Smoked fish

It was the old colonial breakfast dish of kedgeree that nearly did for legendary BBC journalist John Simpson.

"It was a Monday, and in retrospect, if I had had half a brain, I would not have ordered kedgeree because I suspect that it had been sitting around all weekend. I thought it tasted slightly weird, but Dee [his wife] and I were chatting so I carried on shovelling it in. But towards the end of the meal, I thought: “No, something’s wrong” and I stopped eating.’

Four days later, after bouts of sickness and diarrhoea, he collapsed at home in Oxford and was taken to the John Radcliffe Hospital. He tells the Daily Mail of 20 family, friends and doctors summoned to stand around his hospital bed, as he struggled to beat kidney failure induced by food poisoning. Eventually, a spell on a dialysis machine washed the toxins out of his blood.  The full story amounts to over 1800 words -  which would take some ten minutes to read out on the telly or radio.

Now, surely, there will be calls to reveal the restaurant/breakfast joint wot did it....