Right time, right place

When the level of farm mud on and in our car gets to a point at which it might rival our neighbour’s tractor, we haul it off for an inside-out valet at the local car wash, five miles away. It’s a bit of a dump in the northern no-man’s-land of Milton Keynes, but in the 40 minutes it takes the burly crew of tattooed, taciturn men to restore it to an urban sheen, we treat ourselves to pizza. At the car wash.

It’s perhaps the strangest place for an Italian family to open an authentic Italian pizzeria: sharing a plot...