IT’S every child’s dream — there’s a shortage of vegetables thanks to extreme weather conditions in Spain, where much of our veg comes from during the winter months.

No more ‘finish your greens or you won’t get any pudding’. Children across the land will finally win the argument of having chips with everything.

Although, of course chips are a vegetable too, as I heard a woman on the bus explain to her two youngsters the other day.

“What do you want with your cheesy potatoes for tea?”

“Chips!”

“You can’t have chips and potatoes — chips are potatoes.”

There followed an alarmed silence from two under-fives whose world had just shifted on its axis.

Of course for us grown-ups attempting a New Year healthy eating regime, it’s not such good news. Who knew there’d be a run on iceberg lettuce?

I blame the clean foodies. You know the ones — the glut of pretty young women with good genes who write food blogs saying ‘eat a pound of celery, a whole cauliflower and drink nothing but spinach juice every day and you too can look like a skinny, young, over-privileged beauty’.

These food fads — FODMAP, ketogenic, mono — lead to people eagerly gorging on raw kale and endame beans in a bid to emulate these blessed young women.

Take cauliflower, for instance. Everybody knows it went out of fashion in about 1986 when broccoli burst on to our shelves. In the decades that followed, its only useful role in life was in a cauliflower cheese.

But the humble brassica enjoyed a renaissance a couple of years ago with the discovery of cauliflower couscous and cauliflower mash.

The various self-appointed health gurus who espoused the Paleo diet (in which you can only eat foods available to Paleolithic humans a couple of million years ago) were so evangelical about the cauliflower, it led to headlines such as one in the Washington Post which said: “Cauliflower is so hot right now you may not be able to afford it — or find it”. Who knew cavemen were so into cauliflower rice?

Mind you, the recent trend is not the first time the cauli has been the rock star of the veggie world. As far back as the 1st century AD, Pliny the Elder was a fan. “Ex omnibus brassicae generibus suavissima est cyma,” he declared. Which roughly translates as ‘cauliflower is deffo the yummiest of all the cabbages’.

Obviously, it’s good that we’re so eagerly consuming our five a day that demand sometimes outstrips supply — it’s better than having mountains of rotting veg piling up because everybody prefers chips.

But it would be much better if we were running low on unhealthy foodstuffs. This might go some way to helping sort out the world’s obesity crisis and various other health problems.

I remember in the 1970s there was a shortage of sugar and within a couple of weeks I was used to drinking my tea unsweetened, which is clearly much better for you. Although I was about three so perhaps drinking tea at that age isn’t the best idea in the first place...

However, even as we elbow each other out of the way for our ration of broccoli and pak choi, I suspect there will never be a shortage of pop tarts. In the event of a nuclear holocaust, that’s all that will be left — cockroaches and pop tarts.

It’s not me screaming, honest guv SO there I was, having just got home from work, sitting down with a nice a glass of wine and pondering what to cook for dinner when there was a bang on the door. A loud bang.

“Sod off,” I thought, “whatever you’re selling, I’m not interested.”

Another loud bang, longer than the last, swiftly followed. And then a frenzied pounding began which shook the door so hard I thought it might burst out of its frame.

I resentfully opened the door ready for a row with whoever was on the other side to find myself face to face with two policemen.

They confirmed my address and told me they’d received reports that I was being attacked. Someone had heard screaming and it was definitely my address the officers had been dispatched to.

It took me a couple of minutes to convince them that I was alone in the house, perfectly safe, couldn’t remember the last time I’d screamed and the incident must be taking place elsewhere.

All I can say it’s a good job they didn’t come by about an hour later, when I was covered in blood, drips of it across the floor as I got a bit messy chopping up chicken livers for dinner. They might not have been as easy to get rid of.

What a start to the day...

TALKING of food, for those of you wondering what happens when you put two eggs in a pan of cold water and leave it to boil for 45 minutes, allow me to put your out of your misery.

The eggs explode quite dramatically, the room fills with smoke and the lovely new saucepan you just bought is ruined.

Oh and the house really stinks — of eye-stingingly burnt eggs, which I think could actually be harnessed and used in warfare.

That’s what comes of writing your column while you make breakfast, which is why this column is coming to an abrupt end as I have to go and pick egg shrapnel off the various surfaces of my kitchen...