The love of my life

Say what you like about Prince Charles. He bakes a good biscuit. The Duchy Originals range are some of my favourite ever flourbuttersugar-based helpings of heaven. Marks & Spencer make highly commendable high-street offerings. Harvey Nichols are all style over substance. I could go on.

But my point is: a new addition has ascended to the pantheon, and now nothing can ever be the same again.

Oh, celestial marriage of shortbread, dark chocolate and magical limeyness, I love you like no other. I could never care for the chocolate lime in confectionary form. They are hard work for scant reward. But somehow I was gifted the strength to see beyond this poor relation, and in the biscuit aisle of the Tobermory Bakery it was as though some kind of higher power was moving my cagouled left arm towards the shelf and lifting a box of Island Bakery Chocolate Limes through the air towards me. There can truly be no finer biscuit in heaven.

Thank goodness for the power of the Chocolate Limes to purge the senses, as I started the day in a state of some confusion. No, I mean even more than the usual bovine a.m. fog. When my alarm went off, I was in the thick of a dream where I was in an episode of Doctor Who. Not as an actress battling Moderate Alien Peril, but actually living it, as though I'd taken Le Tennant's hand and climbed into my television set (like in the Take On Me video, although that was a magazine), and was right there in the world of marching monsters and badly dressed assistants. Annoyingly, on waking I could remember hardly any details that would enable me to sell the outline to the BBC and buy nothing but biscuits made by The Island Bakery with the profits, but I remember that I could Trust No One, and also that if you spread butter over your hands, you could repel the enemy with them, like some kind of bad-ass articulated teacake.