Who doesn't know what Haggis is?

This doesn’t look promising. My friend, A, has invited me around to try her ‘cooking’ (her quotations) and there’s something about the way she hacks at a red onion with a paring knife in the near incidental light of the downlighters in her kitchen, that does not suggest she does this all that often. It’s only now that I notice that her kitchen is suspiciously clean. She heats some oil in a pan and adds the onion, chopped mushrooms, some spinach leaves and halved cherry tomatoes, before pouring over a jar of bolognaise sauce and stirring. She then adds Quorn meatballs from the freezer. I must have wrinkled my nose at this point as she feels the need to reassure me and top up my wine glass. When she serves it up with spaghetti, I have to say that I’m pleasantly surprised, it’s actually very eatable and I’ve had a couple of vegetables that don’t often pass my lips: Spinach and cherry tomatoes. We follow it with Belgian chocolate cheesecake.

We talk and have a laugh about numerous things, before the subject turns to Haggis and I tell the story of how my sister thought for a few years that a haggis was an animal of some kind. How ridiculous! What a sucker! However the sombre features of my dining partner indicate she, until that very second, had thought the same. I ask her to describe and she mimes in her two hands holding a furry guinea pig-like creature. I haven’t known her that long and this is definitely an awkward moment. Later in the evening I manage to achieve some kind of embarrassment equilibrium by telling her my still unsubstantiated theory on milk on tap in pubs. We make a pact not to tell the other’s secret.