For me, the Christmas season only starts when I procure boxes of mass-produced mince pies and eat myself into sheer insensibility, and right off the rip, this is a bad way to invite festive cheer into my life.

Like every year, Tesco has a selection of mince pies going from the standard "Tesco Value" mince pies, up to the snooty Tesco's Finest range. I set aside my life of pure luxury in the name of festive science with the cheapest box available and upon employing an exiting walk like Scrooge on his way to dropkick Tiny Tim for his father's incompetence (think that was in the story) I made it home and gently slammed the product on my kitchen table.

Peeling open the festive box and pulling out the plastic tray I was presented with slightly smaller-than-average mince pies that looked to have been given as a peace offering to a raging dragon only to be rejected in a whirlwind of flames and fire. Burnt all around the rim, I initially thought it was to add colour to an otherwise ill-looking casing like the result of an uneven tanning bed, but unfortunately for me, it was burnt along with my merry temperament. I took a Christmassy bite fully expecting the cheap mass-produced, ultra-processed ingredients to ignite my taste like the birthing spark that awakens a reactor, but all I got was a mouthful of tasteless sludge and the piercing top note of burnt flour with the grittiness of sand. Burnt sand.

If this was a medieval holiday season prank and I was a feudal lord presiding over my lands, I'd feign a chuckle after the initial bite during the town square's festivities so all my subjects would laugh along with me, maybe ruffle the dusty hair of a young child, and then immediately have my men seize the baker and have him strung up and then shot to pieces with arrows from my guards. The filling felt like the taste equivalent of an asterisk at the end of a word; easily unnoticed with its substance at the end of a page. A page that describes how the pastry tasted like burnt sand and flour repeated over and over again.