In a rare moment of actually contributing something useful to family life, I find myself at the Co-op buying tea.

Holding up my bags in a completely over-the-top show of triumph, a little like a caveman brandishing a load of freshly-killed mammoth steaks, I appear at home and set to work in the kitchen.

The good lady wife inquires what I have brought home.

“Salmon!” I call from the kitchen.

“What are you doing it with?”

“A bit of olive oil rubbed into it, a smidgen of black pepper, some salt,” I say proudly. “Wrapped up in foil and baked in the oven.”

Pause. “No, I mean what are you doing it with? What accompaniment?”

“Salad,” I say. I realise that salad is not cooking as such. But it does require artful presentation, and just the right amount of salad dressing as adornment. “And potatoes.”

“What kind of potatoes?”

“Small, round ones,” I say without thinking.

Another, longer pause. Is that stifled laughter I hear? Why, it is. Oh, I see what she means. “Charlotte potatoes. Or something else beginning with a ‘C’. Colette?”

It is one of the great regrets of my life – and there are oh, so very many – that I am utterly useless in the kitchen.

My wife is what I would call an intuitive cook. She has several pans and oven things on the go at once, and sort of just knows when everything’s ready.

I have to study the instructions on practically everything, follow it to the letter, and draw up a timetable of when everything has to start cooking, performing tortuous feats of mental arithmetic to start with the longest cooking time and take away the time it takes the chips to cook, add the amount of time needed for water to boil and add that to being necessarily sidetracked to look for a sticking plaster as I inevitably cut my thumb on a can.

In the early days of our relationship, I tried to impress on a semi-regular basis by cooking things that I just did not have the ability to pull off.

I once followed a Jamie Oliver recipe and ended up with a wonderful-looking dish of many colours, that I rather ruined by smashing a wine glass into, resulting in us gingerly picking bits of shattered glass out of the meal as we ate, and my wife spending the rest of the week with a slashed gum.

Upon returning from the South of France one year, I set about making a Tarte Tropezienne, a delicacy in that part of the world. Theirs are light and fluffy and delicious. Mine was like a big round brick.

There is one thing I can cook, though, and it’s a good one. Egg and chips. Apparently, though, this is not classed as nutritious food. And you’ll never guess what, but potatoes aren’t actually vegetables. Mad, I know, but true. Who knew?