Turban's no trouble for head of the family

My dad's back in India again. He's travel obsessed. There only needs to be the merest suggestion of a distant relative's engagement to a pretty biochemistry graduate from Delhi and he is on the phone to the long-suffering Aman booking tickets.

The current trip is for the wedding of a grand-nephew in the south Indian paradise of Kerala. Of course, when you have the wanderlust, it would be too simple to fly to Kerala, attend the wedding, eat copious amounts of nuptial foodstuffs and return half a stone heavier; far too easy. Instead you find a complicated route involving a three-plane flight and a small man called Kuljit.

Dad is currently in the Punjab, hanging with his best mate Manore, a man he has known and loved for five decades (nearly as long as Cliff Richard has enjoyed chart success). He phoned me on Tuesday. Now one might think he would be calling to: ask about the health and wellbeing of his second-born son; inquire about some business transaction that hadn't quite been completed due to someone (me) failing to sign the requisite documentation; to see why my mum had left the phone off the hook.

He rarely calls for these practical reasons. Instead he calls to ask me which new style of turban I desire.

The choices he offers from the turban-hotbed of the Punjab are truly mind-boggling, but in this instance his current obsession is with polka dots. Small polka dots or big polka dots in any colour. If there's a colour that I desire and which they currently do not have, he will arrange for that colour to be found or for a plain turban to be so dyed. My mind is awash with possibility; I love a fancy turban.

We settle on a white turban with small black polka dots. (I should point out that my father has an unhealthy predilection with the colour maroon. He has worn a maroon turban for almost all his life. It is a colour that leaves me cold and I have to find more and more inventive ways of avoiding him bringing me home a maroon turban, or in this instance a maroon turban with large silver polka dots.)

I love the fact that with a million things to do in a million different places my dad still manages to find the time to think about me and to search me out the newest, most fashionable and stylish turbans there are to be had in the whole of the Punjab. I also love the fact that every time he calls me he asks me the length of turban I like to tie. (Different people tie different lengths of turban; my father and my grandfather employed eight and a quarter yards.) I tell him, for the umpteenth time, that I need eight and three-quarter yards of material.

"Really?" he asks.

"Yes, dad," I reply.

He laughs. "That's because you're such a big head."

He continues laughing while he shares the joke with Manore, an expensive joke at international call rates. How can he blame me for having a big head when he goes to the effort of making me feel like such a special son?

Box-set bliss 40 years on

Anyone remember Pentangle? They were a British folk/jazz/rock band with the legendary Bert Jansch on lead guitar. I am obviously far too young to have remembered them in their heyday, which spanned the transition of the free-loving Sixties into the flare-riddled early Seventies.

I was introduced to them 20 years ago by a woman from Chester called Deb. She lived in a sweet wee bedsit on Byres Road and had an exotically eclectic taste in music. (She also gifted me Bowie and The The.) Evenings became night as we friends whiled the hours away listening to vinyl albums and drinking Bulgarian red wine.

I recently bought a new four-CD boxed set of folk/jazz/rock. I hadn't heard a single Pentangle track in the intervening decades and could barely remember what they sounded like. Having listened to the first few tracks it's difficult to believe that the sound is 40 years old. It feels so immediate. I feel hugely vindicated by my £28 box-set purchase. All I need now is a jazz cigarette, a black polo neck and a glass of that Bulgarian red.

Feeling flat after bubbly barney

I used to wait tables. I spent my university years and a couple of postgraduate years informing customers of daily specials, advising on which starter was best complemented by which main course and helping divide up the tips equitably.

The one lesson the entire experience taught me was that regardless of actual culpability the customer is seldom wrong. This inability to err manifested itself in the fact that I would invariably have to apologise, even if I felt the apology was misplaced. I soon learnt that right and wrong have little or no place in the world of restaurants.

So it was with great personal interest and more than a little chagrin I found myself arguing with the manager of a very chic and uber-cool new London restaurant over the fact (uncontested) that I had been charged £33 for three glasses of champagne I had yet to taste.

After some discussion the hefty overcharge was removed, but no apology or explanation was forthcoming. I was forced to explain to the manager that the very least he could do was say sorry: I would have returned to a restaurant that makes an honest arithmetical error but I am unlikely to revisit one that fails to be polite.

The king of meats is enough to make your pork belly rumble

Pat Duffy. It's all Pat Duffy's fault. He was the man who introduced me to the joys of roast pork. He had the wee dairy round the corner from my mum's shop on Sinclair Drive in Glasgow's Southside. After school, me and my brothers would pile into our backshop before mum would send us round to Pat's for a wee roll and gammon or cheese or corned beef. On one occasion, when supplies were low, Pat quietly insisted in his sweetest of Irish brogues that we try a roast pork roll. It was an unknown world to me. I trusted Pat and accepted his suggestion, and from that day my love affair with pork has burgeoned.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the bespectacled, curly-haired cooking God (and my own personal hero), has described pork as the king of meats, and I am forced to agree. From thick-cut smoked back bacon through the world of the sausage to delicacies like roasted pig's ears, there is no shortage of joy to be extracted from our porcine friends.

But of all the cuts, of all the delight for me, there is one cut of pork that is by far the superior, the tastiest, the most fulfilling. Pork belly. The flesh scored, rubbed with sea salt, olive oil and bay and allowed to crisp in the hottest of ovens while, below, the fat and the meat conspire to cook themselves into the richest, heartiest most flavourful of foods.

Last week I opted for the belly to be served with roasted pears and doused in a pear cider sauce accompanied by a spoonful of steamed greens. And as I ate I wanted to thank Pat Duffy and his quiet insistence.