If my years of journalism working as a restaurant critic and food writer have taught me anything, it's that you should always take the trouble to read the letters sent in by your readers.
These days it takes only the merest mention of Nigella Lawson to render me with a positively bulging sack. Not only that, if I actually write anything about her in my column, I am sent bucket loads of letters.
Nigella's skill as an artist comes from her ability to introduce new and dangerous twists to a series of traditional and normally prosaic recipes. She is able at once to transform the humble omelette from the mundane to the sublime via the inspired substitutions of pancetta for bacon, formaggio for cheese and uovi for eggs. Just when you thought you were drunk on the giddy heights of the truly avant garde, she will casually throw in something truly dizzying such as a pinch of nutmeg.
That bastion of the old school, Delia Smith, finds herself reeling in shock at the sudden, awful realisation that she has wasted the last forty years of her life concentrating on winning our affections by perfecting the technique of boiling a humble egg, while all the while maintaining a joyless and frigid persona. Then one day, all of a sudden, along comes Nigella, who's not afraid to lick the spoon, or dip her fingers in the cake mixture.
Nigella's rise to total power, coupled with the advent of the supermarket ready-meal, means that the former Queen of Domestic Science now finds herself so out of her depth, that she's like a medievel physician transported into one of today's operating theatres. Her only course of action is to take refuge in her role as chairwoman of Norwich City football club.