HIDDEN behind a, mainly, tightly closed door off my kitchen, lies a secret world. A place you enter at your peril.

A dominion where concussion from falling packets of flour, broken ankles from skidding on grease spots or a chemical burn from a spilt bottle of bleach are all very real dangers. It is...roll of drums......my pantry.

Now that is not to say that it also the place from where the makings of regular fairly edible meals emerge. It is the fact home to two bulging fridges, one freezer that needs weights on the lid in order for it to shut, diverse must-have gadgets and groaning shelves of shamefully and frequently outdated packets and tins.

My daughter Bryony always recalls when she brought two school friends home for tea they whispered to her. “Does your mum have a shop here?”

Additional and optional obstacles have also been the mop bucket and vacuum, which tend to get stuffed behind the door. John has suggested we remove the hazardous substances sign from the old poison shed and put it up on the pantry door.

But no longer. A renaissance has taken place. It happened thus. One of my fridges went on the blink. A mini ice age deposit at the back of the refrigerator and more stuff going off than usual on it’s shelves.

After all, people pay a fortune for Gorgonzola, Dolcellate and Cambozola. They might be aged in caves and had the mold penicillium added artificially. My cheese converts without artifice.

As I had persuaded my normally frugal farmer husband to replace this fridge, the old one had to go. But when I heaved and pulled it away from the wall, an alien life emerged from the dark and dank area left exposed.

If you have read War of the Worlds by HG Wells, it resembled one of the long Gorgon like tentacles that the invading Martians possessed.

Bravely I followed the eerily translucent growth from the back of the fridge to the uncharted, unexplored and clearly unhygienic area at the rear of the freezer. After all who looks behind their freezer? Oh well, you do. Well I don’t. Or I haven’t up until now.

But back to my Martian. Eight feet, yes eight feet later, the tentacle ended in a small, shrivelled potato. It must have rolled off the top of the freezer and hidden itself and its fantasy dreams of larder domination, in the warmth of the foetid world of forgotten foods. Because yes, there were other fugitive foodstuffs tucked away there too.

I dragged out the super tuber and it’s tentacle progeny and threw it to the hens who devoured it with gusto. Back in the larder I cleaned and bleached and disinfected like a woman possessed. Attacked the shelves. Threw away outdated food. Now my larder has a different literary parallel. It’s “A Brave New World.”