IF YOU don’t use Twitter, then you may not have heard that the people who make Come Dine With Me have their eyes on Swindon.

I wouldn’t want you to miss out.

They are recruiting contestants for future programmes, and Swindon is one of the places being targeted.

If you haven’t seen the programme, here’s how it works: somebody had the idea of strangers getting to know new people by cooking meals for each other, which sounds like it could be interesting.

Unfortunately, when guests turn up, they are encouraged to slag each other off and generally be rude to each other’s faces or (better still) behind their backs, while the rigged voting system ensures the person who walks off with the £1,000 prize never deserves it.

For some reason, at some point in the programme the guests are encouraged to snoop in the knicker drawer of the host while he or she is downstairs, cooking the grub. Don’t ask me why.

A friend told me they were coming to Swindon, hinting that we could both apply to be on it, just for kicks, but I soon set him straight, only to find that the programme is starting to haunt me anyway.

That very day we popped in to check on an elderly aunt – and guess what she was watching.

Then I stumbled on a story on the BBC website about ‘shared economy dining’, which is a Come Dine With Me-style fad that is happening in real-life in Paris.

Instead of people going out to restaurants, they are hiring chefs to come to their homes, and in order to spread the cost and make new friends at the same time, they are inviting complete strangers to join them.

Fancy Parisian restaurateurs are worried it will put them out of business, and hopefully it will.

Having looked into it further, however, it seems that these ideas – like most things in the world – are nothing new.

Something similar happened in the 1950s and 1960s, when it went by the name of ‘safari suppers’ over here and ‘progressive dinners’ in the United States.

On the face of it, it all sounds harmless enough, with the idea that meeting random people can be fun and broadens your horizons.

But if you are the type of person I am, you will disagree and realise that the food people eat tells us a lot about their character.

Although it might seem, on the face of it, that you get a good mix of people from random dinner parties, in fact all the willing guests share one character flaw.

The only kind of people who could ever enjoy it are the types who would eat anything you put in front of them, and revel in the misguided belief that that makes them superior to people like me, whom they like to call ‘fussy eaters’.

Substitute ‘fussy’ with ‘selective’ and you’ll have a more accurate perspective.

I have a long list of things I wouldn’t eat, even if you paid me, so there would be no point in me turning up for a meal where, for example, the starter was pickled anchovies and the main course was boiled squid.

I would be the one carrying my dinner in a bag, in the certain belief that if I brought it home for our cats, they would enjoy it more than me.

Eating is the only human activity I can think of where the people who like everything are considered superior to those of us who are selective and have refined tastes and defined limits.

And if you don’t believe me, come and have a root through my knicker drawer.