Of course that’s what comes of eating leftover trifle for breakfast, leftover plum pudding and custard for lunch and leftover pavlova for tea. 

With the desserts polished off though, I can now focus on working my way through the most magnificent leg of glazed ham a middle-aged mother of three could ever wish to possess. 

At about midnight several nights after Christmas, when my husband stumbled in from the header, he finally felt compelled to ask me why I had invested in such an enormous piece of meat. 

“Because it was there”, wasn’t quite the deep and meaningful response he had come to expect from the woman entrusted with the majority of his hard-earned cash. Although we did have 20 people to lunch on Christmas Day and I fully intended to eat glazed ham well into the New Year, a much smaller leg would have done the trick. 

I always choose the freshest, most appealing pieces of fruit, and carefully select undented tinned produce, so it seems I automatically dived into the supermarket refrigerator to retrieve the largest leg on offer. 

Not satisfied with size alone, I proceeded to spend forty minutes preparing a delicious spiced apple cider, brown sugar and maple syrup glaze, then double-trayed and doused the delicacy, before attempting entry into the roasting chamber.  

It turns out that 10 kilograms of ham plus two litres of glaze is a fairly hefty load for an out-of-shape mum to lift into a blazing oven. 

The bottom of the extra-large, heavy-duty aluminium tray snagged on the oven shelf, just enough to create a wave pool in the liquid, which splashed and sizzled into the oven, coming fearfully close to total disaster.  Dark, sweet, molten fluid cascaded down into the cake tin draw below and onto the bamboo flooring. 

Miraculously I was able to regain control to gently guide our main course into the very back of the oven, so only the hock was jammed up against the glass door. 

Only now as I type, do I clearly see the correlation between the heavy strain of lifting 10 kilograms of extravagant flesh and the necessity for me to once again make a New Year’s resolution to be a much more thoughtful diner. 

Here’s cheers to you!