DON'T get me wrong – I like food, and some foods I positively love, but I don’t get this obsession people seem to have with turning it into some kind of art form.

I can’t abide the canonising of TV chefs because they can do something with a pound of mince.

My colleague Katherine MacAlister, the Oxford Mail’s esteemed restaurant critic, can cheerfully write a 2,000-word thesis on baked ricotta, which really does strike me as something of a miracle. After all, I can barely put one word in front of another on the topic of souffles.

But it’s not that I harbour a deep resentment or suspicion toward creative cuisine; it’s just I don’t appreciate it.

Indeed, last week someone asked me which Oxford restaurant I would choose to celebrate in if I won the Lottery and was shocked when I said Pizza Express.

The food is good, the surroundings are nice, it’s quick, and generally the staff are pleasant.

That’s all I want.

A few weeks ago, while I was holidaying in Europe, I was invited to visit a One Michelin star restaurant (until my late twenties, I actually believed it was the tyre company handing out these accolades).

Anyway, I was told on 12 separate occasions that I was privileged and tugged my forelock accordingly when entering the restaurant’s hallowed lobby.

It was a tasting menu – you get small portions of everything on offer – but the desserts were served full-size. One, lovingly laid before me, was a brick of ice (“cut from the very lake which nestles beside this restaurant”) upon which a few, small spoonfuls of sorbet and ice cream had been oh-so-gingerly placed.

The diners around me stared at it like it was the Holy Grail, but I just laughed – rather too self-consciously in hindsight – and said I did the same at home but with a block of ice from my upstairs back bathroom.

Obviously, my smart-arseness was pure defence reflex because I ate it and liked it, but I’d have gone straight into cardiac arrest had I actually been forced to pay for it (£35, although for a fiver, tops, it might have been worth it).

Now, let’s say I went on a murder rampage and then, quite rightly, became ‘dead man walking’ in the state of Texas. What would I order for my last meal?

Would it be a coulibiac of salmon and a Côtes du Rhône Châteauneuf-du-Pape ‘47?

No, corn beef and chips with Branston pickle would see me off quite nicely into the next world, although I would specify the corn beef be fresh.

I know this revelation will horrify a great many of you, but there it is – I’m a heathen.

I even like McDonalds...