Guardian readers reflect and reminisce about the cooking equipment that has been significant in their families

Among the wedding presents from 1963 that I still use (Letters, 9 October) are Denby ovenware, a complete set of Prestige kitchen utensils, a Victorinox paring knife we bought with money given to us for bedsheets, and smoked-glass wine and sherry glasses from a friend of my parents. When a grandchild noticed that we had rather a lot of flower vases, we had to confess that when asked what we would like as a present, we were so embarrassed that we always said “a flower vase”, knowing that it could come in at any price. It was a vintage year, 1963.
Prue Baker
Brighton

• I inherited my mother’s potato masher, bought just after the war. As a newly married housewife setting up home with everything in short supply and rationing continuing, she told me that she was delighted to see the masher for sale and bought two – one for her sister. It was flimsy – a thin circular metal holed base with three wires attached, which were twisted to form the stem, and a wooden handle painted blue. History and memories in a utensil.
Sue Rawson
Scarborough, North Yorkshire

Exclusive: Portsmouth Historic Dockyard’s new £15m permanent display tells tales of courage from conflicts such as Crimean and both world wars

They tell tales of bravery under fire, may lead to conversations about the UK’s place in the world and could prompt visitors to reflect on what they might have done if faced with the same perilous circumstances.

All 10 Victoria Crosses (VCs) awarded to members of the Royal Marines are going on display together for the first time along with tales of courage during conflicts such as the Crimean and both world wars.

Among the hardships of the second world war, a restricted diet with little sugar did little harm, write Roger Wilkinson and Helen Keats; plus a letter from Jane Robbins

An interesting juxtaposition: (While British children go hungry, we waste 1.1bn meals a year. Bring on the redistribution revolution, 6 October); and (The generation raised on sugar rations – and what their health reveals 70 years later, 7 October). Shocking that the average family throws away 156 meals a year, but this knowledge allows us war babies, who still scrape our bowls clean and only throw away items where the mould is too developed to scrape off, to be very smug. And next we’re told that we will probably live longer as a result of our parsimonious cheeseparing. My cup of smugness overflows.
Roger Wilkinson (born 1944)
Leasgill, Cumbria

• My 98-year-old aunt, who along with my mother and family lived in Rotterdam during the German occupation and “hunger winter”, is remarkably healthy. She lives independently, does her own shopping and cooking, and cycled to the local care home to “help out” until she was 80.

From blood pressure to ageing, research suggests the first 1,000 days of sugar exposure could leave a decades-long mark on health

They were born into a Britain still recovering from the hardships of war. Though the air-raid sirens had fallen silent, many everyday foods remained rationed, including sugar. Adults were restricted to about 3 tablespoons (40g) a day to stretch between cups of tea, baking and desserts; children were limited to less than a tablespoon. Babies and very young children were expected to have little or no added sugar.

Then, in 1953, the brakes came off. Separate restrictions on sweets and chocolate were lifted in February, followed by sugar in September. By the second half of 1954, average sugar consumption had almost doubled.

On 14 January this year, army and navy squads faced an unprecedented challenge: one bomb on a Plymouth building site, another floating on a dredger in Exmouth. That afternoon, the clock started ticking

Everyone at Exmouth Marina knew there was an unexploded German bomb in the water. Old hands at the dock had been saying so since the end of the second world war. But the marina had been dredged and re-dredged and nothing had ever come up. It had started to sound like an old wives’ tale. The marina is a busy stretch of water: a commercial port until the late 1990s that had since been converted into a home to private yachts. A bomb, you’d think, would have a hard time staying hidden. But in the middle of the afternoon on Wednesday 14 January 2026, 81 years after the end of the second world war, Steve Hockings-Thompson, the manager of Exmouth Marina, got a call from the crew of a dredging vessel telling him he’d better come out to the boat. “I thought: ‘Oh crikey. We’ve got a bit of an issue here,’” Hockings-Thompson told me recently.

He went out to the dredger, a squat barge that hauls silt and other debris from the marina floor on to a flat deck that resembles a steel sieve. Sitting on the deck was a huge hunk of metal, caked in mud and stones. As Hockings-Thompson got closer and saw its distinctive conical shape, he knew it was a bomb – a big one. The dredger was loaded with 20,000 litres of diesel fuel, so if the bomb detonated, it would be disastrous. He called the police, who quickly came to the scene. “And then,” he said, “all hell broke loose.”