ONE of the things I like to do when we have family or friends to stay is to cook their favourite meals.

My friend Terry, for instance, who lives in California and was on a visit recently, rang to give me his time of arrival. I tormented him by saying I would have a nice ham salad ready when he arrived when I knew full well he wanted a traditional roast dinner.

Which is what he got. Roast pork with crackling, apple sauce, sage and onion stuffing, roast potatoes, six other vegetables and proper gravy. Not something you get in health conscious California where almost every item would have to be de-fatted and de-caloried. And we finished off with rhubarb crumble and Cornish clotted cream.

My son-in-law, who visited a week later and who was celebrating his birthday, asked for and got his very favourite meal. Liver and bacon, new potatoes, fresh broad beans and thick onion gravy. And for afters, a proper bread and butter pudding. This is a meal from his childhood, cooked by his grandmother when he came back from boarding school for the holidays.

Most of our favourite meals are childhood memories. Mine is a proper steak and kidney pie, with a deep thick crust over a rich mixture of equal parts kidney and good steak, with mashed potato, carrots and garden peas. We only got this when my mother cooked, my grandmother's favourite meal was tripe and onions, more of a childhood nightmare.

Thinking about this set me wondering what today's children will fondly remember in years to come. Will they demand pot noodles and Chicken Kiev? Hanker after thin little diskettes of ground up 'beef' or go all dreamy at the memory of nasty little concrete crumbed masticated chicken served with equally nasty mushed up potatoes in the shape of farmyard animals? I hope not.

One thing that has changed is pet food. When I was a child our cat Panda never saw sight of a tin of cat food.

His main diet was a collection of food items which looked like they had been bought at a sale day at the slaughter house. There was ox-liver. Not neatly sliced but in one glistening piece. Then there was ox-cheek, again in large bits, usually bluish in colour and quite often with bits of hair attached. And finally huge pieces of grey stuff known officially as 'lights', but usually called elephant's ears in our family. All these were boiled in a large aluminium saucepan kept for the purpose (except my grandmother used to boil the Christmas puddings in it, and we always hoped she gave it a thorough cleaning first but never liked to ask). Then the meat was chopped up and Panda got two square meals a day. Actually my grandmother always said how appetizing the cat's meat looked, which is possibly why nobody every let my grandmother cook a steak and kidney pie.

On Fridays the fish man called and we always got a bag of 'pussy pieces' which again had to be boiled and which often contained a whole cod's head complete with bulging eyes which if you were unlucky your saw the cat chew up with relish. Together with any leftovers that was the the cat's cuisine and he thrived.

The first tinned cat food I remember was Kit-e-Kat which came in one flavour - pink and fishy. One benefit of this stuff was that its aroma was so strong that you never had to search to find out where the cat had been sick, your nose led you to the spot. And it always surprised me that there seemed very little difference in colour and texture between the stuff in the tin and the stuff which had been in and out of the cat.

Today we have a whole array of foods in our cupboard with an amazing range of flavours, all of which the cats will tire of the second a buy one get six free offer comes to the supermarket. You can certainly bet your life that however much your cat seems to enjoy minced grouse and baby rabbit he or she will suddenly go off it if you buy more than one tin at a time.

Which is good news for Cats' Protection who collect tins of cat food (and there is a collection point in this office).

I am always fascinated by my cats' reaction to other cats who stray into the garden. It makes me think of parenthood when you always want to choose your children's friends because you think you are much more experienced than they are and you just know that the youth with the nose ring and the Mohican hair cut is not good husband material and the girl with the tattoos and the skirts so short they look like belts is not someone who is going to enjoy homemaking and cooking jam.

If I had my way my cats would entertain that rather aristocratic looking pale tangerine Persian lady who occasionally trips delicately through our grass. Or even a respectable gleaming tabby who sometimes jumps on the garden table and washes his whiskers. But no, they like the white and grey female who nicks their food when she thinks I'm not looking and who skulks in the bushes for most of the time, and a bedraggled looking black whippet thin visitor who does unmentionable things over my day lillies right in front of me.

I once had a little tortoiseshell female who saw off every cat in the neighbourhood and positively loathed a sleek and extremely beautiful Burmese male who I would have had up the aisle in next to no time if I had been her. Then she met what could only be dubbed the beast from 20,000 fathoms, a battered ginger tom who had been round the block more than once and had one ear and one eye, and not on the same side either. I would open the door at night and there on the step this thing would stare up at me, his one good eye catching the moonlight in a most disturbing way and his one good ear sticking out crookedly from the side of his head.

He looked as if Dr Frankenstein had played some part in his creation down at the pet cemetery. Then he would spit and flatten himself on the step and dare me to step over him.

But she loved him and would spend hours sitting nose to nose with this battered Lothario, whose parting shot was always liquid, unless you counted his assault on the bin bags as he lurched down the path.

There's no accounting for taste.

My two are in disgrace because I recently rescued a dear little thrush from the strawberry netting in the garden.

He had got himself well and truly tangled and it took half an hour to free him with a pair of nail scissors and he pecked me viciously all the time I was doing it. Then I set him down gently in the hedge and both cats, who had obviously been watching the rescue, leapt out and got him.

We then spent an entertaining ten minutes with me screaming blue murder and chasing them round and under bushes, through the pond and halfway up the big fir tree until I wrestled the poor creature away from the Ginger One while holding the Grey One firmly with one hand. I then carried two squirming and very cross bundles into the house and plonked them in front of a dish full of best game and duck liver cat food and pointed out that thrush was off the menu. They were not best pleased and I'm expecting retribution in the shape of a sicked up vole behind the tele any day now.