Cycling along the Cowley Road a couple of days ago, I noticed the advertisment you can see below in a photograph taken with my iPhone.

The purpose of the display is to promote the sale of Lurpak butter, though the ‘b’ word isn’t actually used.

“Experiment,” says the legend. “There’s life beyond egg and cress.” Then at the bottom in smaller letters is written: “Go freestyle with Lurpak spreadable.”

The curious thing about the advertisement for me was that I could not work out the nature of the experiment here depicted. What were the ingredients being urged as the alternative to egg and cress?

It looked as if the principal topping was grilled peaches, possibly with cream cheese beneath. Give me egg and cress every time, these being – as any caterer will tell you – always the most popular on the buffet.

The butter I am happy with these days, after decades of believing that margarine – as this stuff is never, ever called – was the only spread conducive to good health. Nowadays the matter does not seem so clear cut, and the increasing return to butter is evident from the bigger space now being allocated on the supermarket shelves. My preference is for the own-brand variety sold at Aldi, a store this column was praising long before everybody else got on the bandwagon.

Another product to which I have lately returned after years away is good old-fashioned soap, as opposed to liquid body wash.

Pears transparent and Cusson’s Imperial Leather are my favourites. Lux, which I used to favour years ago, appears to have vanished from the market, along with Camay and Cadum (for madam, as the ads used to say). Knights Castile still goes strong.

Soap is another no-no word, by the way. My latest pack of Imperial Leather refers, absurdly, to “cleansing bars”.