My teenage respect for the rules led me to risk poisoning the whole family

When I was a child, we always spent Christmas at my uncle’s. “Ogre” is a strong word, but everyone was scared of him. He had an insane number of rules. He would come to fetch us in his car – then insist we leave the dog behind in case he scratched the upholstery. It was never obvious when children were meant to speak and when they weren’t. If you chose the wrong time to go to the loo, you would get a 20-minute peroration on every 18th century print lining the stairs. I cannot tell you how uninterested I was in the window tax, which was another of his favourite subjects.

There were tons of unspoken rules about nice stuff, such as where you could put a chair leg so it didn’t leave a dent in the rug, where you could put a drink down and which was the right cloth to clean the table with (it transpired, over a period of some years, that there was no right cloth; there was a tiny battery-powered vacuum cleaner for detritus, and a chamois for high shine). There was an electric carving knife that made everyone tense. There are just so many things that can go wrong between an unevenly shaped carcass and a vibrating serrated blade.

He was my mother’s brother – my parents were separated – and disapproved very strongly of my father, which was fair, I guess, except that it meant we all had to pretend he had never existed, and definitely didn’t exist now. I never got the hang of that until I was an adult – constantly tripping myself up in the middle of a sentence. “I went to the cartoon cinema with my da … some man. Wait, not a man: a woman. Some strange woman took me