
• My father was in Malta in the second world war and one of his favourite tales was about the Christmas parcel my mother sent. It had taken so long to arrive that the carefully knitted socks had rotted around the Christmas pudding that they were meant to protect.
Simon Fowler
Lamberhurst, Kent
• In answer to Anne Cowper, the blackened but intact-looking loaves uncovered and displayed in Pompeii predate bread rolls from the opening of Wagner’s Parsifal by some 1,800 years.
Dr Anthony Cheke
Oxford
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