My nine-year-old half-Russian daughter has arrived in England for the first time since she was a baby. As she knows almost nothing about British culture apart from Peppa Pig and Willy Wonka, my job is to put together a week-long programme before she goes back to Italy, where she currently lives with her mother, my ex-partner. They were living in Russia but left following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Ideally, my daughter will go home enthused about all things English and wanting a lifetime more. But where do I start?

First, there’s the question of food. I shall insist on her trying a Sunday lunch – something with bread sauce or stuffing (preferably both) and plenty of gravy. There will be an English breakfast too, though I’ll expect some resistance. Black pudding, which you must learn to love, shall be kept firmly at the back of the fridge during this first-ever fry-up. I shan’t expect much credit for baked beans. Even bean-obsessed peoples, like the Spaniards, spit on our garish, sugar-heavy way of serving them.

I’ll want her to try crumpets with honey, and scones with clotted cream and jam. The great Elizabeth David said roasts and jams were among the few things the English were good at. We will eat fish and chips straight from their wrapping on a blustery East Anglian seafront.

Then there’s the world of English chocolate, of great interest to a nine-year-old. Bounties and Mars bars are known internationally, but she’s never tried Revels or Fry’s Chocolate Cream, peppermint Aeros or Crunchie bars. These are things I want to pass on, far more than the music of Elgar or the designs of William Morris.

In Cambridge I will take her punting; in Newmarket, we will watch the horses galloping over the heath at dawn. London will need a little more thought. There are things I ought to do with her and things we’ll probably end up doing – with a feeling of truancy. Into the first category go open-top buses, Beefeaters, the Changing of the Guard and the Natural History Museum. The second involves introducing her to Peking duck, musicals, Hamleys and ice cream served in establishments with marble tabletops and the odd Grecian pillar. We’ll have a walk down Burlington Arcade – which may be a mere hop, skip and jump to adults but feels as long as the M25 if you’re a kid – and up Jermyn Street, that retail museum of classic English style. I hope that as we trot between all these places, the unavoidable reek and grind of London will teach her a little bit about capital life.

But so many of the actual textures of Britishness – as I’ve experienced them – are incommunicable to my daughter and would doubtless bore her. Knowing who Victoria Wood or Julie Andrews are, for instance, or why Tom Baker was the best Doctor in Doctor Who. The pleasures of washing up while listening to Desert Island Discs on Radio 4. Why James McAvoy is to be celebrated and James Corden deplored. The middle-of-the-road comfort of meeting in a John Lewis café on a wet weekday afternoon or why pubs are so much nicer without windows you can see through. I could fill several notebooks with such examples, all of them unteachable to a child who has grown up elsewhere.

What I really want to do is just make her warm to Britain and let her see that it could, if she wanted, be her home. With two passports, there’s always a choice. I want her to understand that she can have blinis with red caviar or baps with Cromer crab, holiday in Sochi or on Skye, and that along with the incense-wafting Russian Orthodox Church, there’s the musty C of E variety with its bottom-chastening pews, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ and the Book of Common Prayer.

Of course, whatever package I put together will give her a view of British life about as authentic and contemporary as ‘Who Will Buy?’ in Lionel Bart’s Oliver! Should my daughter decide to settle in London one day, she’ll probably be forced into a flatshare in Zone 4, and shop at Aldi and Primark like the rest of us.

It would be just as instructive and perhaps better parenting to sit with her on a crowded Tube which grinds to a half-hour halt. Alternatively, we could get thrown off a bus because the route has inexplicably terminated early. Afterwards, we’d be nearly run over by a pavement cyclist, have an altercation with an XL Bully owner and snack on doner kebabs which aren’t much more than rock-salt bound together with lamb fat.

There’s usually an abyss between the life we dream of and the one we can afford. I shall just have to warn her to Mind the Gap.