Deborah Ross: Nobody wants to bust a gut on Boxing Day

If you ask me...

If you ask me, I think I may have had enough of celebrity chefs offering their Christmas tips and their Christmas recipes, including – get this – recipes for Boxing Day. Recipes for Boxing Day? Do a glazed ham? Are they mad? Has the world gone mad? Celebrity Chef, can you stop still a minute so I can LAUGH IN YOUR FACE!

Recipes for Boxing Day are up there with The Contraception Lady who comes to visit you in hospital after you've just had a baby, and wants to talk through your birth control plans, and you are like: "Birth control plans? Birth control plans? Are you mad? Has the world gone mad? Can you stop still a minute so I can LAUGH IN YOUR FACE? Do you seriously think, Contraception Lady, that I'm ever going to have sex again? After what I've just been through? After 17 hours of what felt like a cluster bomb going off in my uterus? Do you know I bit my own mother's hand? Do you know I punched the midwife in the face? Sex-wise, Contraception Lady, I have shut up shop. There will be no future births to control here. Be off, Contraception Lady, and take all your peculiar contraceptive notions with you. Good day."

Recipes on Boxing Day! As if all the cooking on Christmas Day hasn't killed you already? As if a cluster bomb hasn't just gone off in your kitchen and in your bank account and in your head? As if wrapping stupid sausages in stupid bacon were not enough of a torment?

I'll give you a good recipe for Boxing Day: Ingredients: One finger; half a box of Quality Street; glazed expression. Method: As soon as someone asks "What's for lunch?" give them the finger and refer them to the half box of Quality Street, having first adopted the glazed expression. You may, if you like, glaze your expression the night before. You may even start glazing over right now. Serving suggestions: Good accompaniments include your own body weight in alcohol and an icy and deranged: "Cook on Boxing Day? Are you mad? Has the world gone mad? Can you stop still a minute, so I can LAUGH IN YOUR FACE?" If not icy enough, return to freezer and check in an hour.

This is the best and only recipe for Boxing Day, and my last piece of advice? For Christmas Day, don't bust a gut trying to track down one of Heston's puddings with an orange in the middle. Putting an orange in the middle of something is no great shakes. In fact, I stuffed an orange into a sofa yesterday, and you know what? It was rubbish.