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The first 29 years of my life were spent in blissful ignorance of items such as vegetables and salad. Boarding school and the army saw to that.

However, at the tender age of 29, I met Madame and was introduced to the delights of greens. Over the years, I have strangely never had reason to come across an artichoke on my plate except when it has been slipped under a few leaves in a Provençal salad.

Saturday night was different. We went out to dinner at some American friends. Helen, our hostess announced that the main course was a Peruvian pork dish, which looked and tasted very good when it arrived. At the other end of the plate, Helen had zoomed across the Atlantic and given us a genuine Provençal artichoke.

Bowls of melted butter were laid before us and off everyone else went - tearing off the leaves, dipping in butter and then dragging the aforesaid leaf through their mouths and then depositing them into another bowl.

I was concentrating so hard on the act that I tore, I dipped and I chewed, I swallowed. Now, I know why it’s call arti-choke. And choke I did, but quietly, it was the first time was had been to Scott and Helen for a dinner party after all.

The only solution was to eat pork and then watch the others and the precise method of eating their artichokes. Our host and hostess had already had a conversation about the fact that they were one artichoke short, so I felt that to leave mine uneaten would be rank bad manners!

Ah! Dip in the butter, and then drag the leaf through your mouth, eating the white fleshy bit and discard the ‘choke’ part. I tried. I have many, natural gaps in my mouth and the artichoke leaf came out resembling a rather ragged comb with many broken teeth.

Bad manners or not, I gave up. Anyone for an artichoke?

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