The problem I’ve found with taking photographs on your smartphone, is that there’s a tendency, unless you tweet them or post them online right away (which I don’t), to forget you ever took them, and never bother downloading them to your computer. It’s because of this lack of regard for smartphone photographs that I recently discovered that the not insignificant number of snaps on my iPhone stretched back over the course of some three years, and included a host of pictures that in turn made my smile, laugh out loud, and frown with a good deal of perplexity.

A similar fate was suffered by the photographs I took on those phones I had owned earlier, including two Sony models that, in evolutionary terms, were positively Neanderthal compared to today’s gadgets. I did download those photographs from the phone memory sticks onto my computer eons ago, but then I stuck them in a folder that in turn ended up in another folder called ‘Desktop Tidy’, which was the surest way of losing them forever. However, an unfortunate encounter between my ageing laptop and a glass of beer precipitated a Titanically disorganised and chaotic digital evacuation, that threw up that long-forgotten folder of old phone photographs. As I flicked through them, I found a hitherto disregarded visual record of my life as it was some five or six years ago.

To celebrate the discovery, and to finally put those long-forgotten photographs to good use, here’s a selection in celebration of European cuisine. I’m a great believer of food being capable of offering insight into other cultures, and the photographs below are a record of just some of the memorable meals I’ve had on past travels.

Bon appétit, as the Germans say.