I cooked a chicken.

The thing is, I hate raw meat. I’m not even a massive fan of cooked meat, but if someone has done it for me I’ll make a half-hearted attempt at scraping whatever gristle I can off the plate. But raw meat? It makes me retch.

Chicken in particular is a real upset for me – perhaps because you have the whole body in your hands as you tease and poke and rinse and rub the corpse into submission before subjecting it to really rather obnoxious levels of heat.

As I fondled a fleshy skeleton just the other evening I realised precisely what it was that upset me about handling the chicken: it feels like a baby. There, that’s it. But crap, it was tasty.