On the day after the first of the Florestan Trio’s Beethoven Cycle concerts in the Wigmore Hall on Friday, a kind member of the audience invited me to lunch in Le Caprice, a lovely restaurant to which I had never been before. The bread basket on our table contained a a very superior freshly-baked carrot muffin which, however, nobody could face eating at the start of a meal. It was still sitting plumply in the bread basket at the end of the meal when we were too full to eat another thing, but I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving it there, so I asked I could take it away with me.

Our waiter glided away and came back with two more carrot muffins which he said would ‘make up a nice number for the family’. He took the three muffins away to pack them up. When it was time to leave, however, I had forgotten all about them. We left the restaurant and had walked a block away when we heard running footsteps behind us, and there was our beaming waiter in his stripey apron, pursuing us with a beautifully-packed blue bag of muffins. Talk about looking after your customers!