I am not remotely domesticated. In the 18 months or so since I left uni my friends have graduated from boiling pasta to becoming baking queens.

When they organise meet- ups I inevitably find myself in the kitchens of their new flat shares, supping on seared steak and soufflé.

When I arrange a little rendezvous it involves intimate dinners courtesy of Toptable.

Likewise when it comes to sewing, I’m a whizz with embroidery and beadwork, but ask me to put up a hem and I start rummaging around for Velcro.

It’s not my fault. As a child my mother banned me from the kitchen for fear of me getting burnt, cut or prodding at the perfectly finished cake she had just baked. (I did once do this, but karma ensured I also burnt my cheek on the cake tin).

And so I’ve gone through life with a limited edit of foolproof recipes, heavily biased towards cous cous and fish.

You see, one can go through Oxford acquiring vast amounts of knowledge on the Crusades, Shakespeare, Austen and even Dior (who happened to stage a wonderful fashion show at Blenheim Palace in 1958) and yet still fail to master the simplest of life skills.

However, every once in a while I will venture into a kitchen to dabble in a little “cooking”. The results are invariably experimental.

One such occasion was last week, when I was invited to stay with a friend who is equally talentless in the kitchen. We already felt naughty that we had scheduled this sleepover on a school night; on a Monday, no less.

She had great plans for the night: dinner and wine on her balcony, overlooking a spectacular view of the London skyline.

But first, this dinner would be cooked, chopping boards and all, by the two of us. She had obtained an ostensibly idiot-proof recipe from a colleague, having sworn an oath to follow it to the letter.

And so, with great trepidation, we crept stealthily like hunter-gathers to the mini mart across the road. In this unfamiliar and exotic land we found ourselves attempting to decipher the difference between chestnut mushrooms and ordinary mushrooms (it’s basically racial segregation at vegetable level).

An hour later and we had created a dish clearly worthy of Masterchef. We were immensely proud of ourselves for having cooked, with real fire, and that the end result was not only edible but actually appetising.

It called for an Instagram moment. We spent the rest of the evening toasting our success on the balcony, plotting our next culinary adventure, and went to bed on a high, our dreams immersed in domestic bliss.

The next morning we woke, invigorated, ready for anything life could throw at us. I swanned through the apartment, switching on both the kettle and the iron, for I was surely now a domestic goddess, capable of cooking, housekeeping and multitasking, no?

No. Before long, my coffee was in a puddle on the kitchen counter and my dress, carefully selected for work and packed neatly into my overnight case, had a gaping hole burnt through the front of it. It seems ironing, a relatively intuitive skill for a fashionista, is not to be combined with the distraction of making hot beverages.

The world of domestic bliss was not designed for the likes of me.