Fruitcake ranks among my top ten dislikes, somewhere alongside chalks screeching on blackboards and women who wear lipstick on their teeth.

And the shame of it is I come from a family with a long tradition of fruitcake-lovers. Christmas was almost synonymous with fruitcake in my house, where a long-preserved traditional recipe from Ye Olde Englande saturated with alcohol and icing, nuts and candied fruit was passed down through the generations and churned out by loving hands well before season.

In my case the phobia, if you want to call it that, bears out Freud’s axiom that everything is rooted in our childhood - I remember overeating and almost choking on fruitcake stored in the pantry when I was a little kid and can’t stand the sight of the stuff ever after.

So then followed years of Christmas family dinner torture - surreptitiously dropping my slice of fruitcake into my lap or feeding it under the table to a dog or cat - or if luck held my way, reaching a nearby potted plant that I could gladly fertilize it with the abhorred dessert when no one was looking. Nice boy that I was, I didn’t really want to hurt anyone’s enthusiastic feelings by throwing up all over the table after ingesting the darned thing. And in a family that’s as fruitcakey as mine, it seems kind of sacrilegious to announce that I hated the stuff. After all, I had to undergo the dreaded ritual only once a year.

I nearly got caught out once when a well-meaning aunt tried to force feed me her “extra special” recipe (“just try it dear, I added a teeny-weeny extra ingredient that makes ALL the difference and its so much more delicious than ever before!” – shudder, shudder!). I saved myself at the last minute by pretending to come over faint and the matter dropped.

This time, the day after Christmas I’m supposed to visit this same aunt for dinner. She’s a sweet old thing and I do love her so – but it’s back to the days of fruitcake as a form of torture for me!