HESTON Blumenthal's Christmas pudding is set to be an achingly dull talking point at this season's least interesting dinner tables.
The £13.99 pudding, which has a satsuma or some f*****g thing in it, has been flying off the shelves of Waitrose and into the kitchens of people who love to go on and on and on in a grating, monotonous way.
Mother-of-two Emma Bradford, who has bought the pudding, said: "The tangy citrus is going to fuse with the dried fruit in such a way that the result can only be an orgasmic culinary pleasurequake.
"And clearly it's also a controversial food item, one that's bound to divide guests at my Christmas table. I guess you could call it 'the Marmite effect', perhaps?"
She added: "On a deeper level, I believe none of this. I am just a deeply insecure person and terribly worried that I am not as exciting as the people I read about in magazines.
"Such is my anxiety that expressing my uniqueness through the medium of pudding seems like a sane idea.
"Also it will add an extra 30 seconds of conversational fodder to an interminable day with estranged relatives that will be alternately tedious and tense."
A spokesman for the chef said: "Having an orange cooked inside the pudding makes it taste like a mixture of cherubs, jet planes and nightclub toilet sex, because of some science.
"It's warming and festive but could equally have come from a coldly terrifying future where society has degenerated into violent surreal chaos and humans live in craters."
He added: "However if you catch me out by the fire escape having a fag you might overhear me saying it's a geegaw for the sort of people who can read an entire Observer sunday supplement without experiencing a single homicidal impulse."
Christmas shopper Tom Logan said: "It could really bring something special to the family table if, instead of an orange, it contained Delia Smith's severed head.
"As it is I'll probably buy it anyway, because of some primordial herd mentality thing that makes me want to punch myself in the ear."